Kino: Triumph of the Will

[Mr Sausage]

Yes, tenia kept worrying a re-release would kick off a media cycle while at the same time suggesting an alternative likely to kick off a full blown media firestorm!

It’s a niche film being released on a niche platform by a niche company. Anyone curious to learn more about it will just find ample resources explaining how the movie helps manufacture evil. Any random who stumbles across it, if they’re not repulsed, will simply be bored.

[tenia]

Yes, tenia kept worrying a re-release would kick off a media cycle while at the same time suggesting an alternative likely to kick off a full blown media firestorm!

Also a case of both can be true simultaneously, and maybe it's telling that none of these looks like a winning situation when dealing with nazi propaganda.

But yeah, in the case of this one, maybe pretty much nobody cares anyway and Kino will only sell 100 copies of it, some of those to people who already have seen it.

[Mr Sausage]

But: widely disseminate it on home video like any other movie and you've taken away that mystique.

I think that's where we disagree. It doesn't mean I don't understand what you mean here, forbidden = thrilling = titillating curiosities, just like I know very much how the Streisand effect can work. I just don't believe that's actually how our world currently works, and that mystique taken away or not, in the end, there's just very plainly one situation where something is harder to reach, and another one where it's easier.

If your argument requires hand waving away long-standing, well-established features of human psychology, you’re probably on shaky ground.

You’re also falling victim to over-focus. You’re so focussed on accessibility that you’re (now wilfully) overlooking the more important issue: desire. Do you want the general populace to have more or less of a desire to see the movie? If you want them to desire it more, restrict it; if you want less, release the boring movie on a format no one cares about.

[Swift]

As an example of that, you've only got to look at the mystique built up over the years regarding Song of the South precisely because it has been unavailable for years, when it would likely otherwise be just another film forgotten by the general public. A quick google search shows a lot of questions from people asking about the content of the film.

[Lowry_Sam]

The problem with fascism in the US isn't the proliferation of Nazi propaganda, the Proud Boys et. al. only ever make up a small portion of the population. The problem in the US is that a majority of the population actually opposes the fascist agenda but feels helpless or ineffective to do anything (substantive) to make a real impact and reassert their power over the (supposed) political system.

[Noiretirc]

If this thread goes where I think it is going, and gets cut into The Political Threads, do we all get automatic access?

[Walter Kurtz]

. The problem in the US is that a majority of the population actually opposes the fascist agenda...

Then why did the majority of the country support the re-election of a fascist ex-President? And if you don't think he is a fascist... you just haven't been paying enough attention.

[tenia]

You’re also falling victim to over-focus. You’re so focussed on accessibility that you’re (now wilfully) overlooking the more important issue: desire. Do you want the general populace to have more or less of a desire to see the movie? If you want them to desire it more, restrict it; if you want less, release the boring movie on a format no one cares about.

I'm not over-focused on accessibility and forgetting about desire : desire is one thing, possibility to act on it is another one. I'm not so much thinking about the general audience to have more or less of a desire to see it, but more or less people to see it, plain and simple. And I do think that there is a split between this (which might be akin to what is happening with gun control in the US vs pretty much everywhere else in the world).

Swift makes a good point about Song of the South, but in the grander scheme of things, I suppose that if there is "a lot of questions from people asking about the content of the film", it's because the movie's lack of easy accessibility (despite being available if you want to - I have a 1080p version of it myself, and a Google "Full movie" search will provide you a link to the full movie within its first 5 results) prevented those people from seeing it (I'd also wonder if all those questions are a sign of people actively thinking about it, or just asking the question and then moving on because there isn't much more to do about it anyway). People might have a desire to see it, so much that there are lots of questions online about it, but how much of a deterrant will be a lack of easy accessibility ?

I think that's where we differ. Again, I completely understand your point, and it might have to do with me underestimating the impact of the movie already been officially available (and in the public domain) vs, say, Song of the South. But it's not over-focusing, just a difference in looking at desire vs acting on it.

Still, very fair points from you and Swift.

[MichaelB]

I'm not over-focused on accessibility and forgetting about desire : desire is one thing, possibility to act on it is another one. I'm not so much thinking about the general audience to have more or less of a desire to see it, but more or less people to see it, plain and simple.

