Leni Riefenstahl directing a film for the Nazi Party
Ben van Welzen considers how film was used to both exalt and expose the evil of WWII, as demonstrated by the opposing approaches and ideologies of Leni Riefenstahl and Alain Resnais.
Film is propaganda. An effective film penetrates the mind, circumvents rational thought, and — in the words of Ingmar Bergman — penetrates “deep into the twilight room of the soul.” By its very nature, cinema hijacks our senses and floods our brains with artificial sights and sounds to manipulate us into unforeseen thoughts and emotions. The silver screen is not a rigid barrier between fact and fiction, but a translucent membrane that allows the film’s altered reality to diffuse into our own and subtly rewire how we perceive the world outside the theater from that point forward. This propagandistic quality is inherent to the medium, and when explicitly put to use it can become an invaluable asset or a dangerous weapon, a weapon that often evades recognition. Moreover, the power of film to propagandize only grows each day as screen media becomes more ubiquitous and reality more blurred. To properly spot such tactics, one must look to the extremes, to a time when every corner of the world felt an urgency to coerce and unite their publics: World War II. From Axis to Allies, the most powerful powers at play had to convince their constituents of their nation’s strength and righteousness. Of course, few parties in the last century have been more successful at mobilizing their people than the Nazi. Successfully uplifting a dictator and suppressing a genocide, the Nazis found the evil side of cinema, the side that infiltrates its audiences, not enlightens.
Leading the charge of the Nazis’ cinematic endeavors was Helene “Leni” Riefenstahl, a close artistic ally to Hitler and a major perpetrator of public deceit. Most famously, she directed the 1935 film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), a chronicle of the 1934 Nazi rally in Nuremberg and a staggering portrayal of the Third Reich’s mandated vision of their country and their society. The film is undeniably masterful in its exploitation of cinematic language to falsely depict Nazi Germany as a virtuous entity overcoming the evils committed by the victors of World War I. As such, Triumph of the Will makes for a deeply troubling, consistently horrifying, but painfully important viewing experience. The film reveals the intrinsic dangers of such a powerful medium, and only with several decades of history can we properly examine Riefenstahl’s craft in composing this symphony of wickedness.
From the jump, Riefenstahl imbues her portrayal of the Nazis with reverence and awe. A boisterous, anthemic overture opens the film as the title card appears below a close-up of a Nazi Eagle, immediately associating the regime with the promised “triumph of the will.” Then, the film sets the scene with intertitles in hyper-stylized and jagged lettering reminiscent of the German Expressionist movement that had just ended: “Twenty years after the outbreak of the World War, sixteen years after the start of the German suffering, nineteen months after the start of Germany’s rebirth, Adolf Hitler flew once again to Nuremberg to hold a military display.” Not only do these titles firmly position the film’s moment in the context of victimhood from WWI, but the carefully timed and composed score bolsters the dichotomy of the having-been-wronged old Germany with the to-be-saved new Germany. In particular, Riefenstahl accompanies the first two clauses with stereotypical sinister and foreboding horns before the score abruptly shifts to an exuberant and blissful melody at the mention of Germany’s “rebirth,” forcing tenderness towards the introduction of their dictator. This trick may not seem particularly subtle, but it’s just one technique of many in the 105-minute runtime to maintain a constant air of victory and honor.
Once the film proper begins, Riefenstahl’s careful portrayal of the Nazis and of Hitler become more implicit but also more grandiose. The title cards fade into a point-of-view shot of Hitler’s aforementioned plane arriving in Nuremburg. The exuberant horns continue to blast as the plane glides through the sky as he descends like an angel through the clouds. Soon enough, these clouds part and the plane soars across the German skyline, its shadow sailing across the nation’s landmarks and architecture, inherently associating the nation’s identity and prosperity to the arrival of their leader. Gradually, the camera’s sightlines shift closer to ground-level, running parallel to the descent of the plane as it joins the electrified crowds of soldiers and civilians, parents and children all welcoming their leader with bright smiles. The opening sequence concludes with the most chilling image of all: Riefenstahl rapidly cuts across the sea of hands raised in a Nazi salute, children chanting their adoration as the plane door finally opens and Hitler himself emerges with a glimmer in his eye and a smile from ear to ear as the crowd roars his name.
