Triumph of the Will. (Homevideo).

Directed by Leni Riefenstahl. DVD, B&W, letterboxed format, 110 minutes. German dialog with English subtitles. Audio commentary by Dr. Anthony R. Santoro. Disc also includes Riefenstahl's Day of Freedom (1935), B&W, 17 mins. Produced and distributed by Synapse Films, P.O. Box 1860, Bloomington, IL 61702, phone [phone].

The grim reaper took his (or her) summer vacation far away from a lakeside bungalow near Munich this year, so Leni Riefenstahl was able to attend the August premiere of her new forty-five minute film, Impressions tinder Water, a distillation of the many hours of deep-sea diving footage she has shot over the last quarter century. Yes, she is still alive! It was, in fact, on August 22 one hundred years ago that Berta Helene Amalie Riefenstahl was born in Berlin, and she has been directing, editing, or acting in films for three quarters of a century, longer even than the redoubtable Portugese nonagenarian director Manuel de Olivera, and probably longer than anyone else in the history of cinema. Her extraordinary film career has hardly been continuous, of course, but has been as tumultuous as the times in which she lived and as treacherous as the fast political company she kept. Anyone who knows anything about movies is aware that her rapid rise as Hitler's favorite filmmaker led to her nearly total eclipse when the murderous 'thousand year' Nazi regime crashed after a mere twelve years.

The last half century of her life, in truth, has often been hard for this woman of outsized ambitions. It has been marked by failed film projects and unwelcome bouts of public attention to her past. But as Riefenstahl entered her eighth decade, she gradually shed her pariah status while transforming herself into a still photographer and memoirist of note. Meanwhile, cinematic connoisseurs had already begun to rehabilitate the standing of this self-proclaimed esthete devoted only to the cult of beauty in the 1960s. By the 1970s, they were joined by the group of emerging feminist film critics who looked back wistfully at the work and fate of a female director whose genuine talents and achievements have arguably never been equaled by any woman since. Even Mick Jagger sought her out to take his picture. No wonder that in Germany today the centenarian Riefenstahl, who is almost as old as the cinema itself, has reemerged in the public eye with such a splash amid the hoopla of the pre-birthday publicity campaign fo r her new film's release. To younger, prosperous Germans now two generations removed from World War II and its infamies, she has become a celebrity once again, someone almost chic. Her increasingly shadow former life with its sinister political accents has faded away and no longer intrudes as starkly on the appreciation of her major cinematic masterworks, including the most notorious of them all, Triumph of the Will.

Over the nearly seven decades since it was made, uncounted thousands of words have been written about Riefenstahl's career-defining film that catapulted her into the limelight of Nazi, and, yes, world cinema as well. From the beginning, the debate about it has raged in familiar channels. Was it merely a documentary about the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, as she always insisted? Or were her many critics right in seeing it as a powerful propaganda piece exalting Hitler and his thugs, thereby confirming the judgment of none other than Josef Goebbels who called it "a great cinematic vision of the Fuhrer, here seen for the first time with a forcefulness which has not previously been revealed." Was it, moreover, a formally innovative work of art, a "symphonic whole" as the director herself referred to it, that, according to its partisans at least, transcended its odious political content? Or, to put it bluntly, is it only bombastic, tedious kitsch?

Quite obviously, the film is all of the above. Certainly, no other two hours of celluloid conveys so well the force and glamor of the Nazis' attempts to, in Walter Benjamin's words, "aestheticize politics" through a grandiloquent mise-en-scene of thousands of workers, Hitler Jugend, and SS men marching (or even just standing) in formation. As Riefenstahl has long maintained, however, the participants' every move through the ancient streets and vast stadia of Nuremberg had been orchestrated in advance by Hitler's artistic confidante Albert Speer and his staff long before she arrived on the scene. She merely responded to what was in front of her; hence the film must be seen as a document as, indeed, the film's titles deem it to be. On the other hand, no filmmaker before her, not even any of the Russians, had devised more ingenious solutions to the inherent problems of shaping such a live political spectacle for the cinema. That she had Hitler's complete confidence and backing helped quite a lot. (An early titl e accurately declares that the film was "commissioned by order of the Fuhrer. ")

