Triumph of the Will

Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935) is Leni Riefenstahl's documentary, and you can watch it online on iFILM. The film records the Nazi Party congress staged in Nuremberg over several days in the autumn of 1934.

Marching columns, torchlit ranks, vast rallies and speeches by Hitler, Goebbels and Göring fill the screen. Riefenstahl shot with around thirty cameras and more than a hundred assistants, mounting operators on tracks, cranes and flagpoles and filming from the air. What began as coverage of a political spectacle reshaped how mass events were photographed.

It remains one of the most debated pictures ever made: film schools still study its editing and camera moves, while its subject is open propaganda for a dictatorship that led to war and genocide. Approach it as both a craft lesson and a warning — proof of how technique can serve an ideology. Triumph of the Will (1935) streams online on iFILM.