Triumph Of The Will Research Articles

Triumph of the Will

The year of high-stakes elections was marked by interstate wars and conflicts – only to show that they are not what will determine the world’s future. What really matters is people’s faith in themselves and their communities amid the irreversibly and nervously changing international environment.

The Man is the Message

The eight-time Academy Award-winning film Gandhi (1982) aims to present the person Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–1948) as a “spokesman for the conscience of all mankind.” More than forty years later, the film still brings to light significant issues regarding the essence of broad moral and political aspirations, the formation and upholding of “civil religion,” and the potential of non-violent political and social actions to prevail in a troubled world. While primarily focusing on the portrayal of Gandhi, the film contrasts and reflects upon the differences and similarities between the markedly different—yet in crucial ways, alike—depictions of civil religion in the 1935 German Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. Both films, as argued here, document uncertainty—Gandhi overtly showcasing it as a “soft” film of civil religious enactment, and Triumph covertly displaying it as a “hard” film of civil religious enactment. Whereas Triumph aimed to present a clear vision of a future devoid of doubt, Gandhi raises queries and leaves audiences uncertain about its message, except for the assertion that the man (Mahatma Gandhi) embodies the message itself.

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

Theopsych: A Psychological Science Primer for Theologians

Biografias em Vertigem: As Trajetórias de Petra Costa e Leni Riefenstahl

The article will discuss the trajectories of young women filmmakers who, with access to the backstage of power, made films about important events in the histories of Germany and Brazil.In 1935 Leni Riefenstahl launches The Triumph of the Will, using her proximity to Nazi leaders and Hitler himself. The same ones who deliver inflammatory speeches captured by the filmmaker applying innovative techniques that made her a reference in the world of cinema. But the World War II provoked a career turn for Riefenstahl, who later tries to hide his involvement with Nazism.In 2020 The Edge of Democracy is nominated for an Oscar for best documentary. The proximity of director Petra Costa to power also helped to highlight her film among others made about the impeachment process of Dilma Rousseff, who gives exclusive testimonies and is captured at intimacy moments by Petra. Intertwining the history of corruption of the construction companies that prospered during the military dictatorship in Brazil with recent events, Petra (granddaughter of a contractor) portrays the growing abyss that divides the country putting its democracy in jeopardy. The title of the film is prophetic, considering events that happened during the Bolsonaro government, which benefited from Dilma’s impeachment.Based on texts by Susan Sontag (Under the Sign of Saturn) and on articles from the Brazilian magazines Veja and Piauí, I will analyze the relationship of the filmmakers with their films and their times. Demonstrating that, despite having opposed political ideologies, their trajectories have several points of mirroring.

Weaponized longing

In this article, by analyzing the memory politics of the nativist Hungarian government, it is argued that instead of some Great Narrative about a Golden Age, a political patchwork is in work here. Instead of glorifying one particular historical period, any element used for the constructions of “Greatness” and “Proudness” is used freely. Then I explain the peculiarities of the Hungarian case: that is, Orbán builds a nativist, anti-European, and anti-enlightenment symbolic universe, whereas Hungary is a member of the EU and even heavily subsidized by it. Afterward, using the foundational text of the regime, I explain how central nostalgia, what in this context I call weaponized longing, is for the Orbán regime. Since there is neither specific political Golden Age nor obvious historic victories, the memory of sports successes becomes relevant constructing the memory of greatness. Therefore, in the next part, I illustrate how Orbán uses the sport to articulate and implement a macho worldview and formulate a nativist discourse on a wide variety of seemingly non-sport-related issues from the essence of modernity to gender roles. Then I explain that sport is not just a tool for Orbán, but in fact, a basic model and metaphor for his politics where “Triumph of the Will” is central. Finally, with the juxtaposition of two seminal institutions, the House of Terror and Cult of Puskás, I demonstrate the memory political endeavors of the regime and some of the built-in contradictions that come with these practices. In this nativist patchwork, the seemingly impossible could be achieved; the darkest times could produce the most glorious elements of history.