She was permitted to insert her sixteen cameramen, most notably the crackerjack Sepp Allgier, sixteen assistant operators, and sixteen newsreel cameramen, not to mention twenty-two chauffeured limousines and support staff, into the space of the events in ways that had rarely, if ever, been tried before. Unprecedentedly mobile and seemingly ubiquitous, her cameras were allowed to perch behind Hitler's ear as he rode in his Mercedes past the large crowds of ecstatic devotees lining the streets of the old city, creating a minitravelogue from Hitler's point of view for those unable to attend. Another lens peered down at the assembled masses from the lofty heights of flag poles in a tiny, experimental elevator. Ever alert to the potential for boredom when politicians speak, Riefenstahl devised a way for a camera to circle around the massive stone podium from which Hitler spoke, capturing his histrionics in ways that later filmmakers would reinvent to record the antics of rock stars.

Whatever she later said, at the time she freely admitted that she consciously sought to go beyond a mere documentary record to create a tendentious political message which she paraphrased as "a heroic film of facts-in the will of the Fuhrer his people triumphs." Indeed, as Goebbels noted in the passage cited earlier, the film was cannily constructed to solidify the image of a man still somewhat vague in the average German's mental universe, an image that would successfully ingratiate him in their hearts and minds. The illusion of intimacy with Hitler she developed through point-of-view cutting between him and his fans no doubt dramatically amplified Hitler's appeal. No politician would again appear so strangely close, so familiar to his audience, until Leacock and Pennebaker profiled JFK in Primary.

Over the years, Riefenstahl has perfected the art of selective recall and coupled it with often specious arguments to shield her from accusations of complicity with the Nazis' crimes. For example, she has always argued that she cannot have been a propagandist since she did not insert any intertitles in Triumph to editorialize about the meaning of what she showed. This is, of course, true; there are no intertitles (although a scroll of highly tendentious statements prefaces the film). But the comment also betrays her calculatedly false modesty. It naively understates the power of her visual strategies to control the audience's gaze and thereby to endorse and--perhaps even more important--to impart a positive emotional tone to the Nazified masses and leaders she portrayed so vividly. She also conveniently overlooks how Herbert Windt's deft musical score, combining selections from Wagner's Rienzi overture, the "Badenweiller March" (Hitler's well-known personal favorite) and the "Horst Wessel Lied," underscored the hardly subtle ideological messages that the Nazis wished to impart. It is not entirely coincidental, after all, that Minister of Propaganda Goebbels personally awarded her the prize for the best German film of 1935.

Interestingly, Riefenstahl, who had dreamed of bringing Kleist's Penthesilca to the screen, derived her optical esthetics from the heroic 'new vision' that animated leftist-oriented German (and Russian) photography and cinematography during the 1920s. Like Rodchenko and Vertov in the Soviet Union or Moholy-Nagy in Weimar Germany, she exploited the power of high-angle and overhead views to reorient a viewer's spatial perception by regrouping objects in the camera's field of vision. The influence of the avant-garde on her work appears most strikingly in the stunning aerial views of old Nuremberg and the tent city where the assembled faithful slept, or, somewhat later, when marching SS groups are seen from directly overhead. But in fairness to her artistic precursors, it must be said that hers is a derivative, degraded version of their visual techniques, closer in spirit to the cult of what Siegfried Kracauer called the "mass ornament" in other realms of popular culture, including the famous 'Tiller girl' perfo rmances in Germany and Busby Berkeley's dance numbers in his Thirties musicals. In her hands, the strategies of ardently revolutionary artists pirouette on the edge of kitsch. More often than not, she forces them to plunge headlong into reactionary bathos.

The same might be said of her adaptation of once innovative narrative formats such as the 'city symphony.' Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, Jean Vigo's A Propos de Nice and preeminently Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera were motivated by their grandly synthetic, admiring but critical embrace of the urban scene from dawn to dusk and on into the night. Riefenstahl adapts some of their familiar moves for the early segments of Triumph of the Will, but only to establish a simple chronological framework for the party-sponsored motorcades, assemblies, speeches, and torchlight parades that dominated the distinctly unmodern Bavarian city for nearly a week. Along the way, viewers are treated to episodes brimming with local color: a file of marching peasants in traditional costumes present a basket of harvest goodies to the Fiihrer; rows of cheering women in various states of heightened arousal, who uncannily resemble a later generation of Elvis or Beatles devotees, strain for a better view of their idol. On e can only imagine the appeal that the homoerotic camaraderie of the Hitler youth, seen washing up and carousing in various violent games, must have had for a sentimental and highly repressed contemporary German public. Presumably, such scenes as well as the more formally staged ceremonies reassured the party faithful as well as a horde of still uncommitted citizens that all was right in Germany with National Socialists in control, despite the bloody purge (the so-called 'Night of the Long Knives') of former Nazi bigwigs like Ernst Rohm in late June and the death of President Hindenburg barely a month before the rally began.

