Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
Because it is a lie and the whole thing was staged and everything was scripted and orchestrated with only one point of view and one idea.
Interesting topic... a quick search turned up this:
Leni Riefenstahl: Documentary Film-Maker Or Propagandist?
by Ellen Cheshire
Leni Riefenstahl was considered to be Adolf Hitler's favourite film director. Her directorial début, Blue Light (1932), caught Hitler's attention and he requested that she make a short film of the Nazi party's 1933 Nuremberg rally, Victory Of Faith (1934). A year later, he commissioned her to make a feature-length film of the 1934 rally - this film became Triumph Of The Will (1935). It has been described as 'an impressive spectacle of Germany's adherence to Hitler', a 'Nazi masterpiece' and 'a masterpiece of romanticised propaganda', but nevertheless has been hailed as a great work despite its glorification of the 1934 Nuremberg Party Rally and the political message of the Nazis. Equally famous, and considered far less political, was her coverage of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin - the four-hour epic Olympia (1938) offered a 'glorious view of Olympic athletes that remains powerful and popular.'
The issue of whether Triumph Of The Will and Olympia should be classified as 'documentaries' or as 'propaganda films' has been in constant dispute since they were made. They are very different films concerned with completely different subject matters, so I have approached the two films separately.
In an interview in 1964, reprinted in A Biographical Dictionary Of The Cinema by David Thomson, Riefenstahl makes clear that she felt Triumph Of The Will was a recording of an event, not a propaganda film:
"If you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene. Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film... it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating events in order to illustrate a thesis, or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality of a certain time and a certain place. My film is composed of what stemmed from that."
However, propaganda can take various forms, ranging from overt attempts to influence the public to covert means of persuasion linked with brainwashing - the subjecting of individuals to intensive political indoctrination and the breaking down of a subject's resistance. It is frequently thought of negatively and has become associated with ideas, facts, or allegations deliberately spread to further a cause or to damage an opposing cause. Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda in Hitler's cabinet, and his work within the Nazi regime is especially infamous. He felt that entertainment was the best propaganda and, as a consequence, 90% of the films produced by Germany had no overt propaganda messages - his aim was to entertain and get people off the streets and away from their homes. He wanted films not to focus on information and facts but on emotion and entertainment. Therefore he was at odds with Hitler's aim regarding Triumph Of The Will.
It cannot be denied that Triumph Of The Will is a record of an event. It is a film of an actuality and happened where and when and in the order that the film says it did. In an account of the making of the film, Riefenstahl writes that she was involved in the Rally's planning - and conceived the event with filming in mind. As Susan Sontag reiterates in her article entitled 'Fascinating Fascism': 'The Rally was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as a spectacular propaganda film.' However, by 1993 in The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl, Riefenstahl claimed that she was not involved in the design of the Rally - "I just observed and tried to film it well. The idea that I helped to plan it is downright absurd."
It has generally been accepted that the Nuremberg Rally was staged for the cameras, rather than the cameras having to accommodate the action. The film was cut to rhythm in time to anthems and Wagnerian music creating choreographed images of endless numbers of men in uniform, marching in to and out of abstract shapes and patterns filmed from a variety of angles, reducing the men to geometrical designs. The passionate music, feeling and emotion builds up to a climatic frenzied finale when Hitler takes the stand. The dramatic intensity of the event was accentuated by the composition and editing. It is this deliberate manipulation of emotion that makes this 'documentary' cross the boundary into 'propaganda film.' This links directly with the perceived notion of propaganda as the systematic attempt to manipulate the attitudes, beliefs and actions of people through the use of symbols such as words, gestures, slogans, flags and uniforms.
The film was financed by the Nazi Government, commissioned by Hitler himself, completed with the full co-operation of all involved, with huge resources at her disposal - an unlimited budget, crew of 120 and between 30 and 40 cameras. It stands as a powerful artistic representation of the ideas in Hitler's book Mein Kampf - work, extreme nationalism, belief in corporative state socialism, a private army, a youth cult, the use of propaganda and the submission of all decisions to the supreme leader, i.e. himself. The film, however, reached and influenced far more people than the book ever could. Riefenstahl claimed in The Wonderful, Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl that it was "Not a documentary but a work of art, [there was] no commentary in the normal sense of the word. There's no commentator to explain everything. That's the way it differs from a documentary or a propaganda film. If it were propaganda, as many say, they'd be a commentator to explain the significance and value of the occasion. This wasn't the case."
In contrast, Susan Sontag in her essay entitled 'Fascinating Fascism' re-printed in Movies And Methods Vol 1, claims that it is the 'most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception negates the possibility of the film-makers having an aesthetic or visual concept independent of propaganda.'
It is not only the messages in the film that were slanted towards Nazi beliefs and ideals, but the mise-en-scene, editing and music all combine to create a hypnotic and visually rich emotional experience, which would have undoubtedly influenced more people than, say, the crude propaganda films of Dr Fritz Hippler (Jud Suss and Der Ewige Jude).
