This one is by popular request so
'Triumph of the Will' and the cinematic
language of propaganda.
'Triumph of the Will' is not a triumph of film-making.
I just want to lay that out before we even start.
Chances are good that you're familiar
with 'Triumph of the Will' by reputation
but have never actually watched it
beyond referential clips, and a sizable
portion of that reputation is in its
value as an advancement of the art of filmmaking.
This is propaganda.
Like, that belief is in and of itself propaganda.
Nazi sympathizers spent a lot
of time between the film's release in
1935 and the war promoting the idea of
'Triumph of the Will' as an advancement of filmmaking.
It was an intentional message
to promote Nazi state art as superior, to
suggest that the Nazi mechanism can
produce better more proficient art than
the artist the Nazis were busy throwing in jail.
It is however not a triumph of filmmaking; it is a triumph of budget.
None of the ideas or techniques were new it is simply that no one had previously
thrown enough money and resources at propaganda on this scale before.
We'll come back to this and develop it in more
detail, but I want to be upfront with the fact that you should be highly
suspicious of any messaging surrounding propaganda.
ok so vocabulary groundwork: we're going
to make a distinction about what we mean when we say propaganda.
Broadly speaking propaganda is just any goal-driven
ideological message, and a lot of stuff incidentally falls under that umbrella.
For example any official message from an activist community meets the literal definition.
Signs encouraging you to, like, pick up after your dog.
So the first thing that we need to make note of is the textural difference
between the literal definition of propaganda and how people actually use the word.
Contextually propaganda is used derisively, not merely used to describe
the literal characteristics of some text or another, but carries with it a value judgments
with the implicit understanding that propaganda is bad.
Memetically, propaganda represents not just rhetoric but some degree of dishonesty:
not an attempt to persuade but to deceive.
Not an attempt to inform but to inflame.
And even by this metric there's still plenty that qualifies as
propaganda from white nationalists spreading false statistics about crime
to corporations trying to paper over the damage they do to bloggers being paid to
pretend to like a video game.
So what we're going to do here is draw a fine line between propaganda and
PROPAGANDA, the distinction being a difference between general propaganda
and propaganda generated by and in service of governments.
I feel like this is an important distinction to make
because there is a potent contextual difference between, say, the propaganda
tracts and memes spread by hate groups and those spread by the state.
That distinction is order of magnitude.
The sheer reach and spending power at the
disposal of government is so far beyond
the scope of even corporations that it's
a laughable comparison.
The US federal government's annual revenue is 3.6 trillion dollars.
The largest corporation in the world, Walmart, sees an annual
revenue of 482 billion dollars.
The 10 largest corporations combined still fall
almost a trillion dollars short.
Global box office revenue comes in around 38
billion dollars, and Pirates of the
Caribbean four is ranked as the most
expensive movie ever made at 378 million
dollars but on the scope of federal
budgets, especially those related to the
military, its budget is a rounding error.
And this isn't even touching on the
power that government have to enact and
enforce the underlying policies that
propaganda supports. The point is that
large, motivated governments can
effortlessly outspend any other
organized entity on the planet and as a
result their potential for producing
and disseminating propaganda exist on an
entirely different plane of operation
than any other form. When you add in the
potential outcome,
that propaganda influencing the lives of
millions or even billions of people, the
stakes to dwarf everything else. It is for
this reason that we're not going to be
talking about propaganda in the abstract
but rather is very specific kind of
propaganda, and with that established
Triumph of the Will
Leni Riefenstahl film Triumph des
Willens isn't the beginning of
propaganda, it's not even the beginning
of motion picture propaganda, heck
it's not even Riefenstahl's first
propaganda film for the Nazis, and i'm
going to use that as a segue into some
contextual history. In 1933 Riefenstahl
documented the annual Nazi Nuremberg
rally in the film Der Sieg Des Glaubens,
Victory of Faith, however that film is
significantly less well-known.
Filmed at the August 1933 rally celebrating Adolf
Hitler's appointment to the position of
chancellor of Germany in January of that
year, the film heavily features founding Nazi Party leader Ernst Röhm.
Röhm would be executed a year later in July 1934,
during the Night of Long Knives, a sweeping ideological purge of
socialist and working-class leadership in the Nazi party, after which it was
ordered that all known copies of Victory of Faith be destroyed as part of an
attempt at rewriting history, erasing Röhm's contributions to the Nazi Party.
Due to the high profile of many of the people killed in the purge it was
impossible to cover up the illegal executions, so Hitler had the cabinet just
make them legal after-the-fact.
A month after the purge, August 1934, president
Hindenburg died, and by the middle of August the roles of President and
Chancellor were merged, making Hitler
both the head of state and the head of government.
