Home | Site Map	"I made everything work together in the rhythm....I was able to establish that with the same material, edited differently, the film wouldn't have worked at all." Leni Riefenstahl

The foremost German filmmaker [of the 1930s], an actress and fiction film director who turned to documentary production after Hitler asked her to film the 1933 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Victory of Faith (Sieg des Glaubens). A year later she returned to Nuremberg and made a similar, but more ambitious, film of the 1934 rally, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935). --From The Oxford History of World Cinema. The editing of Triumph of the Will connected Nazi symbols with the Party leaders, and in turn with ordinary people who attended the rally, as shown in this sequence from the second day. The use of close-ups, such as these photos of the Hitler Youth, contrasted with and humanized the monumental crowd scenes in Triumph of the Will. The use of cameras attached to banners above the arena provided panoramic images which conveyed the immense scope of the proceedings. In this sequence, a shot of a stone eagle and swastika dissolves into a view of Hitler, Lutze, and Himmler, tiny figures among column upon column of soldiers.

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