Triumph des Willens

Leni Riefenstahl′s film of the Nuremberg Rally is the best-known and most discussed work of Nazi propaganda. Beginning with the arrival of Hitler′s plane in Nuremberg, the formally elaborate work knits together the various stations of the mass rally into a manipulative production of the National Socialist Führer cult. Riefenstahl weaves story-boarded sequences and documentary footage according to narrative methods, so that lineups of Nazi followers and allegedly spontaneous reactions of bystanders then manifest as the self-aggrandizing iconography of the Nazi Regime.