We await for the F¨uhrer’s orders: the Nazi perversion in cinematography

Abstract

This work aims to investigate the ideological and intertextual parallels between Triumph of the Will, the movie, produced by Leni Riefenstahl and the book Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler. Triumph of the Will is the film registry of the National Socialist Party in 1934, at the city of Nuremberg and Mein Kampf was written by Hitler in 1924 while He was in jail; the book aims to guide the members of the Nazi party. For this, the research resumes History by the Nazi’s rise using authors like Elias Canetti (1995) and Hannah Arendt (1989); we also study German film production by Siegrief Kracauer (1988). After, this work investigates the movies made by Riefenstahl from Ray Müller’s documentary (1993), and also by the book from Steven Bach (2008) and Riefenstahl’s autobiography (1991). This research constitutes as metodology the books by Mikhail Bakhtin (2010), Robert Stam (1992) and Jacques Durand (1973), to make the movie’s découpage we use Laurent Jullier and Michel Marie (2009). We separated sixteen movie scenes and they were compared between each other to investigate if the movie was made to be seen by all of the german people, to convince them about the Nazi’s ideal – originally present and described in Mein Kampf.