But what I don't understand is how releasing a limited-circulation Blu-ray (because Blu-ray is now a niche format) is going to make the tiniest bit of difference when the film is already widely available online for free, a state of affairs that's never going to change because the film is legally in the public domain in the US.

If a load of Nazis want to arrange a screening for their mates, they can do it right now for an outlay of pretty much zero, unless they end up renting a projector. How is the existence (or otherwise) of Kino's Blu-ray going to change that?

[Calvin]

I don't think this release is going to drive conversions to National Socialism; my question would still be if we all agree that it is a release of limited appeal in a niche format of a film that is already easily accessible, where is the commercial incentive for Kino to put out another edition into the market. This forum is obviously littered with requests for unavailable films that are unavailable because of (whether presumed or correct) limited commercial potential.

[tenia]

I'm not over-focused on accessibility and forgetting about desire : desire is one thing, possibility to act on it is another one. I'm not so much thinking about the general audience to have more or less of a desire to see it, but more or less people to see it, plain and simple.

But what I don't understand is how releasing a limited-circulation Blu-ray (because Blu-ray is now a niche format) is going to make the tiniest bit of difference when the film is already widely available online for free, a state of affairs that's never going to change because the film is legally in the public domain in the US.

Because to me, more is just more. it's another channel, another news cycle, another way to get renewed access to the movie (and in a better quality too !).
If it wasn't making any difference, why would Kino bother ? Surely, they plan to actually find some purchasers, and this print run is very likely not to be bought entirely by people having already seen the movie (possibly for free !).

Maybe that's me overestimating this, but I do think that if it wasn't making any difference, there wouldn't be a market for it, and thus nobody would bother doing a new BD release of it.

[Mr Sausage]

You’re also falling victim to over-focus. You’re so focussed on accessibility that you’re (now wilfully) overlooking the more important issue: desire. Do you want the general populace to have more or less of a desire to see the movie? If you want them to desire it more, restrict it; if you want less, release the boring movie on a format no one cares about.

I'm not over-focused on accessibility and forgetting about desire : desire is one thing, possibility to act on it is another one. I'm not so much thinking about the general audience to have more or less of a desire to see it, but more or less people to see it, plain and simple. And I do think that there is a split between this (which might be akin to what is happening with gun control in the US vs pretty much everywhere else in the world).

Unless strapping people down Clockwork Orange style is on the table here, desire is the only thing we're talking about. There are no "plain and simple", raw numbers anything here. If more people see it, it's only because they want to see it. People don't just watch whatever's released, not in this media saturated landscape. They need to be primed first. Generating lots of controversy is a guaranteed way to increase the film's audience--which is exactly why banning or vocally opposing its release works against your stated goals. And if you think officially restricting access will restrict viewership, especially in the States, you're being naive. Supply and demand will reign here: if an audience has enough desire, people will step up to fill that demand, legally or otherwise. And the internet will be where it happens.

Invoking the U.S. gun debate shows your confusion. These are not analogous situations. The psychological and political effects of censoring art have no relation to the restriction of objects. The gun debate also revolves around the restriction of whole classes of objects, while this debate is around restricting single works of art. Guns have a demonstrable harm one can track through sheer data; it's difficult to track or predict the effects of single pieces of media in any quantitative manner. I could go on.

but how much of a deterrant will be a lack of easy accessibility ?

It's still a question of desire: the more desire a person has, the more effort they expend in seeking it out. The more effort expended by a large enough group, or the more vocally access is demanded, the easier it'll then become to get it as suppliers step forward.

But this has become something of an academic debate for me because I don't actually think Triumph of the Will is dangerous any more. I don't think wide availability will drive anyone into far right politics. Just like I don't think Battleship Potemkin, a far more scorching and effective piece of propaganda, will make anyone into Stalinists. The ideas may be incendiary, but their expression has been muted by time and changing tastes. Today's media landscape has trained people out of their ability to concentrate, to construct ideas over longer spans of time. And a slow, black and white, two-hour, non-narrative historical document? Literally every one of those descriptors on its own is out of style now. I suspect the average teenage Gen Z viewer with no historical context is going to find Triumph of the Will weird and alien, impossible to understand, and too boring to finish.

