There is an old saying about leaping to conclusions based on appearances: if something walks like a duck and talks like a duck, chances are pretty good that what you are looking at there is probably a duck. Except that a goose walks like a duck and talks like a duck and while it may belong to the same family and while most people probably can’t tell the difference, the fact is that a goose is not really a duck in the sense that most people know it. The same standard of measurement is easily applied to Triumph of the Will.
Leni Riefenstahl’s film may walk like a documentary and talk like a documentary, but it is really propaganda. In the hands of a master filmmaker—which Riefenstahl most certainly was and anyone who says different is probably being influenced by political ideology—the divergence between documentary and propaganda can be as difficult to detect as that between a duck and goose. Subtle the dissimilarities may be—to the point of being impossible for the average person to detect—but the differences are not to be ignored.
Important for understanding this difference is that the rules for documentary filmmaking have changed considerably since Triumph of the Will was released. Today, recreation of scenes for dramatic purposes and ideologically weighted perspectives in pursuit of political manipulation are routine; in 1934, however, most moviegoers expected that there was a sharp division in the approach to making documentaries and dramatized narrative which was the standard fare down at the local movie theater. Documentaries were understood by the public—though not necessarily actual examples—to be real-time records of reality as it was happening while the camera rolled. As opposed to a dramatic film about whaling, for instance, a documentary on whaling was accepted on good faith that what was portrayed on screen was a real story that required none of the typical behind-the-scenes attributes of filmmaking like scripted dialogue, elaborate sets, multiple takes and assorted examples of cinematic stage management.
For the most part, Leni Riefenstahl managed to produce a film that reveals none of this stage management despite the fact that the actual production was loaded with them. For instance, some scenes which appear to be shot exactly as they were taking place in real time were, in fact, rehearsed prior to filming began. The impressive majesty inside the stadium at which the rally is held was actually constructed for the express purpose of allowing the nearly 20 cameras used to film it access to purely cinematic movement and angles; as a result some of the speeches had to restaged to meet those purposes. So sublimely talented and committed was Riefenstahl during the editing of the film that for the most part it is all but impossible to detect that she wasn’t make a duck at all, but only a goose that walked and talked exactly like a goose.
The motorcade procession through the city in which the streets are lined with thousands upon thousands of (smiling, always smiling) German supporters of Der Führer is one of the few moments in the film when Riefenstahl’s duck is revealed to be wearing a goose mask. For just a few brief moments---so brief that even here it is not difficult to notice on an initial viewing—the director allowed the propaganda message to conflict with documentary approach in what is otherwise such a carefully constructed artificial representation of reality. Generally speaking, the director managed to avoid the awkward inclusion of any overtly obvious scene capable of betraying that it was actually filmed not “in the moment” but rather in layers of time as typical dramatic narrative would be produced.
The procession through the city successfully incorporates the associational editing technique which is its fundamental basis for propaganda: the sequence is a montage of overhead scenes of the cars making their way through the throngs, the throngs smiling up at some unseen entity (presumably Hitler) and scenes shot from right behind a standing Hitler inside his car as well as shots that purport to be what Hitler sees as he passes (including, infamously, a housecat perched on a windowsill beneath a flag sporting a swastika). The collective effect is to remind viewers of what will be expressly stated at the film’s end: Hitler is Germany and German is Hitler. As an example of what was almost universally considered documentary filmmaking in 1934, this is powerful stuff; a record of what appears to be a spontaneous outpouring of not just support, but absolute worship for the man standing up in the car. And yet it is precisely as documentary that this is where the façade completely falls apart and Triumph of the Will is exposed as pure propaganda for its time or as a startling preview of what the documentary would much later become.
If the movie truly was an example of pure documentary filmmaking representative of its era and not an example of scenes being clearly recreated and thus bringing into question all assumptions about what is real and what is not, there would be object in this sequence impossible to miss. And yet that object is nowhere to be seen. In the scenes inside Hitler’s car, he is shot with the camera lens almost at the level of his shoulders in order to further solidify the audience’s association with his him and his perspective. However, in none of the shots of the procession from outside the confines of Hitler’s car—and there are many shots from many different angles and perspectives—is there actually a camera in the car. The external shots all show a man in a military uniform sitting directly behind object of this supposedly spontaneously outpouring of love, devotion and patriotic fervor.
The absence of a thing which should be quite clearly be there opens up all sorts of questions. Did this procession take place twice; once with the camera inside Hitler’s car and once with it not? Or were the two sequences part of a continuous single procession interrupted midway through to either insert the camera into the car or remove it? And, if the latter is the explanation, then what to make of why the editing falsifies this reality by making it appear as though everything is taking place as a single uninterrupted trip?
The answer is the difference between a duck and a goose. Triumph of the Will may appear to be a documentary, but in this case appearances are not just deceiving; they are meant to be deceiving.
