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Showing posts from March, 2014

Triumph Of The Will (1935)

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This one is definitely the elephant in the room, now that we know the real intentions of the people it is about. Although it is very difficult to find reviews of this film published when it was first released, before it was "tainted" by the outcome of WWII, the fact that it won the Best Foreign Documentary prize at the 1935 Venice Film Festival and the Gold Medal at the 1937 Paris World Fair can be seen both as a testament to the genius of its director,  Leni Riefenstahl , as well as the kind eyes Europe as a whole was having toward German Nazism at the time. Triumph of the Will chronicles the 6-day 1934 Nazi Party congress at Nüremberg, from Hitler's arrival in a jet plane, going over the Hitler Youth camp and then countless parades and salutes, intertwined with some speeches, up to the closing ones by Hitler himself and Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess . Given the movie is a documentary, there is nothing a director can do but to document what is going on (and no polit