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Until a reassessment by historians and film critics in the 1990s, Leni Riefenstahl's cinematic "record" of the September 1934 Nazi party rally had generally been regarded as the quintessential example of the art of political film propaganda. Susan Sontag argued in a seminal article for the New York Review of Books that Riefenstahl's "superb" films of the 1930s were powerful propaganda as well as important documentary art made by "a film-maker of genius."1 She concluded that Triumph des Willens/Triumph of the Will (DE, 1935) was "a film whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker's having an aesthetic concep- tion independent of propaganda."2 Although still an important source, Sontag's assessment has been seriously challenged on a number of counts. While her 1975 essay certainly breaks with an earlier insistence upon the separation of artist from historical context,3 it nevertheless makes huge claims for the quality and power of Riefenstahl's film as both art and political propaganda that are difficult to sustain. Brian Winston, the prominent media scholar, has argued that the film might better be seen as the antithesis of persuasive propaganda and that it is more powerful as a warning against the very political and social ideas the film espouses rather than a successful projection of them.4 Moreover, Winston contends that the film does not stand up very strongly as a work of art and is certainly far from the masterpiece Sontag and others such as Richard M. Barsam claim it to be.5 For her own part, Riefenstahl always maintained that she was not a political filmmaker and her film was not propaganda but a documentary record of the Nuremberg rally. She maintained, perhaps most passionately in Ray Müller's 1993 film, that she had been engaged-reluctantly on her part-in a technical exercise to document the event and had no interest in or sympathy with the political views of the National Socialists.6
Clearly, this dispute over the film's nature, purpose, and status raises questions about its production history and wider issues around the characteristics of politi- cal cinema and the specific nature of film propaganda as a form of political cinema. In an attempt to explore the relationship between art, politics, and propaganda, this paper addresses three main issues. Firstly, how can we...