Translator's Note: Although from the article itself, this is obviously a 0-point movie, but Roger Ebert still gave it four stars, so it is marked as five stars here. In addition, at the end of the article, Roger Ebert commented on the relevant paragraphs in "The Birth of a Nation".
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{★★★★}
…the film is widely regarded as one of the best documentaries of all time.
As I wrote in my 1994 review of Ray Mueller's The Power of the Image: Lenny Riefenstahl, it was, in fact, a better documentary. This sentence is to describe Riefenstahl's 1935 "Triumph of the Will", the film recorded the 1934 Nazi party in Nuremberg held a grand meeting and rally. Others, too, would have agreed with me, and we would all recall the widely accepted notion that this movie is great but evil, and then comment that it raises the question of whether "great art can really serve? The Will of Evil" controversy. Later, when I wrote a review for the racist Birth of a Nation, I mentioned Triumph of the Will again.
But how clear are my memories of Triumph of the Will? I remember watching it when I was in college, and even in 1994 , my recollections are very old and vague, not to mention how great this movie has been over the years All sorts of rants are also superimposed on top of it. Now, I'm rewatching it again and can't believe I've ever praised it. This is certainly one of the most historically significant documentaries of all time, but one of the best? It's a terrible movie, numbingly boring, flat, overly long, and not even "brainwashed" because it's clumsy enough to be brainwashed by anyone but true believers. This "great movie" isn't great because the movies that stand in the same category are great and good, it's great in its reputation and the shadow it casts.
Have you actually seen this movie in recent years? It documents the gathering in Nuremberg in September 1934 of hundreds of Nazi Party members, troops and supporters to be reviewed by Adolf Hitler. Review is the key word here. Large sections of the film consist only of various phalanxes of infantry, cavalry, artillery, and even workers carrying shovels as rifles, walking past Hitler in perfect, stiff formation, with their right hands raised. Tribute to him and be paid back with the same tribute. The film opens with Hitler greeting a phalanx outside and ends with his closing speech for the conference in a hall.
Imagine another movie where hundreds of people gather, another movie where people's attention is also focused on one or a few people on a distant stage, and another movie where it's these few people enjoying the crowd adored movie. There is no doubt that the film is the 1970 rock documentary Woodstock 1969. But consider how that film's director, Michael Wadley, approached this formal challenge. He opens with all the preparations for a big music festival, then turns to the audience who drive, bike, walk, and then come to the place where they eat. He made the man who gave the crowd a portable toilet, Port-O-San Man, a folk hero. He focuses on people sleeping in tents, lying on grass, bathing in running water, and even drenching clouds and rain. He focuses on people covered in shadows or covered in mud. He focuses on the medical problem and then on the dispersing crowd.
In contrast, Riefenstahl's footage completely ignores one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nuremberg rally, which is how it was organized. That's right, here are some overhead shots that show us large tents, lined up with a sort of mathematical precision. But how should the thousands of people eat and drink, how should they prepare their uniforms and weapons, and how should they assemble to start their march through the town? The overhead shots were aimed at a stiff phalanx of thousands of Nazis, not a single missing person, not a single person walking to the touchline. How long do they have to stand before it's their turn to step into the sun? After walking past Hitler, where are they going and what are they going to do? In a way, Riefenstahl tells the most uninteresting part of the story.
For the sake of rigor, you do learn a lesson in the zombie-like obedience of the army passing by. Their phalanx is so rigid that they deny their physical emotions. You want to find a smile, or a yawn in the queue, but every face is so determined and serious, even Hitler himself, only once, when the horses have lined up in front of him, does he smile. But what is the film about other than "walking in line"? Soon after the film begins, the film has a series of close-ups aimed at the dryly official Nazi Party officials. Hitler delivered two speeches, but both were surprisingly short, unpolished, and very crude: the Nazis had to "become unequivocally the only ruling party in Germany."
You want to find traces of humanity, but Riefenstahl doesn't care about humanity. Here, individuality is crushed by mass collectiveity. Here are the occasional clips of people smiling or nodding, but mostly no conversation. The movie also never tries to "humanize" Hitler, you can see sweat dripping down his face during his closing speech, but we never see him sweating in previous shots. Could it be that during the part of the army review, he was deliberately posing so that the camera could capture the perfect shot? A crew using 35mm film standing next to his car on the street can be a source of distraction; someone shooting him from a high platform must stand on a boom to keep pace with the scene .