[MichaelB]

As a parent of two Gen Z-ers, I can confidently predict that my daughter wouldn't watch even a frame (it ticks all three of her "do not watch" boxes, being older than her, in black and white, and in foreign), and while my son might watch it out of historical interest, the chances of it converting him to fascism are zero.

In fact, in the recent local elections, his mother and I had to talk him out of voting Green because they're the most trans-friendly party by pointing out that they didn't stand a chance where we lived (they ultimately came fourth out of five) and he'd be more likely to inadvertently let in the most fascist-adjacent party if he did so. (Thankfully, they came second.)

[Mr Sausage]

I suspect the audience for this release is made near exclusively of people who've seen it before. That's probably more true now than for its original release on DVD years ago.

[tenia]

People don't just watch whatever's released, not in this media saturated landscape.

Not what I'm saying. You're looking at it through the opposite of what I'm saying. What I'm saying is sometimes, you want to do something, like seeing a particular movie, and realise it's not that easy to do, so you just move on. For instance, say you want to see a movie, but you're in France, and the only available release is Polish, though it has French subs. Is it an easy thing to get ? Not really. Would a French release make it much easier for you, despite the movie being available elsewhere and with French subs ? Yes.
In case A, you're likely to move on, and possibly even forget about it because it's a saturated landscape with lots of other stuff to watch and more accessible than this one. Until case B happens, and you remember about it, and then the opportunity will make the rest.

But you're right : with enough desire, it's not a question of "l'occasion fait le larron", but of actively looking for something and finding it.

This being written, I'm not sure why we should be limiting the matter to Gen Z viewers. In France at least, I'd be looking rather at Gen Y.

And if you think officially restricting access will restrict viewership, especially in the States, you're being naive.

Oh I clearly realised there's also a cultural difference at work here (and I'm saying this in a very neutral way).

[JSC]

Simply trying to wish away the things that disturb one's conscience (whether or not this results in the growing of a
toothbrush mustache and goose-stepping around your living room or by having a genuine reaction of disgust at the
horrors of the Nazi regime) usually doesn't lead anywhere but downwards.

I was reading Cultural Amnesia, a book of essays by Clive James, in which he offered this thought:

Adolf Hitler should need no introduction. Statistics suggest, however, that a large proportion of young people
now emerging from the educational systems of the Western democracies either don't know who he was or have
only a shaky idea of what he did. One of the drawbacks of liberal democracy is thus revealed: included among its
freedoms is the freedom to forget what once threatened its existence.

[MichaelB]

See also smallpox and polio. Hopefully smallpox is gone for good, but it’s not at all hard to envisage polio making a comeback in RFK Jr’s America, the problem being that very few people with first-hand experience of dealing with it will still be alive (or compos mentis).

[Mr Sausage]

People don't just watch whatever's released, not in this media saturated landscape.

Not what I'm saying. You're looking at it through the opposite of what I'm saying. What I'm saying is sometimes, you want to do something, like seeing a particular movie, and realise it's not that easy to do, so you just move on. For instance, say you want to see a movie, but you're in France, and the only available release is Polish, though it has French subs. Is it an easy thing to get ? Not really. Would a French release make it much easier for you, despite the movie being available elsewhere and with French subs ? Yes.
In case A, you're likely to move on, and possibly even forget about it because it's a saturated landscape with lots of other stuff to watch and more accessible than this one. Until case B happens, and you remember about it, and then the opportunity will make the rest.

Oh I got your point. Low desire + low access = no one watches it. Sure. But for that to happen, the thing needs to quietly disappear, somehow. Direct government intervention is the worst option for achieving that.

You're worried that new releases drive news cycles, put the thing back into the popular consciousness, and raise desire. Fair enough. But news cycles are driven by controversy. It's precisely the opposition to this release that's going to drive news cycles. A niche release by a niche company in a niche market is not attention getting, it's quiet. Shouting back in opposition is going to raise attention, and banning is going to raise desire. So while the ideal situation may well be for this to quietly disappear--in practical terms, the best option is to let this release go out quietly to the small cadre of film and history buffs who are in no danger of anything, and continue on.

