December 14, 2010 01:30PM EST

Retro Pick: Triumph of the Will

Leni Riefenstahl’s terrifying, infamous doc raises some important questions about the structural workings of art.



Sitting at my computer, deliberating about the film I first tentatively, then firmly decided to choose as this week’s Retro Pick, I flashed back to a telling moment from Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Half Nelson. The morning after spending the night with Social Studies teacher Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), his date—and colleague—asks Dunne about his political inclinations. “Are you a communist?” she asks him. “I saw you have Che in Africa, The Communist Manifesto...” Dunne’s response is, “If I had Mein Kampf, would you ask me if I was a Nazi?”



Works of art, be they books or films, can be important to examine even when devoid of any actual merit as artworks. Sometimes they are symptomatic of a certain era; sometimes they are object-lessons in potential contradictions inherent in the artistic process. The latter is the case with Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous 1934 Nazi propaganda documentary. The film falls in line with Birth of a Nation in exposing one of the dangers of giving oneself (as an audience member) to style in cinema too easily; obviously, both films support and advocate on behalf of horrific ideologies while employing great stylistic elegance and grace. The aerial and mass-crowd photography in Triumph of the Will—one imagines the German state gave Riefenstahl few budget constraints—remain extremely powerful exploitations of the medium’s potential, even 76 years later.

When falling into arguments over artistic manifestos like Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, one becomes confronted a bit too often by those who like to insist that there is no such thing as a division between content and form in art. Content, people of this school of thought postulate, and form are the same thing; they are indistinguishable. While I believe that content and form are absolutely linked, I believe that they are merely inextricable, not indistinguishable. There is a fundamental difference between the ideology a film advances and how that film advances it.

As “media literacy” becomes ever-more necessary a comprehending mechanism in a world where more and more information is delivered to audiences via the visual, a realm that contains not one but two types of language, being able to distinguish between the content and form of a video (and reminding oneself that there is such a distinction to be made) becomes ever-more important. To fully understand the importance of this distinction, Triumph of the Will is necessary viewing.

---

Triumph of the Will screens Friday, December 17, at MOMA.