With all of that in mind: a number of very high-profile crimes
followed by a complete restructuring of the government,
in September 1934 Hitler and his party had a vested interest in
reinforcing the perceived legitimacy of the regime and preparing the populace
for the wars that were to come.
And to that end they hired Riefenstahl to make
a second propaganda documentary at the
now annual Nuremberg rally.
Now let's talk about the language of propaganda.
From a filmmaking perspective propaganda uses all the same grammar as
any other example of the medium.
Contrast, association, implication, these are all
the bread and butter of assembling any visual narrative.
As an example we're going to look at something a little
lighter than Nazis and take a look at Return of the King.
so Return of the King has a scene where
Denethor has sent Faramir out to die on
the battlefield and the film cross-cuts
between the battlefield and the hall at the
palace where Denethor's having dinner. The
three main things of interest are
Denethor's eating, Pippin's singing, and Faramir's riding.
The film pays particular interest to the squishy
sounds and sloppy process of Denethor's
eating, which when juxtaposed with
Faramir's suicide mission create thematic
implications: that Denethor is a careless
sloppy glutton who consumes the lives of the people around him.
He discards his son's life with same grace as he squishes a tomato.
Where Pippin and Faramir are highlighted by their faces, their
personages, Denethor is largely viewed
from severe angles and segmented, reduced
to his hands and his giant consuming
mouth, a visual parallel matched by the
deformed orc Gothmog.
Denethor breaks bones and blood runs down his chin,
images which are juxtaposed with the blood streaking the faces of the orcs
preparing to slaughter Faramir's troops.
This is all compounded by Pippin's song, which essentially just commentates the contrast as it happens.
The messaging here is pretty straightforward: Denethor is
villainized, a parallel is created between him and the orcs.
Heck, if anything it's ridiculously heavy-handed.
The point of this example is to drive home the fact that there really is no
difference in the editing grammar used in one genre versus another.
The same process of creating implications, of
villainizing or lionizing through
juxtaposed imagery, works the same regardless.
Where propaganda diverges is in the nuances of how the message is delivered.
One of the sand traps of discussing ideology in cinema is the demand of narrative.
Story, at least in the European tradition, requires conflict.
characters must be flawed, they must make mistakes, their
opponents must get the better of them.
Things in some way shape or form need to
get bad, need to entertain uncertainty.
In Return of the King, a conventional story,
Denethor's actions must bring Pippin and
Gandalf and Faramir low in order to
create the tension that will be relieved
later in the story when the conflict is resolved.
However these basic mechanisms of
narrative tension are at odds with the
needs of propaganda, because weakness,
failure, and uncertainty are anathema to the propagandist.
The subject of propaganda has no arc but upward, they
begin strong and stronger, they crush all
that oppose them, their opposition is
flimsy and victory is trivial.
They win so much that the audience gets tired of all the winning.
This is the point.
Triumph of the Will is no different: it
is interminable in its assertion of the strength of the Nazi Party, the promise of
victory, and the uselessness of the opposition.
Alright well actually it is a little bit more complicated.
See propaganda does still require a worthy
foe, or more accurately a foe that
justifies the volume of force that the
propagandist is trying to rally.
Triumph of the Will, and Nazi ideology in general,
is obsessed with both the unstoppable
might of the party and the need for that
unstoppable might to be levied against
the paradoxically week degenerates who secretly control everything.
Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay Ur-Fascism describes this particular ideological quirk:
the followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies
however the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemy's thus
by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they
are constitutionally incapable of
objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
Let's back up and revisit previous accusation: Triumph of the Will is not a
triumph of cinema, but of budget. One of
the central arms of attack that Triumph
of the Will uses is in its very essence,
its existence as a grandiose, long,
expensive, complex production. None of the
filmmaking ideas used were new. putting a
camera in the back of a car wasn't new.
tracking shots weren't new. low angle
shots weren't new. aerial shots weren't
new. the only thing new was scope. Every
scene goes on and on for minutes at a
time.
there aren't a few aerial shots, there are
hundreds. there's not a camera observing
the parade as it passes, there are dozens
of cameras embedded in the very fabric
of the parade. to the modern viewer it
may seem aimless and shoddily paced, with
montages that just go on and on and on
long after the point has been made, but
that's the point.
it is not merely a demonstration of
presence but of volume. the indulgence of
it, the conspicuous cost, is as much a
message of the film as any other,
intended to tell the viewer that the
economic might of Nazi Germany is so
great that even their propaganda is
casually one of the most expensive
productions to date. every visual
implication of wealth strength and power
is made and then repeated and repeated
and repeated. Hitler descend from the
majesty of the heaven. the old and
weathered architecture of Nuremberg is
peppered with Nazi icons, tying the new
regime to the perceived wealth and
stability of ages past. children gaze in
awe their glorious humble leader, a man
so blessed by the gods that even cats
take notice of his passing. the Reich
is juxtaposed with churches, with the
pastoral calm of the rising sun, with
efficiency, with a bounty of food, and, of
course, with an endless supply of
soldiers. troops march and march and
march and march. the Nazi army does not
merely exist it goes on and on and on
and then on a little more after that.
now there is no arc to the film because
there is no conflict.
