MUSEUM QUALITY
THERE ARE MOVIES THAT RAISE THE ISSUE OF ARTISTRY AND EVIL. D.W. GRIFFITH’S 1915 Klan-fest The Birth of a Nation is one. Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 paean to Adolf Hitler, Triumph of the Will is another.
One can look at these two skillful, innovative, intermittently exciting movies as exercises in pure form, and many people do. There is something purely cinematic about them—both exemplify cinema as an inherently authoritarian medium as well as an unprecedented rabble-rousing technology for emotional manipulation.
The Birth of a Nation uses drama to contaminate, personalize, and rewrite history; even more steeped in the magic of the movies, Triumph of the Will demonstrates how documentary cinema can be used to frame an event and fabricate an idol. That the history Griffith took upon himself to revise was that of a brutal white-supremacist counterrevolution and the personality whom Riefenstahl was commissioned to glorify turned out to be the 20th century’s leading homicidal psychopath are facts that these movies have to live with—if they are to live at all. Such toxic film objects should be handled with care. They have to be taught, lest they teach us.
Triumph of the Will is also a film that, often excerpted, exists in several forms. I first saw the complete 114-minute version at Anthology Film Archives in November 1972 (four days before Richard Nixon was reelected president), writing in my movie journal that it was “as repetitive as a sixunit porno show.” In fact, it was stupefying not least because as was Anthology’s wont, the crisp 35mm print—which I now realize could only have come from the filmmaker herself—was shown without the distraction of English-language subtitles.
My ellipsis-ridden notes read as follows:
I was numbed by the recurring [drawn swastika followed by an “s”]… kept nodding… the film is very abstract… the lobotomized fervor of the crowds… marching soldiers… Baby Face Hitler w his weird tics… continual screaming rhetoric… boosted soundtrack… martial music… reaction shots and close-ups. [Riefenstahl] combines the teachings of Kuleshov