Дзига Вертов и Лени Рифеншталь: репрезентация реальности в тоталитарную эпоху

The article examines the aesthetics of Soviet documentary films and German non-fiction and experimental films. It appeared in the wide artistic context of the avant-garde of the 1920s and was radically reworked in the 1930s. The subject of the article is the concept of the documentary in a totalitarian culture and its purpose is to show the transformation of reality in the film art of the 1930s. The article analyses the stylistic and theoretical features of Dziga Vertov’s and Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries. The novelty of the article lies in the author’s appeal to understudied films that embody the totalitarian aesthetics of the era of Stalinism and German Nazism. The author poses a question about the existence of obvious similarities and differences between Russian and German films, which is highly relevant in the light of ongoing scientific discussions about the influence of totalitarian regimes on creative processes. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that, despite the figurative and semantic similarity of individual episodes of the films by Vertov and Riefenstahl, and their common political pathos and interest in capturing images of leaders and their meetings with people on the screen, the directors had different attitudes towards the representation of political and social reality. In Three Songs about Lenin, Lullaby and Three Heroines, Vertov turns to folklore and epic genres, and creates an intertextual cinematic world that includes a wide range of meanings and topics that do not fit into the official Soviet canons. In Triumph of the Will and Olympia, Riefenstahl aestheticizes politics and depicts on the screen the official myth about the state and its citizen, which was inspired by the heroics of antiquity and Wagner’s operas adopted by the official ideology of fascism. Riefenstahl shot a fact with the aim of aestheticizing it, while Vertov gave it a new figurative meaning on the editing table. It is natural that the soviet director’s aesthetics could not coincide with the era: Vertov’s works did not appear on the screen, and he himself was forgotten. Riefenstahl, on the contrary, became the main cinematographer of Hitler’s Germany.

Triumph of the Will: A memorial in film

Despite Hitler’s efforts to transform Berlin into Germania, the capital of the new world he envisioned and which he believed would bear comparison with Ancient Egypt, Babylon, and Rome, there is little in the way of monumental architecture to bear witness to that ambition. Though there is only limited public evidence of Hitler’s architectural hubris present either in stone or steel, the same cannot be said of film. Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece Triumph of the Will (1935) (German: Triumph des Willens) is the most famous propaganda film of all time and a staple of university film schools and secondary schools across the world. At the time of its creation, celluloid motion picture film was a relatively new technology and the documentary format a nascent art form. Nevertheless, it was lauded almost immediately as a visually stunning imagining of the new regime and its leader. Though the film maker was subsequently reviled for her Nazi associations, as an art work her film has retained an almost miasmic aura that justifies continued re-assessment of its standing as a monument to the Nazi regime and the horrors perpetrated in its name.

From medium to meaning. O propagandowych środkach wyrazu w filmie „Triumf woli” Leni Riefenstahl

Podstawowym celem niniejszego artykułu jest określenie najczęściej używanych propagandowych środków wyrazu w filmie Triumf woli Leni Riefenstahl. Tak sformułowany cel badawczy można przedstawić w postaci następujących pytań: Jakie propagandowe środki wyrazu zostały zastosowane w filmie? Za pomocą jakiej symboliki przygotowano przekaz propagandowy w filmie Leni Riefenstahl? Odpowiedzi na te pytania zostały zinterpretowane w kontekście teorii Stewarta M. Hoovera from medium to meaning. Autor zwrócił w niej uwagę na istotne pytanie: Na ile media przekazują znaczenie? Na ile nadają zjawisku znaczenie? Analogicznie do tego można zadać pytanie – w odniesieniu do filmu Riefenstahl: Na ile jej film mógł nadać znaczenie nazistowskiej propagandzie? Jaką rolę kino odgrywało w polityce Adolfa Hitlera w popularyzacji znaczenia jego poglądów? Artykuł ma charakter przeglądowy. Pośrednim jego celem jest zwrócenie uwagi na przekaz znaczenia w komunikacji audiowizualnej.

Triumph of the Will? Assessing the Right to Public Participation in Kenya’s Constitutional Framework and Design

Government, in the most basic of terms, is a group of individuals managing affairs of the state on the behalf and behest of the citizenry. They hold power to make the laws, interpret them and subsequently implement them. In the dispensation of their duties, should the public then participate in the running of the state? This paper shall seek to first define and justify for public participation in governance, and appraise its position in Kenya’s Constitutional dispensation. The paper shall conclude with an analysis on how the right to public participation should be achieved.

