Triumph of the Will

Triumph of the Will is a 1934 Nazi propaganda film. It is a great example of Art in the service of immorality. People will swallow anything if it looks good enough. Frightening. The scenery's pretty, though.

It does go on and on and on...

It's available online at the Internet Archive and from google:
That one's no longer available. Try this:


Videos With Bibi has a post. 1001 Flicks has a review. FilmEducation.org has some background information and some study questions.

The History Place considers the film in relation to Germany's history:

The film's most enduring and dangerous illusion is that Nazi Germany was a super-organized state, that, although evil in nature, was impressive nonetheless.

In reality, Nazi Germany was only well organized to the degree that it was a murderous police state. The actual Reich government was a tangled mess of inefficient agencies and overlapping bureaucracies led by ruthless men who had little, if any, professional administrative abilities.

Kevin Jack Hagopian writes:

Triumph of the Will, like The Birth of a Nation, presents the great conundrum of art: can art be both morally reprehensible, and yet "great"? Riefenstahl was imprisoned by the Allies after the war, and then released, partly because no one could figure out if a film could be an instrument of war. Riefenstahl was adamant; she had been concerned with matters of form, not politics. But she was never to be rehabilitated by the German film industry...

11/26/2007: A Film Canon has a review.

6/27/2008: Roger Ebert has a review:

That "Triumph of the Wall" is a great propaganda film, there is no doubt, and various surveys have named it so. But I doubt that anyone not already a Nazi could be swayed by it.

7/24/2008: Pesky Fly mentions this film in a post dealing with propaganda in this presidential election.

1/7/2010: The Sun's Not Yellow has a post.