“This film is great but evil”: the Nazi propaganda movie Roger Ebert awarded four stars
For many obvious reasons, critics aren’t expected to review, analyse, and offer insight into Nazi propaganda films. Roger Ebert still did it, though, and as you’d expect, separating the artist and their art from the underlying sentiments created a sense of conflict.
That begs the question as to why Ebert decided that 2008 was the ideal time to dive back into a 1935 feature that he hadn’t seen since his days as an undergraduate student, but whatever convinced him to give Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will a second whirl led to one of his most fascinating dissections.
Clearly, he was caught in between two worlds. On one hand, he had to have his professional hat on and watch the picture as someone who earns a living from offering their opinions on the good, the bad, and the ugly of world cinema. On the other hand, it’s still Nazi propaganda at the end of the day, so there’s only so many superlatives anyone can throw at it without leaving a bad taste in your own mouth.
Acknowledging that it’s “by general consent one of the best documentaries ever made,” Ebert wasted little time in confronting the elephant in the room. “We would all have been reflecting the received opinion that the film is great but evil,” he noted. “And that reviewing it raises the question of whether great art can be in service of evil.”
And yet, despite awarding it a full four stars, his reappraisal seemed to contradict itself. “It is one of the most historically important documentaries ever made, yes, but one of the best?” he queried. “It is a terrible film, paralyzingly dull, simpleminded, overlong, and not even manipulative, because it is too clumsy to manipulate anyone but a true believer.”
That doesn’t sound like the sort of film that earns top marks from someone like Ebert, and as it turned out, it was more to do with reputation than content, since he countered that even though Triumph of the Will is “not a great movie in the sense that the other films in this group are great,” it was still great because of “the reputation it has and the shadow it casts.”
Ignoring the fact that it’s a two-hour love letter to the Nuremburg rallies, which is admittedly hard to do since that’s the entire point of its existence, Triumph of the Will was one of the most innovative documentaries of its time, utilising moving cameras, aerial shots, perspective, and cinematography that would inspire and influence the generations to come, albeit without the whole Nazism angle, thankfully.
“That Triumph of the Will is a great propaganda film, there is no doubt, and various surveys have named it so,” Ebert offered. “But I doubt that anyone not already a Nazi could be swayed by it. Being a Nazi, to this film, means being a mindless pawn in thrall to the godlike Hitler.” Again, not really relevant decades after the fact, but he remained intent to separate the artist from their art.
It was an odd thing for a four-star review to contain so many criticisms and indictments of its shortcomings, but then again, Nazi propaganda is hardly the most straightforward thing to examine as a critic, whether you’re Ebert or not.
