Fascist art, surreal art: some European films

I’ve always meant to watch TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (1935) but never got around to it until this month. This legendary propaganda film records Adolf Hitler speaking at a rally in Nuremberg which director Leni Riefenstahl transforms into something amazing. Hitler’s plane descending to the city as if der Fuehrer were coming down from Olympus. Vast crowds of soldiers and ordinary Germans marching, listening, all in unison; as Roger Ebert says,when someone goes “Sig heil!” it’s invariably a crowd in unison, not individual voice. Despite some slow bits in the middle, with endless different battalions marching to salute Hitler, the overall result is uncanny, a sense that the Nazi movement goes beyond any ordinary dictatorship and has become something extraordinary. As Ebert also says, however, it’s unlikely to sway anyone who’s not already a believer; Hitler’s legendary oratory doesn’t impress me at all (even given that he’s speaking in German). As the book Documentary says, it worked the opposite: Allied propagandists mined the film for scenes that would dramatize the monstrous threat we were up against. Still, fascinating to see this. “These things appear mysterious, that hundreds of thousands would assemble amidst calamity and passion.”

After watching Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast I looked up what else Netflix had of his and discovered they have the first and third movie in his Orpheus trilogy (I’m familiar with the middle movie, Orphee). THE BLOOD OF THE POET (1930) is a short film in which an artist touching a portrait discovers he’s transferred the image’s mouth to his hand, the beginning a weird series of events and strange images as he encounters mocking statues, liquid mirrors and children in bondage. Interesting but I’ve no idea how it fits in with Orphee. “It has already proved dangerous to wipe yourself off on furniture.”

The third film, TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS (1959) was Cocteau’s final movie, wherein the director plays himself traveling through time (“The only way I could smoke in 1770 was by convincing them I’d invented the cigarette.”), confronting a mysterious tribunal, getting stabbed by Claudine Auger and encountering Yul Brynner at the entrance to the underworld. More linear than Part One though not necessarily easier to understand — a shame Criterion’s DVD didn’t include a commentary track. “This man is a poet and therefore indispensable — I’m not sure to what.”

A young man flirts with THE BAKERY GIRL OF MONCEAU (1963) to relieve his frustration that his dream girl apparently ghosting on him; while he knows the bakery salesclerk is more into him than vice versa, he constructs flimsy rationalizations why toying with her feelings is okay. This thirty-minute short was the first of director Eric Rohmer’s “Six Moral Tales”; I can’t say it grabbed my interest in its own right, but it did remind me a lot of Francois Truffaut — the protagonist could easily be Antoine, the protagonist of Truffaut’s 400 Blows and Antoine and Collette “I can’t stand people who pace up and down outside my door.”

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