soc.history.war.world-war-ii

"Prisoner at War" wrote in message
news:d1b43dab-b346-4536-9eb6-a8293e6ee6e8@u69g2000hse.googlegroups.com...

> First, the questions: why were subsequent Party Days not
> "documented"?

Well, they may have been, if not by Leni Riefenstahl.
(Directors seldom want to refilm the same theme again
and again.) Triumph of the Will (1935) presented the 1934
Nuremburg party rally and was Riefenstahl's second such
film. She also filmed the 1933 rally, the first after Hitler came
to power (and, memory suggests, the first staged by Albert
Speer): the earlier film was released and is in the movie
libraries, albeit (rightly) eclipsed by Triumph of the Will.
As soon as this movie was finished (which took more than
a year) Riefenstahl was hard at work on her Olympic Games
movie (1936) which took two years to complete to her
satisfaction. This left no time to consider repeating
something she had already done, with no particular
ideas how to surpass her achievement.

> How come this wasn't in color?

Have a look at the Wikipedia article on Technicolor.
Colour movie technology was hardly mature by 1934:
and required special cameras and lighting (i.e. was
then unsuitable for filming outside the studio.) German
black and white movies already had their own "expressionist"
style, widely admired, cf. Riefenstahl's mountaineering
movies. (She began in films as a showgirl, later actress
specializing in mountaineering flicks.) Secondly, German
studios were still grappling with sound-on-film (another
new technology that they handled well.)

> Did the other
> dictators like Mussolini and Stalin attempt similar cinematic
> "documents"??

Mussolini, apparently not: Stalin -- yes indeed: the USSR
laid on even more parades than the Italian and German one-party
states, and filmed them enthusiastically, for distribution to the
(Russian) masses through special state agencies, an early feature
of the Bolshevik propaganda system. Later the USSR developed
its own colour film process, to make its newsreels more attractive.
Not many parade pictures were exported because they were made
principally for Russian audiences.

> Himmler can't march for his life! He is *always* out-of-step!! And
> where's Heydrich? I'm surprised he wasn't given any camera time on
> this. How did they determine whom to showcase, anyway?

Goebbels was in charge of the film project and (so far as we know)
delegated all artistic responsibility to Riefenstahl. (Remember, this
was their second collaboration, the earlier one being the 1933 rally.)

Heydrich was in 1934 not a figure of national importance. (He was
then police chief for either Munich or the Bavarian state (Land),
and had no function in Nuremberg: but rose fast and was by
about 1936 (after the SS displaced the SD) head of the Gestapo,
thus a personal of national importance.)

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)