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I didn't see Triumph of the Will detailed anywhere which is entirely fair, but this looks like a good edition. one wishes Criterion would give Olympia a similarly contextualized release...

Audio commentary by Film Historian Anthony Slide
"Leni Riefenstahl: On a Nazi Female Filmmaker,” an Essay by Novelist, Essayist and Critic Francine Prose
Day of Freedom (Tag her Freshet - Unsere Wehrmacht, 1935, 28 Min.) and Victory of Faith (Der Sieg des Glaubens, 1933, 61 Min.): Two propaganda films made for the NSDAP by Leni Riefenstahl
Schichlegruber Doing the Lambeth Walk: A 1942 Satirical British Anti-Nazi Propaganda Short

Is that a new commentary? I thought I remembered one on the old DVD/Blu-ray, which didn't seem to me to very good. Also an Anthony S, if I'm not mistaken.

denti alligator wrote: Mon May 18, 2026 2:46 am Is that a new commentary? I thought I remembered one on the old DVD/Blu-ray, which didn't seem to me to very good. Also an Anthony S, if I'm not mistaken.

Anthony Slide is a fairly prolific classic cinema author and is a Kino regular on a lot of silent and early sound films (he also did The Cocoanuts for Universal). He did commentaries for Kino's releases of The Blue Light and Tiefland as well. I'm usually not that excited about commentary tracks, but his work is up there with David Kalat and Tim Lucas.

denti alligator wrote:Is that a new commentary? I thought I remembered one on the old DVD/Blu-ray, which didn't seem to me to very good. Also an Anthony S, if I'm not mistaken.

The commentary on the Synapse Blu-ray was by Anthony Santoro.

FlickeringWindow wrote: Mon May 18, 2026 4:01 am

denti alligator wrote: Mon May 18, 2026 2:46 am Is that a new commentary? I thought I remembered one on the old DVD/Blu-ray, which didn't seem to me to very good. Also an Anthony S, if I'm not mistaken.

Anthony Slide is a fairly prolific classic cinema author and is a Kino regular on a lot of silent and early sound films (he also did The Cocoanuts for Universal). He did commentaries for Kino's releases of The Blue Light and Tiefland as well. I'm usually not that excited about commentary tracks, but his work is up there with David Kalat and Tim Lucas.

Very amusing stuff from him so far in what I've watched in Kino's Wonder Dogs! comp.

Why is a teenager creating a petition to ban a film? Should we continue to avert our eyes about the horrors of the past and present and make the same mistakes again and again?

Obviously this shouldn't be taken seriously, I just thought it was amusing. I think I still have my Synapse DVD somewhere since I could never sell it anywhere, and since I guess InterFilm Art's edition isn't coming, this will have to do for an upgrade! I used it in my class for years during our WWII unit and no one ever blinked, but then again complaints like this tend to come from people who haven't even seen what they're decrying

For me this moral/political puritanism epitomizes the difference between Gen Z & Gen X. The most popular elective course when I was an undergrad was a political science class on The Holocaust. I can't remember if parts or all of Triumph Of The Will was shown (though we weren't buying it, VHS was still pretty new & few bought films) and Mein Kampf was an assigned text (which we did have to buy but then resold to bookstore ...and the publisher was a nonprofit that gave proceeds to anti-semitism organization). No one would have protested this (it's importance was self-evident to us), protesting priorities were elsewhere (and didn't revolve around consumption - except for South African apartheid).

This move may ultimately provide an undeserved platform for right-wing extremist groups to co-opt its message.

I'm pretty sure this is just a case of a youngster not understanding how the Blu-ray "platform" works. Because as hard as I have tried I can't seem to find the downvote button on my copy of Terminator 2 so Cameron can finally see I don't approve.

We were shown Triumph of the Will at school, but since we were specifically doing Nazi Germany it was pretty much compulsory.

In order to engage with something you have to understand it. The culture has changed that (esp. younger) people will take others' word for the content/claim someone makes & do not need to see it for themselves to make their own opinion....that for me is the really worry, not that someone is buying a blu-ray of Triumph Of The Will.

I teach Triumph regularly. No complaints. I used to teach Jud Süß, which is far more appalling (and also far more interesting as a film). No complaints. One of my Jewish students thanked me for showing it, because it helped him better understand how antisemitism works.

I won't be signing the petition and I obviously don't think the film should be banned or suppressed, but I am curious as to the thinking process from whoever at Kino woke up one day and thought 'you know what we should do? Release the complete works of Leni Riefenstahl' and why no one in the business meeting suggested that the films of Helmut Käutner or Alexander Kluge or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg might need their attention more.

The description is curious as well: "This Kino Classics release is part of an ambitious reevaluation of the filmmaker’s career..." What is the re-evaluation here?

There's something really funny to me about describing Triumph of the Will as "blatant" Nazi propaganda.

It is pretty upfront about it, certainly.

HJackson wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 7:24 pmThere's something really funny to me about describing Triumph of the Will as "blatant" Nazi propaganda.

The part that got me is "widely recognized as blatant Nazi propaganda". It's like saying Bambi is widely regarded as an animated film.

