Triumph of the Will of the People

Sunday, the Saddam-state collapsed as finally as the thousand-year Reich.

by Rod D. Martin
February 4, 2005

It has been almost exactly seventy years since Leni Riefenstahl directed what is still the singular masterpiece of documentary and propaganda filmmaking, Triumph of the Will. Her film glorified Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party at the beginning of their run, at a time when many the world over were speaking hopefully of the “new German renaissance,” and helped convince both Germany and much of the globe that the new world order was and ought to be totalitarian.

There's something about that number seventy. In the Bible it can signify perfection or completion, and it represents the number of years the Jews lived in Babylonian captivity; in our time, it is the approximate number of years allotted to the evil reign of the Soviet Empire, from the October Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And it is more than slightly fitting that seventy is also the number of years from the release of Triumph of the Will not just to Leni Riefenstahl's death, but to the fa…