The Face of Germany, 1918–1945: Ufa Personnel, Censorship, and Propaganda

The Face of Germany, 1918–1945: Ufa Personnel, Censorship, and Propaganda Heather Oriana Petrocelli Toward the end of World War I (WWI), with the Allied powers’ anti-German propaganda at its zenith, Generalquartiermeister Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff considered the German propaganda efforts to be too fragmented to be effective and felt the need to create a film production company that would be controlled directly by the German armed forces.1 Thus, at the end of 1916, Bild-und Filmamt (Bufa) was created as an umbrella organization for all government and military film, as well as press agencies, to promote the German war effort.2 Bufa mainly produced short educational, propaganda, and entertainment films for both the front line and the reserve forces.3 Still, General Ludendorff, wanting to move beyond the mechanism of Bufa, wrote a letter to the Imperial Ministry of War on July 4, 1917, that would lay the foundation for the consolidation of the German film industry and the formation of a larger film conglomerate, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (Ufa): The war has demonstrated the exceptional power of photography and film as a means of educating and influencing. Unfortunately, our enemies have thoroughly exploited their lead in this area, causing us severe damage. In the further course of the war, film will retain its momentous significance as a political and military means of influence. For this reason, it is essential for the positive outcome of the war that film exert the strongest influence in all places where German influence is still possible. Thus, we must examine 1. how this influence can be achieved and 2. what means are to be used. On 1. In film, the bolstering of German propaganda efforts must extend a. to the influencing of the film supply in neutral third countries and b. to the unification of the German film industry, setting broad, uniform targets for the systematic, energetic influencing of the masses in the interest of the state.4 [End Page 54] Heeding General Ludendorffs call, the government officially formed Ufa on December 18, 1917.5 Through this deliberate process of consolidation and mergers, Ufa became Germany’s first vertically integrated film conglomerate—controlling production, distribution, and exhibition—as well as the largest German film studio and eventually the largest studio in Europe (second only to Hollywood). A “cultural production company of historically unprecedented magnitude,”6 Ufa produced a renowned canon—including films such as The Golem (1920), The Last Laugh (1924), Metropolis (1927), and Triumph of the Will (1935). Click for larger view View full resolution Erich Ludendorff and Adolph Hitler, 1924 Moreover, in spite of dramatic regime changes from 1918–1945, during three distinct German political periods—from the Kaiserreich (a monarchy), to the Weimar Republic (a parliamentary democratic republic), to the Third Reich (a totalitarian dictatorship)—Ufa maintained an extraordinary degree of continuity in its personnel, its censorship regulations, and, most notably, its propaganda efforts (from its escapist films to its overtly nationalistic material). Given the pervasiveness of film, the force of which Ludendorff had accurately assessed, Ufa was perhaps the most consistent cultural representation of Germany for 27 years. Ufa was both a cultural institution and a modem industry, constantly surrounded by the “force field made up of capital, politics, film, and the public.”7 If its policies and products often reflected the uneasiness of these politically transitional eras occurring in just a quarter of a century, the studio nonetheless adapted quickly and energetically to the shifting political pressures (producing almost all of its filmic corpus during the Weimar and Nazi eras). Germany’s social and political landscapes fundamentally changed at the end of WWI. The nation had been unified for less than fifty years when the end of WWI brought about the abolishment of the Kaiserreich monarchy, due to the abdication and subsequent flight of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Germany’s defeat at the end of WWI shocked the German public because the nationalistic propaganda, from sources including Bufa films, had led the vast majority of the German public to believe that Germany was winning the war.8 In addition to the shock of defeat, the Treaty of Versailles caused widespread humiliation among Germans, which spurred a palpable...

‘The greatest love stories on Earth?’: the ethics of community in social documentaries

ABSTRACT In the documentary Occupy Love (2012), the filmmaker proposes social movements can be love stories. Taking the filmmaker’s claim seriously, this article questions whether social documentaries can be understood as love stories and, if so, how different formations of love in documentary shape the communities they produce. Looking at three key examples, Triumph of the Will (1935), Roger & Me (1989), and Occupy Love, this article uses the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy to analyze the different types of communities and loving attachments engendered by each film. Taking the view that not all documentary love stories are ethical, it demonstrates how some documentaries subvert the ethics of community by reinforcing neoliberal individualism, while others violently eradicate difference in their drive toward total communion. Finally, some documentaries render the community ‘inoperable’ by illustrating the collective as a network of heterogeneous individuals who are nevertheless committed to a shared ethos. In the final analysis, all three documentaries raise questions about the possibilities and problems associated with thinking community through documentary.

Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein

Reviewed by: Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein Daniel H. Magilow Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany. By Valerie Weinstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Pp. 296 + 20 b/w illustrations. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0253040701. While lay audiences associate the cinema of Nazi Germany with its most overtly nationalistic and antisemitic films—think of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Fritz Hippler's The Eternal Jew (1940)—scholars of this dark chapter of German mass culture have long recognized that a more complete understanding means looking past the most tendentious productions of Goebbels's propaganda ministry. Pioneering scholarship by Eric Rentschler, Linda Schulte-Sasse, Sabine Hake, and others has demonstrated that relatively few films made in Nazi Germany wore their Jew hatred on their proverbial sleeves. Most that did tended to flop at the box office anyway. (Veit Harlan's Jew Süss [1940] was a notable exception). Because overt antisemitism characterizes only a few of the film comedies that comprised 48 percent of the 1,094 films produced in Germany between 1933 and 1945, many have maintained reputations as politically innocuous. Some have even become cult hits. Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944) inspires audience participation rituals akin to those at screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room. Münchhausen (1943) inspired Terry Gilliam's 1988 remake and is periodically screened on Turner Classic Movies. But as Valerie Weinstein convincingly argues in Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, comedies may not have expressed antisemitism as conspicuously as other kinds of films, but they were still instrumental in normalizing and legitimizing it. Weinstein's work productively erodes the barriers between reified categories like "propaganda" and "entertainment" and the naive and dangerous commonplace that Nazi Germany's lighter fare is apolitical. Her theoretical framework for reading these comedies attends to what she terms their "inferential antisemitism." Unlike the [End Page 420] conspicuous anti-Jewish vitriol in The Eternal Jew, Jew Süss, and The Rothschilds, inferential antisemitism "operates below the level of articulation" as an "insidious mode of representing Jewish difference" (14). In Weinstein's paraphrase of historian Lisa Silverman, Jewish difference is a conceptual model for understanding how the coding of certain discourses as Jewish creates a context whereby "both Jews and non-Jews shape ideals of the 'Jewish' and 'non-Jewish'" (13). In Nazi film comedies, inferential antisemitism manifested itself in "innuendos, gaps, and displacements," such as the rejection of irony, fast-paced repartee, and other "Jewish" strategies termed "wit," as opposed to genuine German "humor." Inferential antisemitism made film comedies into weapons of mass ideological destruction. They were predicated on ideas about Jewishness and Germanness that were offered as axiomatic and beyond critique, thereby reinforcing them as common sense. In the pre-televisual media environment of Nazi Germany, film's role in such subliminal ideological conditioning was wide-reaching. Comedies contributed substantially to the project of using film to form a unified people's racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) out of the filmgoers who accounted for over a billion visits to the cinema in 1943. After an introduction that effectively lays out the book's main argument, Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany first turns to Nazi theoretical works on Jews, humor, and the film industry, particularly writings that claimed Jews had contaminated and commercialized German film. This discussion then analyzes how the film trade press translated these ideas in their "reviews" of films—to the extent genuine film reviewing even existed. Implicitly and explicitly, the film trade press "regularly maligned common comic strategies coded as Jewish, including wit, irony, intellectualism, exaggerated physicality, rapid rhythm, and superficial, rote comicalness" (45). The next six chronologically arranged chapters offer close readings of the strategies of film comedies, beginning with the overt antisemitism of early films such as Die Blume von Hawaii (1933) and Nur nicht weich werden, Susanne! (1935). Additional chapters unpack underexamined works like Wenn wir alle Engel wären (1936), while the films April! April! (1935) and Donogoo Tonka (1936) offer a "case study in how stock characters and disciplinary humor can result in inferential antisemitism" (155). A chapter on the Verwechslungskomödie (mistaken-identity comedy) Robert...

