Leni Riefenstahl is one of the historical figures who appears in the Brown House, which takes place in 1933, a year before she made a ‘documentary’ of the 1934 Nuremberg rally given the title Triumph of the Will by Adolph Hitler. Rallies were extremely important to Adolph Hitler in gathering fanatics together in a show of strength that would intimidate, and force the much more passive majority of the public to accept the radical Nazi ideas espoused by Hitler in his speeches at the rallies. The Nazi ‘base’ were willing to swallow the idea that Jews were a physically different race rather than just a particular religious group. Along with the deliberate degradation of education to create a more credulous public, by mobilizing his base Hitler could bully better educated people into agreeing with racial ideas which they knew to be false. These stills from the film illustrate how by using selective casting of only fair haired boys she supported the bogus Nazi racial theory that Germans were an athletic, Aryan, Nordic race separate from the Jewish ‘race’ which was described as being dark and swarthy.
The irony is that none of the senior Nazi leadership looked remotely ‘Aryan’. In fact, the appearance of the violently anti-semitic Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (finger in the air) conformed exactly to the bogus Nazi profile of ‘the Jew’. Another irony is that he had a clubfoot, which was the kind go physical ‘deformity’, as the Nazi saw it, which should disqualify a person from having children.
Hitler flattered farmers and factory workers by wrapping an entire mythology around the idea that their connection to country through its soil and to its past through tradition meant that they were truly the heart of the country not the elites doing ‘brain work’. Hitler was elected by weaving together such ideas along with promises about what he would accomplish rather than concrete policy proposals. He promised to restore German pride and make Germany great again.
When Hitler came to power Germans did not want to go to war. In fact they lived in fear of another war, but in support of bogus notions but membership in Nazi youth groups, which in time became compulsory, meant that the entire youth population was in uniform. Exercise Drills were effectively part of a long term preparation for combat readiness for boys, and for girls to become the breeders of the warriors of the future.
Both Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels saw the potential for film as a propaganda tool. What we might call 'disinformation’. Film manipulates an audience, making it sympathetic to one rather than another but pulling pin its heartstrings. It is a process that has nothing to do with intellectual argument.