"If you watch the film again today, you'll find that there isn't a single composite shot in it," Riefenstahl defended her film in Mueller's documentary. What does the "synthetic shot" in her mouth mean? We certainly don't think those "walk-through" shots are composited. But what about those worker class shots? A group of people sang in unison about their work in the swamps, in the fields, and in various places. The song was supposed to be for Hitler. At this moment, a roaring voice sounded: "Where are you all from?" So from the small town to the region, different answers sounded in turn. They couldn't have all heard the question, and each response should have been individually crafted.
Unnaturalness is also one of the problems with movies. In the middle of one of Hitler's speeches, he was interrupted exactly six times by "Long live Victory!" as if there was a clapping signal for when they started and when they ended. And we can find throughout the film that there are no scattered or separate "Long Live Victory!" sounds in the background, and there is always only one uniform chorus of cheers. I also looked for a similar situation elsewhere in the film to shed more light on the mechanics of how it was shot. For example, although Riefenstahl used a total of 30 cameras and a shooting team of 150 people, only one camera could be found on the screen from beginning to end; during the outdoor rally, you can see one placed in front of three Nazi flags. The camera on the elevator between the first and second flags casts its shadow right on the second flag. Another shot of a man climbing a pole to get a better view of the queue, she cuts to him, and he salutes with his right hand; I wonder if he doesn't hold both hands. It must have fallen, only to discover that his left foot is not visible in the front and back shots - he is standing on top of something else, no doubt. Plus, one little detail: everyone on screen has a freshly done hairstyle.
Triumph of the Will is a great propaganda film, there's no doubt about it, and all kinds of investigations agree. But I doubt how much of an impact the film will have on ordinary people who are not Nazi supporters. If you're a Nazi supporter, then for this film, you're a no-brainer surrendered to the god-like Hitler. But for Germany at the time, it must have had some sort of persuasive power; despite Hitler's poignant statement that the Nazis would be the only party in Germany, and that its leader would be the only German leader for 1,000 years. At the end of the film, the crowd begins to sing the Nazi national anthem, "Song of Horst Wiesel"; under Nazi law, the first and fourth stanzas of this song require a right-hand salute. We can see a large number of right-hand salutes in "Triumph of the Will", pay attention to Hitler, and every time he pulls his fingers back into the palm of his hand before the salute, there is a sense of satisfaction on his face. What a terrible man. How crazy do so many Germans have to be to support him? But calm down: Within a few years, most of the people in the movies will be dead.
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Griffiths and The Birth of a Nation are no less ignorant than the America that made them, and the film shows us just how racist white Americans could be in 1915, and how racist they could be. while unaware of it. This is worth knowing. Black people have known this for a long, long time, and are painfully witnessing it every day, but The Birth of a Nation proves it in broad daylight, and the film's importance happens to include It is a clear confirmation of this phenomenon. Sadly, the fact that the film is a mirror of its time is one of its values.
To understand The Birth of a Nation, we must first understand the difference between “what kind of intentions do we go to the movie with” and “what kind of experience the movie gives back to us”. All serious moviegoers will one day get to the point where you see movies for their value, not just how you feel about them, Birth of a Nation is not a bad movie because it endorses evil , like Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, it's a great movie that endorses evil. To understand why these films do what they do is to understand many of the essences of cinema, and even to understand evil itself.
But can we really separate the content of the film from its craftsmanship? Gary Wills argues that Griffith's films "raise the same questions as Lenny Riefenstahl's films and Ezra Pound's poems. If art should serve truth and Beauty, how can great art be subordinate to an ideology full of hate?"
For this view to hold, we must assume that art should indeed serve truth and beauty. I wish it were, but there are arts that don't serve either, yet they can still provide us with some kind of reflection on human nature, helping us understand what is good and what is evil. For that matter, The Birth of a Nation deserves to be placed in the above category, given the unshakable fact that it dramatizes and incites racism in America more than any other work of art.
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