I'm also of the opinion that important historical documents like this one ought to be widely available, on the basis that dangerous ideas aren't effectively combated through banning but inoculation, and because the logic of censorship is itself totalitarian. But this is a more contentious claim, while I don't see why anyone would argue with my other claims.

This being written, I'm not sure why we should be limiting the matter to Gen Z viewers. In France at least, I'd be looking rather at Gen Y.

I was imagining the most vulnerable population, ie. the young and uneducated.

Gen Y'ers who are skewing increasingly authoritarian and populist in their voting will not be swayed one way or the other by Triumph of the Will. They will know it's evil from the start through sheer cultural saturation, compartmentalize that immediately, and move on having made no connections between it and current events, let alone their own feelings.

[Captain Paranoia]

I'm not over-focused on accessibility and forgetting about desire : desire is one thing, possibility to act on it is another one. I'm not so much thinking about the general audience to have more or less of a desire to see it, but more or less people to see it, plain and simple.

But what I don't understand is how releasing a limited-circulation Blu-ray (because Blu-ray is now a niche format) is going to make the tiniest bit of difference when the film is already widely available online for free, a state of affairs that's never going to change because the film is legally in the public domain in the US.

If a load of Nazis want to arrange a screening for their mates, they can do it right now for an outlay of pretty much zero, unless they end up renting a projector. How is the existence (or otherwise) of Kino's Blu-ray going to change that?

As for the debate on companies releasing films such as these, I'm of the viewpoint for boutique labels releasing films such as these (same statement goes for say The Birth of a Nation) as these releases often provide contextual material necessary for the films that would be not featured on say, a public domain or an online release, of course (which makes me lament the burying of the Censored Eleven the more I consider such).

On an additional note, could anyone vouch for Anthony Slide's commentary on Tiefland? The commentary seems interesting enough for an film all but ignored on video given its production history (I sense if Kino had the ability to rescue from Nina Gladitz's documentary Time of Darkness and Silence from legal purgatory they would've, wouldn't be surprised if it's mentioned on the commentary).

[Lowry_Sam]

. The problem in the US is that a majority of the population actually opposes the fascist agenda...

Then why did the majority of the country support the re-election of a fascist ex-President? And if you don't think he is a fascist... you just haven't been paying enough attention.

The majority of the country is not the same as the majority of voters.....and that is part of the problem. The Republican party has been retaining its control & power by rigging the system over the past 50 years: stacking the Supreme Court, centralizing power in the presidency, reintroducing Jim Crow laws, gerrymandering voter districts... At the same time the supposed opposition party has been doing nothing substantial to curtail these abuses of power. As a result, fewer vote because they can't or because they're fed up or don't care anymore as they see their vote makes no substantial difference to their material well-being. The single biggest party affiliation in California is now "No Party Preference" because most people see that decades of voting for a lesser of two evils is one of the things that got us to where we are today & unless that changes there will be no genuine change. Trump isn't the problem, he's the symptom....there are plenty more willing to fill his shoes once he kicks the bucket.

[hearthesilence]

I mentioned this before but a large portion of the U.S. typically doesn't vote, far more than the winning margin of any election.

The 2024 election had (by U.S. standards) a very high turnout among registered voters, but that's a big caveat because 26.4% of the citizen voting-age population was still not registered: that's about 62 or 63 million people. So with the 20 million registered voters who didn't bother to vote either, over 80 million could have but did not vote in the 2024 presidential election. (In the popular vote, the margin between Trump and Harris was less than 2.3 million votes.)

And just to factor in the electoral college, swing states generally have a higher turnout among eligible voters, but even then it was topping out at 3/4: the five states with the highest turnout among eligible voters in 2024 were Wisconsin (76.66%), Minnesota (76.5%), Michigan (74.85%), Maine (74.55%) and New Hampshire (73.74%). FWIW, the lowest were Texas (56.83%), West Virginia (55.56%), Arkansas (54.06%), Oklahoma (53.46%) and Hawaii (50.26%).

[Walter Kurtz]

. The problem in the US is that a majority of the population actually opposes the fascist agenda...

Then why did the majority of the country support the re-election of a fascist ex-President? And if you don't think he is a fascist... you just haven't been paying enough attention.

