Triumph of the Will

1935

Leni Riefenstahl's record of the 1934 Nuremberg party rally, presented here with an opening that explains how and why it was made. The rally itself was partly built for the camera, with pits, tracks and lighting planned in advance, so what looks like documentation is staged: the aeroplane descending through cloud, the low angles that make one man monumental, the massed ranks cut to music. It is included as the canonical study object it has become in film and history teaching, and everything it asserts about the regime is the regime's own claim about itself.