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Product Description ------------------- DVD SPECIAL FEATURES Four Interactive DVD Slideshows: * Historical Background; Making of the Film; Personalities and Locations. * SA Historical Background. * Original Promotional Materials and Media Articles with Interactive English Translations. * Original Third Reich Photo Book: "NURNBERG 1934" on the Reich's Party Convention. Digital Audio/Visual Book with English Narration. [9 Min.] Two Bonus Shorts:* DAY OF FREEDOM: OUR ARMED FORCES (Tag Der Freiheit: Unsere Wehrmacht), Leni Riefenstahl's complement to Triumph of the Will. NOW COMPLETE AND UNCUT! Restored with a recently discovered 10 minute middle reel, which includes, according to Riefenstahl, one of her best filmed Hitler speeches. [26 Minutes]. * GENESIS OF TRIUMPH, A new IHF featurette overview of the events leading to Hitler taking power and the significance of the Nuremberg Party Convention. A comprehensive look at precisely what takes place in Triumph of the Will, including novel facts about Riefenstahl's film editing. [23 Minutes]. Other DVD Features:* Interactive Scene Selection * Accurate Switchable English and Spanish Subtitles * Digitally Restored from Original 35mm Film Elements using daVinci Revival tm Technology. * Optimal DVD-9 Dual Layer Edition Review ------ The greatest propaganda film ever made. Banned for more than 30 years, Triumph of the Will by Leni Riefenstahl generated perhaps the greatest moral and legal controversy in the history of cinema. It is now available, complete and uncut from International Historic Films. The subject of the film is the 1934 Nazi Party convention. Staged annually at Nuremburg, the convention was a series of speeches by Nazi leaders, reviews of their uniformed followers, and mass rallies involving thousands of people. Although Riefenstahl's work has been labeled a Nazi propaganda film, it is actually the filming of a propaganda subject by a non-Nazi, a woman whose appointment by Hitler to make the film was resented by the propagandists in the Nazi hierarchy. The result is a fascinating expression of one individual's impression of the Hitler movement. Riefenstahl's film pioneered many dramatic techniques of film direction and editing which have effectively translated to the screen all the paganistic joy, the unrestrained emotion, and the awesome power which characterized the Nazi rallies. The complete dominance of one man's personality throughout the film, as well as over an entire nation, is more forcefully conveyed to the viewer's awareness in Triumph of the Will than in any other film or book about the Third Reich in existence. Even today, Triumph of the Will is considered a masterpiece - an extraordinary blend of inspired art, direction, and cinematography. --International Historic Films, Inc. Leni Riefenstahl s directorial debut in Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932), a stunning ain picture in which she also starred, was seen by an entranced Adolf Hitler, who, after becoming Chancellor, asked her to direct a feature-length documentary on the 1934 Nazi Party Rally in Nürnberg. Riefenstahl demanded and obtained complete artistic control, including the final cut of the film. Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935), one of the most polemical pictures ever made, was awarded a gold medal at the 1937 Paris International Exposition as best documentary film. From the moment the Führer makes his Wagnerian descent into Nürnberg, one is aware of the film s sheer immediacy, its harmonies and rhythms, and its stylistic innovations: from the cloud motif of the opening sequence to the constant, rhythmic montage of faces; from vertiginous aerial s to low-level s of Hitler that transform him into a virtual god; from abstract patterns of untold thousands of humanity to restless, constantly moving cameras that track and dolly and swoop and soar; Riefenstahl creates a stylized, idealized worldview a disoriented, disorienting place apart that she would perfect in Olympia (1938). Its lasting influence on other filmmakers Mikhail Chiaureli s The Fall of Berlin and George Lucas Star Wars, for instance and even commercials continues into the twenty-first century. Documentary or propaganda? The director always maintained that the picture was a documentary record of an historic event, while the Nazis exploited it as potent propaganda. Riefenstahl s conception of reality is that of the heroic ideal (present in all ain films) and physical beauty. Triumph of the Will is a personal vision and a visual poem to the idealism of National Som. If this ideal represents fascist aesthetics , it is also as old as the Greeks. Riefenstahl remains the most controversial director in motion-picture history. She was an assertive, outspoken, determined woman in a male-dominated industry. She has been called an artistic genius, the foremost innovator of the non-fiction film, one of cinema s most innovative artists, and a vicious propagandist. To some, her very name is synonymous with film poetry; to others, she was a gifted artist who prostituted her talents to glorify the Third Reich. Together with Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Ingmar Bergman, Leni Riefenstahl is one of the cinema s finest pictorial stylists. --Dixon Smith