"look at us we're amazing." there is no
story, there is only message.
oh it's mostly lies by the way
internally the Nazis were a mess. They
had after all just assassinated a number
of their own high-ranking officers and
the army, which outnumbered the SA and
SS, was still very much on the fence
about their support for the regime
following the death of Hindenburg.
Germany was still very much at risk of
tipping into a civil war between the
Nazis in the Wehrmacht.
the whole point of the rally was to make
the film and the whole point of the film
was to project an image of an
unstoppable overwhelming wealthy happy
fed and unified Nazi Germany to
demoralize opponents and embolden
supporters. in fact there's a message
back there that you probably wouldn't
even catch, that whole thing about the
army. the actual german army, the Wehrmacht,
is barely in the film. there's one
scene of cavalry being inspected but
that's about it.
all the rest of that endless sea of
troops are SA and SS troops which were
organs of the Nazi Party not of the
Armed Forces. it is a conscious exclusion
meant to establish a pecking order
between the Nazis and the Wehrmacht, to
make the potentially disloyal members of
the army feel small overwhelmed
unimportant and outnumbered. Throughout
the film the odious aspects of the Nazi
ideology, the concentration camps which
had already been operating for a year by
that point, the political assassinations,
the racism,
these are all downplayed or absent, left
unstated. the message is clear and
singular we are strong and prosperous
and anything we choose to do is
justified because it works and religious
imagery has been tapped to consecrate
that justification with divine favour.
historically this is also where we start
to really see the public beginning of
Nazi paganism with a parade of Nazi
flags being ceremonially consecrated by
touching them to the Blutfahn, a flag
that they claim had been carried by the
Nazis killed during the beer hall putsch.
Now the relationship between the Nazis
and religion is super complex and
interesting and you should definitely look into it
lots of books out there on the subject
but if you can get your hands on a copy
definitely check out the Urania's Children it's a really interesting short
read about astrology that's been out of
print for decades and The Occult Roots of Nazism.
The short of it is that Nazism was a theological goulash.
They made heavy use of Christian symbology and
tried to turn the numerous German
churches into an organ of the party
through the Confessional Church, but this
was largely a means to an end.
they didn't tap into Christian imagery
because they shared Christian values,
they did it because those images have
emotional meaning to the people.
simultaneously to this they were
co-opting any religious symbols that
they felt supported their own claim to
power, adopting the disparate trappings
of both Odinism and Hinduism.
This goes just as well for their approach to
science and their embrace of pseudoscience: it doesn't matter what
form it comes in as long as it reaches the desired conclusion.
In the words of Hannah Arendt science is only a surrogate for power.
This is actually important: one of the main mechanisms of
propaganda is to plant the idea of
precedence, to alter the audience's own
sense of history and the world and
appeal to the seemingly objective
authorities of God, History, and Science.
one of the most common use of propaganda
is to make new institutions seem much
older than they really are
by injecting themselves and their ideas
into history, what Umberto Eco described as a cult of tradition.
Nazi architecture is monumental in design, evocative of classical Greek and Roman.
Triumph of the Will places the new Nazi Party alongside centuries-old churches
Nazi eschatology dredges up old Norse runes to suggest an unbroken pure
lineage between the ancient & the present.
Nazi pseudoscience says that the murder of Jews and Roma is acceptable because of blood.
The point of it all is to center the party in every aspect of life,
to make the party the mouthpiece of the gods.
this is why there's all that bunk about
Riefenstahl being a visionary director
the legacy of Triumph of the Will is
muddled because it was intentionally muddled.
The party was trying to inject itself into everything,
into history, into art, into religion.
They made their own movie and had their own critics praise
it, to make it important.
despite being funded entirely by the
government, Triumph of the Will was
released commercially, to distance it
from the party just enough to add a
patina of legitimacy, to suggest that
Riefenstahl had captured something
unique and organic. And it worked.
To this day we continue to use Triumph
of the Will as our reference point for
the mental construct of the Nazi regime.
Which I want you to think about that.
Our idea of the Nazis is deeply
informed by a propaganda film produced
by the Nazis for the explicit purpose of
creating that mental construct.
This right here is exactly the image they
wanted you to think of when you thought of them.