Hitler and Film: The Führer’s Hidden Passion by Bill Niven

MLR, .,   have started a little more from that pole. is feature enables great writing always to be in two places at the same time. R I A H R Hitler and Film: e Führer’s Hidden Passion. By B N. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. . xi+ pp. £.. ISBN ––– –. Written by Bill Niven, a British historian known for his research on Germany’s dif- ficult past, Hitler and Film is part of a growing trend at university presses to publish books aimed at a general readership. Like Ben Urwand’s e Collaboration: Hollywood ’s Pact with Hitler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Harvard University Press, ), this most recent contribution feeds the unending fascination with Nazi cinema as both the ultimate other of classical Hollywood and the most extreme example of the politicization of film. Aer years of ideology critical studies, film theoretical analyses, and Cultural Studies readings, both books also contribute to a renewed interest in the role of individuals, whether studio bosses or Fascist dictators, in controlling all aspects of film production and reception. Hitler and Film will be a satisfying read for history buffs and film fans interested in the ird Reich. e book is written in a fluid, highly readable style and provides a vivid account of the personal and political ambitions that propelled Hitler to take an intense interest in film as a technology of mass entertainment and a form of political indoctrination. ere are many details involving Hitler’s film-viewing habits, his heated arguments with Goebbels over films in production, and his alternately obsequious and menacing behaviour towards film actresses. Aside from drawing extensively on archival sources from the Bundesarchiv, Niven makes effective use of the numerous memoirs written by Ufa stars trying to justify their professional choices and to profit from the widespread fascination with what is oen described as the first media dictatorship. Hitler’s comments about individual films (e.g. ‘good’, ‘bad’) reveal him as an ardent film fan—but one with surprisingly ordinary tastes and limited powers of discernment. His interventions in ongoing film productions and his interactions with celebrities requesting special treatment confirm the conclusion reached by countless biographies of Hitler, namely, that the Führer enjoyed exercising control over all things major and minor. However, in what ways his decisions shaped a national film culture defined as much by its hierarchical power structure and ideological objectives as by the opportunism, pragmatism, and mediocrity of those working under these conditions remains an open question. Niven introduces the main story of his book by reconstructing Hitler’s intense love of film through the daily screenings at the Berghof and his repeated clashes with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. e chapters on Leni Riefenstahl, from her first party rally films to Triumph of the Will () and Olympia (), cover familiar ground explored in numerous monographs on (or by) Riefenstahl on her  Reviews life and work. Subsequent chapters document the public relations efforts surrounding Hitler’s appearances at film premieres, his representation in wartime newsreels, and his extensive socializing with celebrities at official functions and society events. Niven rightly highlights the difference between the pre-war and war years. Not only did Hitler become closely involved in the approval process for wartime newsreels and anti-Semitic films such as Jew Süss () and e Eternal Jew (); together with Goebbels, he also created the List of the Divinely Gied that protected film professionals from being sent to the front. Significantly, Hitler’s growing need for shaping the image of Nazi Germany for posterity coincided with concerted efforts to minimize his own film appearances—and conceal his Parkinson’s disease. For scholars of German cinema and media and historians working on the ird Reich, this book does not offer much new information or interpretation. Niven does not engage with the existing scholarship, whether on film propaganda (i.e. newsreels , state-commissioned films) or the kind of mainstream cinema that has inspired numerous studies on studio histories, film genres, and the star phenomenon. As a result, opportunities for deeper engagement are missed: how the kind of top-down approach chosen by Niven complicates...

Kreowanie rzeczywistości w filmach dokumentalnych. Kazsus Leni (Helene Amalie Berthy) Riefenstahl na podstawie produkcji Triumf woli i Olympia

The aim of this article is to present the biography of a film director- L. Riefenstahl, with an emphasis on her propaganda documentary works by the example of two documentaries: “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia”. The thesis stated by the authors of this article is about creating reality by L. Riefenstahl. The authors present the propaganda techniques used by the director in her documentaries. The authors base this work on the analysis of audiovisual productions, historical method and finally- deduction. L. Riefenstahl was the artist with a great experience. As the director, not only was she innovative and unconventional, but also she was able to use and transfer her experience gained on other fields of her own life onto audiovisual productions. Therefore, the critics value Riefenstahl’s works due to their innovatory character and technical nuances. Although L. Riefenstahl is one of the most talented documentary directors, still, vast majority of her films were vile propaganda at the service of the 3rd Reich. Worshipping Hitler, love of symbols and faith in NSDAP is highly visible in Riefenstahl’s works.