I'm even more amused by the implied existence of *subtle* Nazi propaganda.

Lowry_Sam wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 5:56 pm For me this moral/political puritanism epitomizes the difference between Gen Z & Gen X. The most popular elective course when I was an undergrad was a political science class on The Holocaust. I can't remember if parts or all of Triumph Of The Will was shown (though we weren't buying it, VHS was still pretty new & few bought films) and Mein Kampf was an assigned text (which we did have to buy but then resold to bookstore ...and the publisher was a nonprofit that gave proceeds to anti-semitism organization). No one would have protested this (it's importance was self-evident to us), protesting priorities were elsewhere (and didn't revolve around consumption - except for South African apartheid).

I'm still baffled by - I will use the term in quotation marks to qualify my meaning - the "woke" turn by Gen Z and some millennials.

I am unequivocally in support of most of what would be considered social justice. But there are harmful, repressive, and naive strains of activism that are bad for the culture at large, and that ultimately undermine any real social justice movement.

It's important not only to "know of" history, to "know of " toxic ideologies. It's important to *know* them, to encounter them without looking away.

It's important to have a capacity for critical distance or remove, to have a sense of cultural objects and "media" as something *separate from* the self, with which you can enter a mindful relation that's appreciative or skeptical or horrified or queasy or enthralled, sometimes all in relation to a single cultural object.

"Gen Z" has a strange panic about contagion, maybe because social media (and all "media" we engage with - what people now lazily call media "consumption") is pervasive, omnipresent, intimate, and so easily absorbed.

One can link the panic to Trumpism or MAGA - a rhetorical move the petition makes - but the fear of "harm," the aversion to discomfort (as if "feeling" unsafe has any real purchase on reality), and the demetaphorization of "virality" are so much more widespread.

There is so much magical thinking in our cultural politics right now, on right and left, so many thought-terminating cliches, that I wish people could articulate, reality-test and measure their imagined chains of cause and effect.

Kino releases Triumph of the Will. People buy it. A few people in the Venn diagram of neo-Nazis who are also cinephiles are ecstatic? Or does a wayward teen, fresh off his first puff of the devil's lettuce, try something different on Kanopy, become converted to fascism by watching a mid-century Nazi propaganda film, fall into that dark world of neo-Nazi cinephiles, then decide not to go to art school after all, and instead.....

One of my high school English classes viewed excerpts and IIRC they used a copy that was normally kept on the school library shelves, free for anyone to check out. I don't remember anyone ever remotely wishing to object back then because it would've been asinine - it was clear what it was and viewings were clearly meant to be educational in ways that ran against its original intentions. tbf, Nazism and white supremacy weren't making the comebacks they are now, but one's moral outrage is far better spent on keeping the worst people out of power than censoring a 90-year-old movie that's already been pored over by countless academics.

It is still technically outlawed in Germany, I think. I believe screenings are only permitted in some kind of academic context.

The laws around Nazi propaganda and images is rather complicated. PBS' Frontline did a piece on it. Deutsche Welle did a piece specifically on propaganda films.

denti alligator wrote: Thu May 21, 2026 11:13 pm It is still technically outlawed in Germany, I think. I believe screenings are only permitted in some kind of academic context.

Germany enforces very strict laws on speech about Nazism and the Holocaust, so strict as to be treating the matter (understandably) as taboo.

The U.K. has moved in a similar direction - the sort of offenses that would be college campus scandals and HR matters in the U.S., disciplined by private bureaucracy, or strung up for social media pillorying - are there treated as criminal. An infamous example here: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-gl ... t-43478925

I understand the impulses to censor and regulate speech (rooted in real fears and in response to real problems), but I grew up hearing the story of Jewish ACLU lawyers defending the right of neo-Nazis to march in Skokie.

Vive la difference.....

The irony is that by banning explicit nazi propaganda like Triumph of the Will, you make it easier for people to fall for nazi propaganda by making it harder for them to identify it. Censorship often tries to create a state of innocence in citizens, on the idea that innocent citizens will create an innocent state. But there's a reason why innocence is associated with naivety and credulity. This young person's good intentions will hasten the exact thing they want to prevent.

Bertrand Russell had it right: the best way to combat propaganda isn't to ban it but to show people propaganda from all sides, so people can see the same seductive techniques applied to mutually exclusive world views, and so build up a resistance to it. Every member here who was shown the movie in school under the guidance of a teacher was done a real service.

Sidestepping the obvious for a moment, Leni Riefenstahl is considered a considerable talent and technical innovator, and also is in the rare pantheon of early woman directors, and her films can and should also be studied for these reasons as well. I know we watched clips in film school for the technique alone. It would be one thing if it was some shady label trying to market this on grounds of it being taboo, but Kino has got to be one of the preeminent labels consistently presenting early cinema of all stripes since their inception, and it would be hard to argue they're all of a sudden trying to be insidious in 2026.

Counterpoint, their new cover does strike me as weirdly confrontational in a Motorhead kind of "pushing buttons" way. Sort of doubling down on the aesthetic and making it look edgy. Perhaps this is what our young friend is reacting to?