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Rating: The official aircraft cuts through a basin of high clouds. Some seem to rise incredibly high, abnormal mushrooms, proto-emulations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Piercing the romantic, ephemeral cloudy ceiling, one glimpses THE city; gothic embracing fortresses, churches, palaces, popular apartments: Nuremberg, immense. From the Old City, the resurrected Empire prepares to uncover the roof of the historical and political underworld, imprisonment imposed by and to Versailles. It tears apart, with a grin, the Diktat.
The soaring spires of the Cathedral pass the baton to the celebrating crowd: children, housewives, farmers, proletarians, an abnormal social meltin' pot, the clamor of Heil! explodes. It will not be easy to draw the curtain on this show, offered and organized by professional actors of the Beowulf lineage.
The new leader of Germany disembarks, mechanically, from the airplane; with him all the hierarchies. In the Mercedes, heading to the Hotel Deutscherhof, the little man with the mustache is the reincarnated Emperor, the 20th Century version of Charles V, the demiurge of the third Holy Roman Empire feudalized by the human chain that, with arms outstretched and palm forward, shouts and reveres. Wagner, sculptures, fountains, soldiers, helmets, military belts, the orgiastic roar of the human-beast accompanies him all the way to the hotel. And not even the night is peaceful: lit pyres, swastika flags, choirs of Nibelungen hominids... the calm after the storm is broken. Resting is a crime. Nuremberg, Delphi of Germany, Nordic Olympia.
The morning awakening is marked by bells: from above, one notices an immense campsite, an infinite/undefined tent city. It is the bivouac of youth: vigorous boys shaving, combing each other, hydrating under fountains, cooking soups, sausages, eating, fighting, playing, smiling, look at them, they are in hundreds, orderly, rigorous even in the mischievousness of the carefree age of children, to be indoctrinated, or rather, to be tamed. The ineffable camera subsequently captures the parade of farmers through the City's streets: Bavarian clothing, ancien regime style, grape bunch headgear, knickerbockers, they honor the Führer with baskets of food, flowers, fruit. The shot pans from the General Staff to the boy-bearer, to the rural housewife. The Third Reich unfolds its wings, clipped by democratic plutocracies. The all of all. It engulfs the engulfed.
The hour of the Congress has arrived, let the dances begin. Coats of arms, insignias, heraldic symbols, more than 50,000 attendees. As if the closing credits had not even appeared, the Party's big figures appear in italic bold, followed by their speeches. Hess, Rosenberg, Goebbels, Ley, Darré, Dietrich... The voices amplified by microphones expand with august content, violent invocations to the Goddess Germany. The Leader expresses joy and exultation, hiding a satisfied smile behind the small square of a mustache.
Hyperbole of delirium. One witnesses the parade of the RAD (Reichsarbeitsdienst, Armed Auxiliary Forces): thousands of comrades, shovels in hand, endless litanies and chants; even choreographed. The Ave Maria of the new secular Germanic faith. Where do you come from, comrades? From Friesland - from Silesia - from Pomerania - from the Rhine - from Königsberg - from Dresden - from Saar - from the Black Forest. We build roads - From one people to another - From one city to another. Nuremberg is the pulsing hub of the Third Reich's highway. The autogrill par excellence. Fourth day. The Hitlerjugend is ready, inflexible. Children, teenagers, trumpets to their mouths and swastikas in their hearts, fringes and blonde tufts, shaven temples. Their faces alternate with the Führer's close-up, rigid. Kilometer-long avalanche of outstretched arms. Then comes the military circus of the Wehrmacht: cavalries, machine guns, armored vehicles. A reviewed and corrected re-edition of Rome's circus shows. Missed novelty. Plagiarism from Antiquity.
Apotheosis. Grenades noisily underscore the ceremony of decoration for the SA and SS flags, adorned with the blood of the "martyrs" of the November 1923 putsch; later, a crowd bath that welcomes in the city's full center the climax of the new German art: endless parades, the Führer's Roman salute grandiosely extended towards the troops, women at windows with binoculars. The streets are so crowded that last-minute fanatics are forced to climb over rooftops and statues, without the slightest hint of discomfort. Totalitarianism that assaults the scenery before the politics. Nuremberg: the open-air theater of human gigantography breaks barriers, the constraints of space/time. Bridges and avenues, dawns and afternoons. Everything is meticulously planned.
Epilogue. Es sprecht der Führer: the Austrian former failed painter, before his People, the masses. He seems calm, then suddenly, he clenches his arms around his torso. He shouts. He sweats. He torments himself. He praises totality. Nothing transcends from this, except the Goddess Germany. Lieutenant Hess climbs the pulpit: Deutschland ist Hitler! Sieg Heil! The end. Curtain falls.
Leni Riefenstahl: she was commissioned the propaganda feature film on the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1934. This "non-review" is merely a personal avaluative exegesis on the artistic delirium and the megalomania of the Hitlerian camera. Is it possible to separate art and morality? Utopia and dystopia? Creative avant-garde and mental recession? Technology at the service of barbaric socio-political tendencies? I do not vote, for insecurity, and freeze the question.
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