Throughout, Riefenstahl's editing controls the mood and rhythm of the eighteen major sections and the many subordinate sequences. She wisely cuts the bombastic speeches of party officials down to stirring, at times curiously anodyne, soundbites. She even dares to reduce visual fatigue by cutting away from loving close-ups of Hitler's frenzied gaze while in the grip of his oratory to record the rapt attention of individual audience members. Presumably, she felt that doing so would enhance the power of his lines, now uttered off-screen, such as "It is our wish and will that this State and Reich will endure for millenniums to come."

That the Hitler Reich lasted only a fraction of a millennium proved detrimental for the future of a director who had done more than anyone else to shape his positive image as a statesman and heroic father figure. True, the Allied commission that examined Riefenstahl's case after the war concluded that "no political activity that supported the regime warrants punishment," and it classified her only as a Nazi fellow traveler. Armed with this judgment (what the Germans mockingly called a Persilschein, after the name of a popular laundry product), she probably should have been able to restart her film career, much as the odious Veit Harlan, director of Jud Suss, among other anti-Semitic masterworks, did during the 1950s. That she could not suggests that she had been singled out by her compatriots as a symbolic scapegoat for the deeds of a criminal state they all now preferred to forget. I suspect that, rightly or wrongly, Triumph of the Will became the fiery angel barring her from a return to the ailing postwar German film industry, which might have made real use of her talents. Throughout all her later travails, it should be pointed out, this ultimate Nazi insider has never ceased protesting her ignorance of Nazi crimes, proclaiming her innocence of any complicity in bolstering the regime, and lamenting her lost opportunities.

The packaging of this latest version of Triumph of the Will to appear in domestic format says little more than that this edition is a digital transfer from a 35mm fine grain print. Indeed, it does look very splendid on my TV screen, and the same can be said for the rarely seen short film Day of Freedom, a 1935 sequel to Triumph of the Will that Riefenstahl filmed to placate the disgruntled brass of the German Wehrmacht. (They felt they did not get enough air time in the earlier film.) Despite some occasional slips, the newly translated subtitles are accurate and legible. It remains unclear to me, however, just how complete this version is. The film was originally to have included an introductory section shot by Walter Ruttmann that recounted the history of the Nazi's struggle for political power. This material, once lasting almost a third of the entire work, was apparently abandoned shortly after the film went into general release in 1935. Some years ago, an outfit calling itself Celluloid Chronicles Home Vi deo advertised a "complete" 133-minute print and their tape included about thirty minutes of outtakes as well. The new Synapse edition cannot make such a claim. Clearly, however, both of these editions are superior to the severely truncated forty-five-minute digest, prepared in the late 1930s by none other than Luis Bunuel, which has long been the version seen by most students.

The Synapse edition adds a running commentary by Professor Anthony R. Santoro. Unfortunately, he rarely provides significant perspective either on the cinematic strategies Riefenstahl used or the political context in which she operated. Rather, he is prone to excited recognitions or redundant descriptions ("There's Goebbels and Ley!" or "There are the roofs of Nuremberg!") as well as banal generalities ("Riefenstahl was really an innovator in the use of the camera and camera angles"). But along the way, he provides some interesting thumbnail sketches of lesser known Nazi leaders we see on screen, including one Jakob Grimmiger, who, as SS Standartenfuthrer, had a permanent job lugging around to all the Nazi Party celebrations the blood-stained Nazi battle flag used in the failed 1923 putsch. You may be interested to know that he died at the age of seventy-seven in 1969, after a career as a city-council member somewhere in Bavaria. Then again, you may not.

Stuart Liebman is Chair of the Media Studies Department at Queens College and he is currently working on a book about the representation of the Holocaust in cinema