Triumph of the Will

I’d have to agree that Triumph of the Will was designed to make the Nazi party look more attractive to the German people, even if that beautification was only capitalizing on the way Hitler and the Nazis were perceived by many Germans at that time. Take, for example, the representation of the young workers as being carefree and playful: I think it’s safe to assume that the general frivolity pictured in the film was not necessarily the way those people lived all of the time. There was no real reference to actual work throughout that entire scene; just various shots of blond-haired boys wrestling and laughing. The music and previous images even made the mass-produced meals look enticing.

Though Triumph of the Will is arguably designed to beautify the Nazi party, I don’t know if Night and Fog was necessarily designed to do the opposite. The film didn’t deal as much with the politics behind the imprisonment and extermination of the Jewish people throughout Europe; it just revealed how those people actually lived. It obviously did portray the horrors of the camps, but it did not seem specifically designed to combat the glamorized image the Nazi’s were given in films like Triumph. Night and Fog did, through real portrayals of the camps, serve to combat some of the glamorized and sterilized versions that many people have been exposed to through movies about the Holocaust, which, by extension, changed the way the party politics—and in some ways, war—are viewed. Whether Triumph of the Will is a documentary or not, I do believe that Night and Fog at least achieved the purpose of more correctly portraying the whole of the situation; all of the images in Triumph were real, and the people involved in those images did support Hitler that fanatically, but it is not necessarily a correct representation of the Nazis. Night and Fog more accurately got to root of the Holocaust than Triumph did for the party.