Film Propaganda: Triumph of the Will as a Case Study

Until a reassessment by historians and film critics in the 1990s, Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic “record” of the September 1934 Nazi party rally had generally been regarded as the quintessential example of the art of political film propaganda. Susan Sontag argued in a seminal article for the New York Review of Books that Riefenstahl’s “superb” films of the 1930s were powerful propaganda as well as important documentary art made by “a film-maker of genius.”¹ She concluded that Triumph des Willens/Triumph of the Will (DE, 1935) was “a film whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic conception independent of propaganda.”² Although still an important source, Sontag’s assessment has been seriously challenged on a number of counts. While her 1975 essay certainly breaks with an earlier insistence upon the separation of artist from historical context,³ it nevertheless makes huge claims for the quality and power of Riefenstahl’s film as both art and political propaganda that are difficult to sustain. Brian Winston, the prominent media scholar, has argued that the film might better be seen as the antithesis of persuasive propaganda and that it is more powerful as a warning against the very political and social ideas the film espouses rather than a successful projection of them.⁴ Moreover, Winston contends that the film does not stand up very strongly as a work of art and is certainly far from the masterpiece Sontag and others such as Richard M. Barsam claim it to be.⁵ For her own part, Riefenstahl always maintained that she was not a political filmmaker and her film was not propaganda but a documentary record of the Nuremberg rally. She maintained, perhaps most passionately in Ray Müller’s 1993 film, that she had been engaged—reluctantly on her part—in a technical exercise to document the event and had no interest in or sympathy with the political views of the National Socialists.⁶

Clearly, this dispute over the film’s nature, purpose, and status raises questions about its production history and wider issues around the characteristics of political cinema and the specific nature of film propaganda as a form of political cinema. In an attempt to explore the relationship between art, politics, and propaganda, this paper addresses three main issues. Firstly, how can we conceptualize “political propaganda” and how has this concept been understood by some of those who study film history? Secondly, how does Riefenstahl’s film function as political propaganda? Can it be argued that technical and aesthetic qualities help underscore the film’s political aims? Thirdly, is it possible to judge the effectiveness of the film as a piece of propaganda in its historical time and place? Indeed, a major concern here will be to restore a crucial element absent in so many discussions of the film, namely that of its specific historical context.

Defining Propaganda

In the English-speaking world, there is a tendency to apportion a negative meaning to the term “propaganda.” Here propaganda connotes the dissemination of particular messages of a dishonest and dangerous kind; ones usually associated with authoritarian and tyrannical regimes. Propaganda is associated with the manipulation of large numbers of people and is seen to involve deliberately misleading them either by obscuring reality with a partial or slanted view, or through downright lies. Yet it is evident that in some cultures the term has retained its Catholic usage alongside the modern negative sense. In Latinate languages, the term retains something of its original meaning of “propagation” and is used as a colloquial expression meaning advertising or “junk mail.” Yet it is important to reflect upon the fact that propagandizing has not always been thought of as something to be ashamed of. It can be viewed as a positive activity, as in the original use of the term by the Catholic Church in its 1622 Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. Here the reference is to the active promotion of a worldview perceived to be the absolute and unquestionable truth.⁷

In the Anglophone world, the tendency has been to avoid...