Triumph of the Will

Triumph of the Will is a 1935 German film directed, produced, edited and co-written by Leni Riefenstahl, documenting the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, attended by more than 700,000 supporters, and built around speeches by Nazi leaders and mass displays of military and paramilitary formations. Riefenstahl's techniques, including moving cameras, aerial photography and long focus lenses, were innovative for their time and influenced later filmmaking far beyond Germany, and many of the most familiar surviving images of the Nazi regime and of Hitler himself originate from this film. The film is also, and inseparably, one of the most effective works of political propaganda ever made, commissioned to glorify the Nazi party and its leadership, and its craft cannot be separated from that purpose. It prompted a direct countermeasure in Frank Capra's Why We Fight series of American wartime films made to counter its influence.