Schneider Steven - Steven jay schneider стр 48.

Cast: Adolf Hitler, Max Amann, Martin Bormann, Walter Buch, Walter Darré, Otto Dietrich, Sepp Dietrich, Hans Frank, Josef Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Jakob Grimminger, Rudolf Hess, Reinhard Heydrich, Konstantin Hierl, Heinrich Himmler, Robert Ley, Viktor Lutze, Erich

Raeder, Fritz Reinhardt, Alfred Rosenberg, Hjalmar Schacht, Franz Xaver Schwarz, Julius Streicher, Fritz Todt, Werner von Blomberg, Hans Georg von Friedeburg, Gerd von Rundstedt, Baldur von Schirach, Adolf Wagner

It was Adolf Hitler himself who commissioned dancer and actress turned filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl to make a grand, celebratory record of the sixth Nazi Party Congress held in September 1934 at Nurembergthe medieval Bavarian showplace where, with deliberate irony, a court of Allied victors would convene in 194546 to judge war criminals of the Third Reich. Hitler also gave her the films title. Riefenstahl was a careerist as well as a creative talent and, her postwar protestations to the contrary, there is evidence (not only here but in her photo-journalistic coverage of the invasion of Poland and in her later use of concentration camp inmates as extras) that her enthusiasm for fascism was crafty if, debatably, naive. But any discussion of motivation cannot diminish the devastating impact of Triumph of the Will. This is an awesome spectacle, vulgar but mythic, and technically an overwhelming, assured accomplishment.

Riefenstahl had all the resources a documentarian could desire. Nuremberg was as carefully prepared as if it were a massive soundstage housing a series of elaborate sets. She ordered new bridges and accesses constructed in the city center, and lighting towers and camera tracks built, all of which was carried out to her exact specifications. Deploying 30 cameras and 120 technicians, Riefenstahl brilliantly fulfilled her Nuremberg briefto glorify the might of the Nazi state and tighten its grip on the hearts and minds of Germanywith breathtaking imagery on a spectacularly sinister, epic scale, creating an infamous masterpiece still regarded as the most powerful propaganda film ever made.

The documentarywhich after six months editing into a carefully selected two hours represents about three percent of the footage shotopens with Hitlers arrival by plane, his descent from the clouds given the character of a Wagnerian heros entrance, with his head in a halo of sunlight. The Führers acclamation and adulation by saluting multitudes is central to this presentation of his political philosophy as world theater, lending him a disturbing charisma despite the posturing and the stridency so familiar from news archives, historical drama, and masterly parody, like Charlie Chaplins in The Great Dictator (1940). Setting him off are a kaleidoscope of astonishing images: vigorous young men disporting, torchlit processions, swastikabrandishing ritual, militaristic display, thousands of well-drilled children pledging themselves to the Movement, and a continuous folkloric parade concluding with the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel Song.

Triumph of the Will is an unsubtle but innovative demonstration of technique, from ingenious camera angles and striking composition to the relentless pace of its canny editing. This is an enduringly fascinating, chilling testament to the power of film to impose a false spiritual aesthetic on the overtly political. After World War II, Riefenstahl was imprisoned for four years by the Americans and the French for her role in the Nazi propaganda machine over her insistence that she made pure historical film, film vérité. Repeated attempts to revive her career were unsuccessful. Later she discovered underwater photography and demonstrated she still had an artists eye. AE

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1930s

LATALANTE (1934)

Heretical as it may be to say in these enlightened times of gender politics, but Jean Vigos masterpiece LAtalante is the cinemas greatest ode to heterosexual passion. One simply cannot enter into its rapturous poetry without surrendering to the

romantic series of oppositions between the sexes, comparisons rigorously installed at every possible levelspiritual, physical, erotic, and emotional. It is only this thrill of absolute otherness that can allow both the agony of nonalignment between lovers and the sublimity of their eventual fusion.

This is far removed from the typical romance of the time. As Vigo once memorably complained, it takes two pairs of lips and three thousand meters of film to come together, and almost as many to come unstuck again. Like Stanley Kubricks Eyes Wide Shut (1999), LAtalante casts the immortal love story within an adventure tale: man (Jean Dasté as Jean) the seafaring adventurer, woman (Dita Parlo as Juliette) the city-craving settler. The seductive temptations and drifts that temporarily split them up are forecast in a charged moment of almost metaphysical agony: In thick fog, Jean stumbles blindly over the boats barge until he finds his bride and envelops her in an embrace at once angry and relieved, inspiring them instantly to head below deck to make love.