A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada by Benjamin Authers

Reviewed by: A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada by Benjamin Authers Jon Kertzer Benjamin Authers. A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada. University of Toronto Press, 2016. 192 pp. $27.95. The word "rights" is a semantic swamp. It designates a range of social sanctions from the universal (human rights), to the inspirational (right to life, liberty, and security), to the practical (adult residents' right to vote in a municipal election). Rights have limits and compete for priority. Some exist by being exercised (right to vote), others may be forfeited if used irresponsibly (right to drive a car), and the word is used metaphorically to extend the scope of responsibility (animals have rights only when people respect them). Benjamin Authers stays afloat in this swamp by focusing on how English-Canadian novels written in light of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) stage a series of contests between forensic and fictional needs: 1. Law is conservative (respecting precedent, tradition, "original" intention), whereas unprecedented literary forms may serve a transgressive poetic. 2. Artistic licence flouts the competing authorities of legality and morality. Vicious laws (apartheid) are not only legitimate [End Page 192] if properly enacted but can be aesthetically exciting (Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will). 3. The Enlightenment legacy proclaims universal rights yet allows exceptions (women, aliens, "enemy non-combatants") and tolerates privileges based on class, race, or wealth. 4. Classic liberal ideology must reconcile individual rights free from state interference (J.S. Mill's account of liberty) with the conformity imposed by nationalism ("Canadian values") or by ethnic communities, which saturate individual identity. Authers does not claim to resolve these contests, nor does he endorse the easy dialectic whereby literature humanizes law, while law gives judicial fibre to literature. Instead, he shows that any fashioning of identity based on rights is intrinsically political and therefore open to dispute. Rights may be revered as "more than law" (10, citing Michael Ignatieff), but no matter how universal, natural, or God-given, they can only thrive within a jurisdiction that articulates the individuality they protect. In his introduction, Authers documents how rights have officially been proclaimed essential to "Canada's distinctive rights identity" (13). This noble ideology he treats skeptically by investigating how it is applied inconsistently in legal judgments and disputed in the novels examined. Ultimately, his subject is unruliness—political, judicial, textual—as revealed by the "troubling twinning" (71) of law and literature. Both are concerned with making and breaking rules, but whereas the former promises closure through rectifi-cation, the latter is harder to pacify. Legal and literary forms sometimes offend, sometimes befriend each other, in each case generating what Authers variously calls ambivalence, aberration, or inadequacy: "an excess of meanings, a surfeit of consequences" (103). There is always something that eludes legal or poetic discipline, yet is essential to both. To aid his analysis, he summons two agents of disclosure. First is the painful recognition that rights become most salient when violated. Even if we cannot explain precisely how rights function, we suffer when they are infringed. This drama offers two literary possibilities. Novels may expose our failure to respect rights that continue to provide a valid standard of correction, in which case "rights themselves remain the privileged way of determining fictional and legal meaning" (27). Or more distressing, novels may expose rights, no matter how formulated, as inherently problematic. With the exception of Indigenous authors, Canadian novelists usually prefer the former but allow a vigilant reader like Authers to detect [End Page 193] the latter. Applying "a suspicious legal hermeneutics" (84), he reads legal and fictional texts both with and against their grain, aided by his second critical agent: a "strange temporality" (26) arising from the performative nature of founding legal documents like the Charter. When it declares that Canada is a multicultural nation based on rights, it thereby creates the conditions it affirms. It does so by invoking Canada's legal heritage, which endures because the Charter says it does; by proclaiming our duty to maintain that proud legacy; and by projecting its aspirations into the future, since ideals always beckon from afar. In response, Authers detects other "temporal rhetorics...

Clouds: The Relation of Terror and Terrorism to Aesthetics


 The article discusses the relation of terror, terrorism and aesthetics in a historical context that seems far too wide: through an inclusion of a historical past that the experience of 9/11 seems to differentiate itself from. The paper starts of comparing the clouds around Hitler’s plane in Leni Riefenstahl’s film The Triumph of the Will (1934) and the clouds of dust in the place of the destroyed Twin Towers of NYC on September 11, 2001. The two images provide a basis for discussing the relations of terror, terrorism, and aesthetics.

