Tiago's brain dump

Last December, while aimlessly browsing the Internet, I happened to stumble upon an article published by Ebert in 1991 - that is, five years before starting his Great Movies collection - in which he listed his personal ten best movies of all time, comprised of films that had "moved [him] deeply in one way or another". Despite being the first time I had ever laid eyes on that article, based on what I knew about Ebert I was pretty sure of what to expect. I knew Michael Curtiz 's  Casablanca  (1942) would be in there - as it was the movie with which he had started his Great Movies compilation -, together with  Orson Welles 's  Citizen Kane  (1941) - generally regarded as " the " best movie of all time (at least by then ). I was sure that a movie by  Yasujiro Ozu  (one of Ebert's  favorite   directors   ever ), as well as one by  Martin Scorsese  (about whom Ebert even wrote a book ), had been selected as well, and I had ...

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...