1935, 120 minutes
As much as I find propaganda distasteful, it does constitute a part of the religious complex and must be examined in pursuit of an understanding of society.
Triumph of the Will is a 1935 propaganda film commissioned by Hitler to commemorate the domestic initiatives that were essentially the counterpart of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The spirit seemed to me very feminine, collective, and at odds with the masculine mindset. This is a necessary aspect of modern to postmodern groupthink, to include the female mind as hers is the one with the hen pecking instinct.
The film features speeches, mostly by Hitler’s underlings, in which they say things that would be thought perfectly truthful and good if anyone else said them. The ceremonialism had a certain stark, ancient, sentimentality. Below are some outtakes from Hitler’s pretty level-headed speeches.
“Neither class or caste”
-to the Hitler Youth
“Physical Labor will no longer be a divisive concept.”
-to the Labor Service
“Our God, The God that created Our People”
-at SS and SA rally
This was a garden like ideal of life promoted by the tyrant who said, “We want this people to be peace-loving and strong.”
The most willful aspect of this uniformed vision of labor-based paradise was its naïvete. Oswald Spengler had warned of this ‘castles in the clouds’ mindset two years earlier in The Hour of Decision.
The torch that would burn the world was being soaked in the kerosene of dreams.
On the surface, however, all of the acts and words of these Nazis, if said by Mandela, or Obama, could be regarded as worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize today, a wondrous example of the seductive quality of groupthink.
The aspect of the film that is pertinent to this project is the belief in a genetic God as an ancestral spirit or tribal generator, along the lines of the Hebrew Yahweh. This speaks to the idea of a blood memory, as does Hitler’s assurance to the youth that his generation just carried the torch of the people that would be passed on through them.
I view the men giving these speeches as evil. However, I find them to be honorable and superior to the politicians that speak to us today, who insist that they are not engaging in propaganda, and thus insure that their every word is a lie. These Nazis openly declare that they were engaging in thought-molding propaganda, where our masters deny this same truth. I attribute the difference, in part, to a belief in a collective genetic-based spirit, where the postmodern speaker holds nothing sacred.
Dude, I was going to tell you about Leni. She got into photography after WWII. I bought one of her photography books by the name of "People of the Kau". Leni wanted to capture unspoilt enclaves of the African Sudan before they disappeared. The male population of the Kau were knife-fighters and their opportunities to procreate were entirely contigent on their fighting prowess. If you were a powerful warrior, the women would choose you as a mate by dancing naked in front of you and eventually placing a leg on your shoulder to indicate that you were desirable. Much like a lap dance, but they actually wanted to sleep with you. Personal beauty was also held in high esteem and they had more words than we do to identify superficial anatomy. However, once you reached the peak of your beauty/vitality, it was customary to don clothes to hide the aging body. So on your next trip to the Sudan to meet the remnants of Kau, don't forget your burka James.:)
That sounds so cool Bart. Thanks for the information.
I did find this film to be appealing to the eye—except for the sweating middle aged men in uniforms giving their speeches.
“Our movement took a grip on cowardly Marxism and from it extracted the meaning of socialism. It also took from the cowardly middle-class parties their nationalism. Throwing both into the cauldron of our way of life there emerged, as clear as a crystal, the synthesis - German National Socialism.”
-Hermann Goering
“If you want to shine like the sun first you have to burn like it.”
- Adolf Hitler