Hitler At Home by Despina Stratigakos

Reviewed by: Hitler At Home by Despina Stratigakos Lynn Parrish Hitler At Home By Despina Stratigakos. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. ix + 373 pp. In Hitler at Home, Despina Stratigakos chronicles the production of Adolf Hitler’s domesticity. This carefully constructed identity was intended to serve as the private counterpart to the public persona already established through the propagandistic works of, most notably, Leni Riefenstahl. While Riefenstahl had before her a preexisting monumental built environment in which to record her subject and his adoring legions, the same cannot be said with regard to Hitler’s domesticity. Stratigakos seeks to illuminate the process involved in crafting an idealized private persona for Hitler. To do this, she highlights the efforts of those responsible, namely, his long-time interior designer, Gerdy Troost, and his official photographer, Heinrich Hoffman. Through the combined efforts of Troost and Hoffman, a new domesticity was fabricated for Adolf Hitler, one that was in direct contrast to the very public identity of Nazi statesman created through the works of Riefenstahl. This “private Hitler” created by Troost and Hoffman was featured in a more subtle propaganda [End Page 112] campaign directed toward the German people, but also toward the wider international community. Despite Riefenstahl’s name recognition and obvious Nazi association, her work is not featured prominently in this book. In fact, it is only mentioned in passing, and always as a counterexample to demonstrate the amount of thought and effort that went into crafting Hitler’s domesticity. For 1935’s Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl confronted an extant architectural stage populated by hundreds of thousands of people engaged in adoration of “the titanic leader of a great and unified nation” through which she could convey Hitler’s “mastery and gravitas of a statesman.” Stratigakos further notes, “The effect of the film on the viewer relied on his or her identification with the unbroken mass that symbolized the newly united nation. The visualization of the mass and its performance required an architecture designed for monumentality and spectacle.” In contrast, Hitler’s private life was not so polished or ready for close public inspection; he had no established milieu from which to project correlating images of his domesticity. Since his early days in Vienna, Hitler had lived a rather Spartan and nomadic existence. He remained a renter until the 1933 purchase of his Alpine retreat on the Obersalzberg, Haus Wachenfeld (later to become known as the Berghof after various additions and Gerdy Troot’s interior design), and had no such stage from which to project his domestic existence. While he did maintain a Munich apartment on Prince Regent Square, initial attempts at interior decoration did not begin until 1935, again undertaken and overseen by Gerdy Troost, and those renovations didn’t reach their culmination until after he had purchased the building in its entirety in 1938. This created a very real dilemma because, while his public persona of statesman was already established and widely disseminated, Hitler’s unconventional private life, the anomalousness of which already was a source of concern for Reich propagandists, offered no cast of family characters or humanizing attributes to portray him as first man and father of his nation. Where Riefenstahl was charged with portraying the ideal Nazi statesman, Troost and Hoffman were concerned with the ideal German man. Troost’s interior spaces were evocative of the coziest of German homes—warm and comfortable, set in a color scheme of earth tones to accentuate the wooden decorative elements that predominated her designs—a direct contrast to the modernism favored by the Bauhaus, which Hitler had closed in 1933 for its degenerate nature. In fact, Troost’s designs didactically set the tone for what was, as determined and modeled by Hitler, considered to be the new, appropriate artistic expression within the Third Reich. Her crowning achievement was the [End Page 113] Berghof, which incorporated majestic Germanic landscape into the domestic sphere of Hitler’s favored retreat. Within this milieu of quintessential German domesticity, the public “was encouraged to image the thrill of the singular—not dissolving into the mass, but exiting from it . . . And it was the architecture of the Führer’s domesticity...

Filming the Nazi Flag: Leni Riefenstahl and the Cinema of National Arousal

A quarter century after the publication of her memoirs and a decade after her death, the life and work of Leni Riefenstahl remain the subject of ongoing attention. Scenes from Triumph of the Will (...

Introduction: On the Ground of Ethical Criticism

Introduction:On the Ground of Ethical Criticism Garry L. Hagberg One can characterize the relation between philosophy and literature in a number of interestingly different ways: literature provides examples that put flesh on the bones of philosophical ideas; literature shows what philosophy says; literature serves philosophy by displaying the complexity of circumstance that philosophy may oversimplify; literature captures a kind of content that is not amenable to propositional encapsulation; literature offers a portal into an imaginative world and a special kind of vicarious experience within it that philosophy does not and should not try to provide; literature shows (to adapt Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase) what it is like to be another person in another time and place; and there are more. All of these are linked in various ways to the work brought together in this Special Issue. But one of the central concepts—a concept that repeatedly asserts itself in discussions of the relation between philosophy and literature—is that of enrichment. Philosophers have focused, with impressively strong and helpful results, on the relation between ethics and aesthetics. But too often, perhaps, it has seemed the case that one can proceed to theorize generally about what is pictured as the relation by naming an example or two (e.g., Triumph of the Will or Piss Christ) and then arguing for the priority of one category of value over the other. An enriched conception of the problem, by contrast, would avail itself of important differences, differentiated interweavings of ethical and aesthetic strands, with a fine and nuanced attention to the variegated relations between aesthetic and ethical considerations across a broad range of cases, as they emerge in situ. This is one important (and, I think, indispensible) service close literary reading can provide to philosophy. And while the vision one can attain of these matters at this level of detail may not be reducible to a single overarching theory of a single primary relation between ethics and aesthetics, such readings can and do bring an awareness of [End Page v] conceptually engaging and philosophically significant complexity. All of the essays brought together here serve this aim. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2016 The Johns Hopkins University Press

