Riefenstahl was not altogether a pleasant woman but one needs to be a little careful in identifying the "crime" she committed that caused the adverse reaction to this film when it appeared in 1954. No guilt attaches to the fact that she used extras from a concentration-camp. In fact this should have been a blessing since they were promised their freedom. Her crime was that of indifference. She evidently took no care to see that the promise was fulfilled and the gypsies concerned nearly all seem to have perished in the camp. She also very foolishly lied about the whole affair when questioned.
Whether this - ugly as it was in the context - was a good reason for ending the career of the finest woman film-maker that has ever lived, I rather doubt. Riefenstahl was really being punished for her earlier pre-war propaganda films, the making of which did not in any way constitute a war-crime or indeed a crime of any sort.
The Triumph of the Will is a remarkable film which has fixed forever the image of Nazi Germany, quite as much for those who hate it as for those who admire it. Olympia (the first part at any rate) is a masterpiece. Strangely neglected is her 1935 Tag der Freiheit –unsere Wehrmacht, a film not at all appreciated by the Nazi party that commissioned it. It is an extraordinary premonitory vision of modern warfare (no country had yet engaged in such strategic bombing when it was made) where the perpetrators, the Nazi leadership isolated and bemused on their platform and swathed in encircling smoke, seem to have lost all control of the terror that they have unleashed. As a film intended to be a simple account of a military exercise, it is breath-taking in its scope.
Her fiction films are not her finest work. The photography is excellent. Riefenstahl learnt enormously from her work with the father of the "mountain film", Arnold Fanck and his expert team of cinematographers and Albert Benitz, who films this, had worked with Fanck in 1926-1927 and with mountaineer Luis Trenker in 1931 (Bergen in Flammen)and would work on Lang's final "Dr Mabuse" film in 1962 (although it is true that this is far inferior to the two silent films). It must have seemed old-fashioned in 1954 but is a wonderful reminder of a high cinematographic art fallen into neglect. The reviewer who describes it as a mix of "silent" and "talkie' is not wrong - this was precisely the intended effect of many of the great European films of the thirties and produced some of the greatest classics of the cinema.
The fantasy/allegory legendfilm style of both Der Blaue Licht and Tiefland can be a bit bit trying but really works not to badly here. The two parallel struggles with wolves, if one can put that way, are excellently realised. But the pastoral romance is difficult to take and one misses the cold, detached glare of the great documentaries.
To her credit, Riefenstahl never really attempted to trade on this film to exonerate herself politically. It is not in the last a film of political protest as some modern revisionist critics have attempted to claim (the story is a very traditional romantic melodrama) but it is true, for what it is worth, that its general tendency is quite clearly anti-totalitarian.
It remains a worthy film - and alas the last - by one of the great directors.
