Triumph Over Violence (1965) User Reviews

Quite brilliant

[Jeremy_Urquhart · 9/10 · 25 May 2023]

Triumph Over Violence is a triumph of documentary filmmaking. I got burnt out on documentaries a while back and don't watch as many as I used to, but this one was so effective. It moved well and never felt boring, and the scathing narration (I don't know if I can quite call it cheeky or humorous, but there was definitely shade thrown at the Nazis, as deserved).

This is something special, though. The amount of footage they seem to have, the excellent narration, and the way it uses those images, the narration, and the editing to create jarring moment after jarring moment, and tonally doing so in a way that still respects the viewer and respects those who are died and are now on film.

So many tightropes walked all at once by this. It's a miracle it all works and feels so effective. That being said, it's hard to recommend because of how grisly the imagery can be... dismembered body parts, emaciated dead bodies, heads in the process of being separated from bodies, aftermaths of the camps, shot bodies, hung, frozen, bloated bodies - it's a horrifying watch. Tread lightly, but it uses that imagery for a purpose. I would be the first person to complain if it felt like shock for shock's sake.

This was a near-perfect documentary. Loved the presentation. There are parts (not necessarily the violent parts) that will stick with me (the bit with the close-ups on the eyes was chilling). It's all such an overall powerful, angry, scathing, and necessary condemnation of Nazi Germany and the concept of war in general. Catharsis, presenting an argument, and informing - what more could a documentary aim to do?

An extraordinarily powerful reminder to the future generations of the horrors of German nazism

[mrphik · 27 March 2003]

It is hard to draw parallels between this brilliantly narrated compilation of both Allied and Third Reich's archive films and Hollywood's productions such as "Schindler's List" or "Jakob the Liar". While the latter present limited, sanitized and artificial-looking depictions of life under the Nazi rule, Romm's "Ordinary Fascism" pulls out all the stops in its selection of documentary material to draw the viewer not only into absolute horror about fascism and nazism in the 1920s-1940s Europe, but also to a firmest of convictions that nothing of the sort should be allowed to happen again anywhere in the world.

Note the timing: the film was released in 1965, in the Soviet Union's heyday at the height of the great societal and intellectual "thaw" that followed the Stalin's death and the denunciation of Stalin's totalitarianism by Nikita Khruschev. Never explicitly mentioning any of them explicitly, the film targets tyranny and despotism no matter what form they may take; the release of such a film would have been impossible under Stalin.

A good indicator of the power of this film could be the fact that it is available in most video stores in Germany.

Bizarre mix of analytic documentary and anti-Western propaganda

[Dominic-Berlemann · 6/10 · 4 August 2007]

This 1965 documentary by Mikhail Romm is an excellent example of the special position of film directors in the former Soviet Union, who didn't have to succumb to the economic hardships typically imposed on art by Western market economies. However, the film implicitly reveals the political interventions under which all art suffered under the Soviet system. On the one hand, Romm displays a strong and original will to educate mankind in a Soviet style sense of humanism, which by today's standards appears to be rather naive, if not outright ridiculous. On the other hand the documentary simply brushes aside important historical events in order to (over-)emphasize the undeniable contributions of the Red Army and of Soviet society in general to overthrowing fascism in the Great Patriotic War. There is no mention of 1939's Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, in which Hitler and Stalin divided Polish territory amongst themselves like pieces of pie, no word about the willingness of many Soviet citizens to collaborate with the Nazis because of overwhelming Russian dominance in the USSR, nothing about the fact that Britain's RAF was the only power providing successful military resistance to the Nazi war machine in 1940/41, and the decisive invasion of Normandy is not considered either. The whole war is painted as a primarily Soviet affair. The depiction of US marines as the fascist hordes of the Cold War really puts the icing on the cake, as it puts Americas's troops in the same line with some of world history's most appalling war crimes, for the apparent propagandistic benefits. However, Romm's approach is interesting insofar as it combines the analysis of fascism with sarcastic comments uncovering at least the nature of Hitler's bestial tyranny. However, most of these comments are rather common-place, such as alluding to Goerings plump figure or Hitler's obsessions with dogs and so on. This movie is not a must, but despite its obvious propagandistic tendency it provides the viewer with some interesting insights - not only about the causes of fascism, but also about the nature of Soviet dictatorship as well.