On Doherty’s <em>Hollywood and Hitler, 1933–1939</em>

On Doherty's and Hitler, 1933-1939Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939. By Thomas Doherty. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. 448 pp., ISBN 978-0-2311-6392-7 (hc). US $35.00.Perhaps because of my own minor role in the controversy that engulfed Thomas Doherty's vivid, compelling, and expertly researched survey of Hollywood's response to the rise of Nazism, and Hitler, 1933-1939, it is hard to avoid mention of Ben Urwand's The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler. Joel Rosenberg's excellent review of Urwand's book, which appeared in this journal in 2013, conversely could not avoid mention of Doherty's book. Now that the controversy has appeared to die down, I find Rosenberg's points identifying the commonalities between the two works particularly illuminating.Doherty's book has its weaknesses, as Rosenberg observes, but between the two titles, and Hitler maintains the more nuanced if unsurprising historical perspective, covering the 1933 to 1939 period. The key to Doherty's success is that his book ultimately stays grounded within a solid understanding of the many moving parts making up the film industry. Hollywood incorporated not just the familiar names of major studios but also smaller, independently financed, and now mostly forgotten outfits that had the freedom to tackle the threat of Nazism more forthrightly.Unfortunately, a lack of meaningful distribution significantly marred their ability to galvanize the public. Poor production values made these films look amateurish and more like vanity projects than the hard-hitting exposes they promised to be, virtually assuring them a place at the bottom of the historical dust heap. Newsreels and foreign films, especially the Soviet Professor Mamlock (Adolf Minkin/Gerbert Rappaport, distributed in the US by Amkino, 1938), fared better, mostly because they already had built-in audiences and operated at the relative margins of the studios' self-regulatory apparatus, the Production Code Administration.Even these films at best reached mostly urban audiences and still faced local and state censorship restrictions. Doherty does a nice job of situating conflicts and controversies over the films that did or did not get made against a backdrop of lurching domestic and international politics. It is difficult to weigh the importance of an anti-Nazi film like Warner Bros.' 1939 Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Anatole Litvak, USA) without considering pitched four- and five-way battles among anticommunists, Nazi sympathizers, troubled liberals, and ardent leftists, the last of which frequently could not agree among themselves. Sometimes these conflicts spilled over, as when tried to depict the Spanish Civil War in a film like Blockade (William Dieterle, USA, United Artists, 1938). More often, they erupted when foreign dignitaries like Vittorio Mussolini, a son of the fascist dictator, or Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Germany, distributed in the US by UFA, 1935), visited Hollywood. Hollywood's anti-Nazi politics, as it turned out, thrived not in films but in what Doherty astutely deemed celebrity activism.The basic flaw of Urwand's book-and for some critics, the fatal one-is how its flattened and one-note historical perspective mistakes archival documents depicting how the Nazis wanted to see them as evidence for how actually saw the Nazis. In the aftermath of a strident and ham-fisted attempt to discredit Doherty's work, it is easy to overlook the groundbreaking nature of Urwand's work with primary historical documents as depicting perceptions of from abroad. Compared to Urwand, Doherty treads much more familiar terrain, relying heavily on day-to-day accounts in industry trade papers like Variety, Reporter, as well as others, and to a lesser extent on some familiar archival sources in the United States. Although Doherty, like Urwand, never fully explores how his selection of source materials might reflect deeper dispositions of its collective authorship, his reliance on these trade publications provides rich and nuanced insights into how the industry's image of itself fluctuated and evolved in relation to the growing global threat of Nazism. …