Catch up with the idea behind this series here.
Moving right along here, 1935 holds a place in Academy history as the year that MGM launched a press ad campaign for its film “Ah, Wilderness!,” the first of any kind of public baiting. Wouldn’t you know it, the campaign failed and the film was shut out. 1936 saw the introduction of the supporting actor and actress categories, awarding plaques to Walter Brennan and Gale Sondergaard. It wasn’t until 1943 that the winners here earned actual Oscar statues.
The big winners from this period were “Mutiny on the Bounty” and “The Great Ziegfeld,” representing a phase where the Academy couldn’t get enough of big budget epics and/or biopics. Some things never change. Here’s what they missed.
1935 – “Triumph of the Will” (Leni Riefenstahl)
Four years before the start of World War II, the Adolf Hitler commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to document the week-long Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. She was given unprecedented access to Hitler and other party leaders and was entrusted to capture the power of the Third Reich. You probably already know this because “Triumph of the Will” is arguably the most famous propaganda film of all time. Objective by design, it’s ironically the film’s subjectivity that makes it so powerful today.
By that, I mean that Riefenstahl simply lets the camera roll and capture the events, foregoing narration, background information, graphics and talking heads. The city, the people, the soldiers, the motorcades, the speeches, all speak for themselves. Her compositions are flattering and the music swells appropriately, but it’s a direct cinema, observational approach that allows plenty of time for contemplation by the viewer. And in that time, it’s hard not to think about what would occur within this party in the next ten years.