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>I am living a nightmare that has
the overtones of Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will."
>
>I rented the movie once. It got me a few looks form the
clerk at the video store. If you ever
>want to see a frightening
film you may want to take a peek at this one. While neo Nazis may
>see it as a fun little film showing Nazi power. Historians use it
to demonstrate how the Nazi
>state drew in the masses through
propaganda and also how Adolf Hitler had a unique and
>terrifying
ability to entice crowds to his beliefs by the very power of his words.
It IS a frightening film, but its power goes beyond Hitler's
actual words...
I first saw the film on a local PBS station
back around 1970 -- at the time the fact that the station was actually
broadcasting the full film without interruption was quite
controversial...
My mother thought that we should watch it,
thinking that it would be 'educational' for my sister and me, showing what
Hitler was like...
The film was shown with subtitles -- a
good thing, since I don't understand German....
As I was
later to learn in various film-study courses, Riefenstahl was a genius
when it came to imparting certain ideals solely by image; check out her
"Olympiad", too...ostensibly 'just' a documentary of the 1936 games held
in Berlin, there is hardly any voice-over at all and yet succeeds
brilliantly in presenting the premise of Aryan superiority...and she used
the same techniques in "Triumph of the Will"...
But there is
something more to "Triumph"...about 20 minutes into the film it
concentrates on Hitler's filmed speeches in the early 1930s, shortly after
he was made Fuehrer...and it contained the expected anti-jew and
anti-communist harangues one expects; indeed Hitler is quite shrill and is
almost a caricature....
It was at this point that I stopped
reading the subtitles and just watched and listened; remember, I don't
understand German, so I didn't "understand" what was being said...but I
had the benefit of time and history, and even tho I didn't understand the
language being spoken, I knew that it was full of hateful, racist
invective, that it was full of things I hated...
And yet,
after a few minutes, I was hooked; I was totally mesmerized by Hitler, and
another minute or two I felt awed and almost felt Hitler an idol; I was
amazed at how easily these emotions were invoked, even though I didn't
understand the actual words being spoken but DID know that I hated
everything Hitler stood for...
And at that moment I realized
just how easy it IS for a politician to hook the masses, no matter how
outrageous that politician's statements are; it DOES come down to image
over substance, and even when one understands the language being spoken
one has to realize that most of the public has an attention span of a
flea; this is even more the case today, when the majority of the public
only gets sound bites of a politician's speech and not the full
speech...
Now you have to understand that in this portion of
"Triumph", Riefenstahl is only using existing newsreel footage, this is
NOT footage she filmed herself...therefore she isn't responsible for the
mesmerizing act; it is solely Hitler's own doing and, as I said, even
though I didn't understand the actual words being spoken I still was
sucked into the aura....I could well understand why the German people
supported Hitler and the Nazi's and could understand why they would be
willing to give their lives for the Fatherland if he asked them to...and
Hitler achieved that with something that went beyond the actual words he
used...
>Fascism always starts with words, then
actions and reactions.
It's more than words -- it is the
IMAGE that is projected, which is stronger than the actual words being
used; in fact many times the IMAGE is at odds with the actual words (for
example, an Orwellian image of a symbol representing 'Freedom', while the
actual words encourage the curtailing of freedom), but it is the IMAGE
which has the most power and which is manipulated by those spewing the
words...
June
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