The Road To Hell

And my White Elephant assignment is...

... Leni Riefenstahl's turgid time capsule, TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. A film that Mick Jagger has sat through "at least fifteen times" (according to a citationless Wikipedia article).

Oh, White Elephant. I give you THE DEVILS and you hand me this?

I'm struck by how little there is to say about this Hitler hagiography. Obviously the whole affair is gilded with a cynical hindsight that the German people, circa 1934, didn't possess. I'm going to approach this thing with a series of random observations culled from the notes I made in illegible handwriting. And then I'm going to cleanse my palate with William T. Vollman's RISING UP AND RISING DOWN. Or a good night's sleep. Whichever comes first.

In brief, TRIUMPH details the September 1934 National Socialist Party Congress, held in Nuremberg. (About twelve years later, many of the prominent members of the Congress -- most notably Herman Goring and Rudolph Hess -- would be tried and sentenced to death in the same city.)

The film is all Sturm und Drang (forgive me): beating drums, mind-numbing marches, impassioned speeches filled with empty nationalist rhetoric, and lots of emphasis on the sheer scope of the damn thing. The numbers are astounding: an undoubtedly slanted Nazi census posits an attendance of upwards of 750,000 Germans.
Riefenstahl's cameras seem to corroborate this:

B-roll of swastika-bedecked buildings and fawning crowds is punctuated by the speeches of party members, most notably those of the Fuhrer himself:
 

Hitler's jingoistic diatribes are remarkable for their lack of substance and for their mutability. His lines about classless society and a state run by the people can fit interchangeably into our modern day definitions of Left and Right.

BUT HERE IS THE KEY THING, and it's a very important point to note in the age of Godwin's Law: I've lived to see just about every world leader with a modicum of power be compared to Hitler. Every American president from Reagan to Obama has been Hitlerized to suit the needs of partisan cry babies. And the big lesson I walk away from TRIUMPH OF THE WILL with is that we in America have been sheltered from and blessed by NEVER SEEING ANYONE REMOTELY LIKE HITLER.

Sorry to shout. But - unless you're talking about Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. - Hitler comparisons are spurious and reductive and serve no purpose in reasoned, productive discourse. Hitler was a man in the right place at the right time with all of the wrong conclusions. Germany had suffered defeat and humiliation following the Great War. The Weimar Republic had fallen into decadence and wasn't attendant to the needs of regular volks. A populist leader with a patriotic message was needed to unite and rebuild Germany. For some reason, Adolf Hitler fit the bill.

The film is useful as a document of the religious fervor of the crowds. I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen the enraptured thousands.

Women and children press the edges of the crowd, Beatlemania-style, in the hopes of touching the heel of Hitler's jackboots.

It's the innocent, hopeful faces of the crowd that disturb more than anything. So many people wanted to believe in Hitler's hopeful message of a reborn, pure people. His Gospel of self-purification is, in many ways, truly an inverse (or anti-) of Christ's.

Speaking of, there's a pagan feeling to the proceedings. I'm not sure if it's just me bringing the baggage of Indiana Jones's characterization of Nazis as occult obsessives. A lot of the nighttime ceremony footage could be seamlessly intercut with Benjamin Christensen's HAXAN or Murnau's FAUST:

And, on more than one occasion, I thought of THE WICKER MAN. Something about brainwashed children beating on drums I guess:

 Other randoms:

- I now feel wholly justified in my hatred of parades and marching band music. They were, apparently, the drug of choice for these genocidal maniacs.

- I never knew "sieg heil" meant "hail victory."

- While Resnais' NIGHT AND FOG is the obvious antidote for this garbage, there was something about the clean lines and perfectly arranged vectors of the mise-en-scene that reminded me of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD:

And, it is important to note, Riefenstahl's had an impeccable eye (though I'm not sure how much of the production design and image-molding is due to Goebbels). So many of the images, stripped of their fascistic context, are absolutely stunning.

- I wish I had the time to listen to the historian's commentary and read Susan Sontag's piece on TRIUMPH before I wrote this. Oh well.

- If there's something familiar about the rows of S.S. and phalanxes of Nazi units 

it's because George Lucas and Peter Jackson modeled the armies of Darth Vader and Sauron (respectively) on the Nazis. However, they weren't the first. Expert film blogger Matthew Dessem points out that Eisenstein beat them to it by a few decades.

- There's any eerie foreshadowing of Auschwitz, etc. in the pristine rows of Hitler Youth tents

and the skinny, half-clad denizens of the encampments:

One last note:

Antisemitism is obviously a big part of the subtext here. There are a few vague asides during the rally dedicated to eugenics and maintaining a pure race, but any full-blown hate speech was either cut around or saved for the after party. Sadly, the Nazis were just another chapter in a long history of hatred against the Jewish people. I think everyone should peruse the ADL's handy Myths and Facts to remind themselves that, while we've never seen anything like Hitler in our modern Information Age, the spirit that drove him always remains. At one point in TRIUMPH, Hitler even proudly notes that National Socialism began with a small group of seven people.