Riefenstahl’s opening doesn’t demand devotion or admiration, but rather she triggers all the signals to welcome the viewer into her skewed perception. Hitler’s entry through the clouds elevates him to the level of a divine power descending upon mortals, while the close-up shots within the frenzied crowds place the viewer directly among those who looked to this divine power for salvation. Much of the film that follows carefully fiddles with perspective, positioning the camera perfectly for the banners and towers and other structures adorned with Nazi symbols to loom over the viewer, almost as if the monuments protrude out from the screen and cast a mighty shadow on the audience. These stylistic moves again hijack the mode of German Expressionism, appropriating an artistic movement to manipulate its own striking visuals. Then, in the two pivotal scenes of Hitler delivering a speech, Riefenstahl films him as she films these structures, keeping the camera close to the ground and looking up at the man, as if he looms even larger than those towers from before. In a film permeated with rapidly cut wide shots of expertly organized crowds, these shots of the dictator alone in frame uniquely maintain his illustriousness.
Of course, this is all tyrannical deceit, but it’s an easy deceit to conjure. Indeed, a film like Triumph of the Will benefits from being a propaganda piece meant to provoke excitement and pride, two pleasant feelings that don’t require much of a push to fall into. Films do often attempt the inverse of Riefenstahl’s work, to little avail; that is, instead of supplying positive emotion with shiny deceptions, they demand uncomfortable confrontations with harsh and horrifying realities. When extracting such a confrontation, the filmmaker must work with the utmost grace and subtlety, for — unlike Riefenstahl’s maximalist approach — one wrong move will activate the viewer’s natural defenses and make them turn away or shut down. In 1956, French filmmaker Alain Resnais accomplished such a task, making one of the most important films of all time, the Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard).
Overgrown train tracks leading into a concentration camp
Only 32 minutes long, Night and Fog expertly orchestrates every sight and sound of its runtime, maximizing its dialectic approach to the montage of images, the counterpoint of score with image, and the gradual progression into darkness. Resnais carefully structures his film to avoid the instinctual rejection an audience would have if he began the film with the horrors that slowly creep in towards the latter half. He begins with images of the deserted concentration camps in 1956, with a narration discussing the architectural history of the structures in each different camp. Though filmed only ten years after the atrocities, this color footage of overgrown train tracks and empty fields allows a distance from the viewer to the reality, maintaining an impersonal approach to the start of the film. Even still, there are unmistakable traces. The barbed wire fences, the empty train cars, the familiar sights through the faraway windows; Resnais’s patience and the narrator’s academic disposition allow our eyes to wander over the screen and contextualize the markers within our understanding of Holocaust history. Nevertheless, the film continues to slowly descend deeper, gradually and almost unnoticeably transitioning through a retelling of the Nazis’ rise to power and slowly turning back the clock from the distant 1956 images to the foreboding prewar images. With the viewer settled and immersed, the film drops the entire façade. All of our defenses are down, and we must face the sights, the truths, the realities that we would reject without proper introduction and facilitation.
The deserted remains of a concentration camp
To continue to describe Night and Fog would be wrong. Resnais and everyone else involved created a film that forces us to confront the Holocaust not as a chapter in a textbook but as a real, human atrocity that occurred less than a century ago, an atrocity that could appear in an instant and disappear even faster. As such, I cannot properly describe it in words; one must see the progression of images into the horror, hear the soundtrack into silence, and feel the evil lurking in its quietest, stillest moments. No words can penetrate the mind in the way Night and Fog does, only cinema can, only reality.
Riefenstahl, a new documentary about the controversial filmmaker, will be screened at IU Cinema on October 4 as part of the International Art House Series.