Leni Riefenstahl arrived at the 1934 Nuremberg rally with a crew of over a hundred, thirty cameras, and resources no documentary filmmaker had ever been given. Pits were dug for low-angle shots. A lift was installed on a flagpole. Tracks were laid. Cameras were mounted on fire ladders and in an aircraft. The rally itself was, in part, scheduled around the filming, and some sequences were reshot afterwards in a studio when the footage was unsatisfactory.
Triumph of the Will was released in 1935, and it remains the most technically accomplished propaganda film ever made and the most studied.
Its argument is delivered entirely through the camera, which is why it is in this part of the guide.
The opening is an aircraft descending through cloud over the towers of medieval Nuremberg — a god's-eye arrival, the shadow of the plane crossing marching columns below. Hitler is filmed almost exclusively from below, so that he stands against sky. Crowds are filmed from above, as pattern. Individual faces are cut in briefly and repeatedly: a woman, a child, a young soldier, all rapt. There is no narrator and there is almost no argument. There are speeches, but their content is not what the film is doing.
The technique is what Green and Brock call narrative transportation. An immersive audiovisual experience produces a state in which the viewer is absorbed, and absorbed viewers generate fewer counter-arguments than readers of persuasive text. A written claim that the German people were united in devotion invites the response that they were not. A film that shows it does not present a claim at all; it presents perception, and perception is not ordinarily audited.
The low angle is an argument. The aerial descent is an argument. The cut from Hitler's face to a child's face is an argument. None of them can be answered, because none of them were stated.
Repetition of symbols — the eagle, the swastika, the standards — supplies the mere-exposure effect of chapter 24, so that unfamiliar insignia acquire positive affect through familiarity alone.
Riefenstahl spent the rest of her life insisting she had made a documentary, that she had been an artist rather than a propagandist, and that she had merely recorded what happened. The reshoots, the pits dug in advance, and the fact that the rally's staging was itself designed for the camera are the answer to that, and they are documented in her own production records.
She was never convicted of anything, lived to 101, and continued working.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Visual Framing Chapters