The majority of the country is not the same as the majority of voters.....and that is part of the problem. The Republican party has been retaining its control & power by rigging the system over the past 50 years: stacking the Supreme Court, centralizing power in the presidency, reintroducing Jim Crow laws, gerrymandering voter districts... At the same time the supposed opposition party has been doing nothing substantial to curtail these abuses of power. As a result, fewer vote because they can't or because they're fed up or don't care anymore as they see their vote makes no substantial difference to their material well-being. The single biggest party affiliation in California is now "No Party Preference" because most people see that decades of voting for a lesser of two evils is one of the things that got us to where we are today & unless that changes there will be no genuine change. Trump isn't the problem, he's the symptom....there are plenty more willing to fill his shoes once he kicks the bucket.

Well you and "Silence" are both missing the point. The majority of people-who-still-give-a-shit [meaning VOTERS] are fascists. Shame on ALL the fucking gens x,y,z ,millenial, boomer, greatest et.al. etc. who don't vote for NOT giving a shit. And you are part of the fucking problem because you don't call these people out for not voting/giving a shit. Sure the odds are stacked. They always have been. And its getting worse. But the apathy of the non-fascists has gotten worse too.

I do not celebrate little weenies of all ages who run home and hide under there beds and say "Mommy i just can win anymore!"

I remember walking to city hall about 10 years ago to pay my property taxes on one of my homes. It is in Ft. Lauderdale where we spent a couple weeks over the year end holidays. A bunch of tea party fascists - about 50 or 75 of them - were picketing and blocking the entrance. I tried to gracefully thread my way through them. Three of them stopped me. I broke one nose, cut another faced up with my fists, and rammed my knee into another guys balls.

The news cameras were out there in force along with a dozen police. They broke the fun up after what went down.

But at least a few hundred thousand weenies watching the news saw an illustration of how not to be a weenie. Liberals have to learn how to fight. That simple. And if you don't want to fight. Then fight at the fucking ballot box.

[hearthesilence]

I don't know what it was about my last post that suggests I'm sympathetic towards those who don't vote, but I've made it very clear before that I'm not and never have been. One reason I added "far more than the winning margin of any election" is to emphasize how colossally stupid it is not to vote.

[Beloved Aunt]

I've come round--partially--to the "they're all the same" thing, somewhat, because, well, sometimes they more or less are, like in my country (Canada) right now, the differences between our new prime minister, a pretty shitty, weaselly guy named Mark Carney, and the conservative opposition, are such thin fucking gruel, and the conservatives are probably not that likely to actually turn Canada into a fascist state all that much more than it already is, or to do what Trump is doing regarding elections, and the political fate of my country isn't so important to the rest of the world and the future of humanity, that it really matters all that much--at least right now. I think in the United States and Brazil, on the very, very much other hand, there is absolutely no excuse for the left, and anyone who has real values, to not always vote against the Republicans, and against Jair Bolsonaro and his idiot son. These people must be defeated.

[hearthesilence]

There isn't a good excuse but too many people never learn and come up with idiotic excuses, even fabricating things that aren't true or believing what has been de-bunked. (I'm not talking about fake shit that goes viral through dubious means, I mean people who simply have a monstrously poor understanding of what they're complaining about.)

I get there's always something to complain about, but honestly sometimes it reminds me of the shitty parents who terrorized a friend of mine throughout his childhood - they weren't just demanding, they would go out of their way to make it more difficult for him to meet their enormous expectations, then still put the blame on him for "failing" in some regard and the cycle just feeds itself. I think one of my last posts in the politics thread was about the college student interviewed by USA Today who blamed Biden for failing to do something about student loans, even though anyone who actually follows the news should've known he tried incessantly through legislation that was ultimately torpedoed by every Republican and a handful of "moderate" Democrats who were never supportive of these measures (the Democrats never had an effective majority in the Senate, they were tied for two years and had only a one vote majority for the next two, all of which could be easily undermined by a few defecting votes; they only had a House majority for two years before the Republicans took over during Biden's last two years). Failing that, he then used executive orders, only to have that torpedoed by the conservative majority in the Supreme Court, all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents. Failing to realize this, she just blamed Democrats and came up with the brilliant plan to NOT vote for Democrats, thus helping to shore up the same opposing forces that prevented what she wanted from happening.