The Influences of Star Wars: Triumph of the Will

In continuing to write about the movies that helped make Star Wars….well Star Wars, I knew it would get to this point. So I decided to just rip the Band-Aid off and get it over with. Yes, Star Wars was inspired by the Nazis. I think for the most part this is fairly common knowledge and pretty apparent to anyone who’s ever taken a World History class. The Empire is very much designed in the vein of the Third Reich and other fascist dictatorships, with the Emperor standing in for the Fuhrer himself. The Empire’s troops are called Stormtroopers as that was the name of German Shock Troopers in WWI and WWII. The Imperial Officers are adorned in similar outfits worn by that of Nazi officers and gee the Empire troops sure do love to gather together in a nice symmetrical formation which in no way looks like a Nazi rally. So yeah, the inspiration is pretty in your face, but there’s a lot of subtle allusions as well, notably to Nazi propaganda.

Arguably the most famous piece of propaganda ever filmed is Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi epic Triumph of the Will. Much in the vein of Birth of a Nation, the film is known today as an important yet horrendous picture. Riefenstahl’s camerawork and editing where revolutionary and created some of the starkest images ever put to film. Every shot imaginable today but near impossible to achieve then was utilized and with some 30,000 extras, Riefenstahl was given total control to perfectly execute every single shot. Almost no film in history has had the resources available to this feature and by god do they make great use of them. The only issue is that whole Nazi thing, you know, that thing it’s actually about. For all it’s majestic artistry, you can’t write off what the goal of the movie is, to promote Nazis. Triumph of the Will is so important to the Nazi image that most images people think of when you say words “Hitler” or “Nazi” probably come from this movie. For its technical merits, it is still taught today, remaining one of the most polarizing important films in history. A young George Lucas saw it in film school and it certainly struck a chord with him, because it’s everywhere in Star Wars.

It’s not even that images of the Empire’s are taken wholesale from it, even the Rebel’s award ceremony at the end of A New Hope is taken directly from Triumph of the Will. It’s a rather bizarre decision to use Nazi imagery to represent both sides of the battle. Now while other Star Wars material has dug deeper into the complexities of both sides, showing things are not as black and white as they may appear, Star Wars still needs to be a black and white story to make sense in the way it’s presented. Characters may have shades of grey as they flip flop between good and evil, but there is a clearly defined dark side of the force and the light. What Lucas can be insinuating is that the Rebels themselves do not fall entirely on one side. My issue with this is it seems to go against everything else Lucas strives for. He deems it a simple kid’s movie that is supposed to be structured tightly to fit into Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey. By trying to make a complex narrative about war, Lucas seems to distract from that simplicity he aimed for. For me the worrisome idea is Lucas just used the images because they looked good, an attempt to remove the images from their context.

Like I said, the visuals of Triumph of the Will cannot be removed from the context of the Nazis. By utilizing their style, you ostensibly deem it worthy of imitation. You can claim you just want to use their techniques, but that doesn’t remove the Nazi overtones. Sure it looks great, but some visuals are ruined forever by association. The thing is if you were to stage a scene similar today like the ceremony at the end of A New Hope, it would be compared to Star Wars and not Triumph of the Will. We have taken Nazi symbols and ostensibly covered up the history. Is this a good thing, or do actions such as these lead to an erasure of history? I don’t claim to fully know; all I know is whenever I see the ceremony scene it rubs me the wrong way. We can talk all day about the ethics of using Nazi features for your villains when we ostensibly “like” movie villains regardless of knowing they’re evil, but it’s the subtle stuff I worry about. I guess it’ll go on as one of the great debates. For me, I feel fine with using them for the villains, but it’s the subtler visuals that strike me as troublesome. I said it was inspired by the movie, I never claimed it was a good thing.