The most clever thing about Triumph of the Wall is the title. Eight years in the making, Triumph pays a titular nod to Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous documentary while creating a bit of infamy of its own: This is one of the worst full-length documentaries I have ever seen. The press materials begin “if Nietzsche built a wall.” This confused me; was I to take this interminable, meandering mess as some form of an existentialist statement? I didn’t buy it. A better choice for this analogy would have been Sisyphus, who for eternity is damned to roll a boulder up a hill only to watch it roll back down. His plight is a perfect fit: Triumph of the Wall is the story of a 1000-foot dry stone wall that, no matter how many stones the stonemason lays, never seems to get completed. The documentary feels incomplete as well, veering wildly toward and away from its original topic with no direction or cohesiveness.
The initial subject matter is not the problem. Fine documentaries have been made about less than cinematic topics like spelling bees, crossword puzzles and fonts. For hundreds of years, these stonemasons have built structures without any kind of binding agent to hold the stones in place. It’s all about finding pieces that fit together, and doing that over and over and over until the job is done. The walls that cover Scotland, England and other places have stood for centuries, and are fascinating to view. Director Bill Stone wisely takes a trip to Scotland to shoot some of these and to talk to stonemasons who are more disciplined about their craft than Triumph of the Wall’s builder, Chris Overing. Unfortunately, this diversion came far too late for me to care.
This documentary lacks the focus needed to stave off viewer frustration. We learn very little about Overling, outside of his tendency to aggravate Stone with his lackadaisical commitment to the documentarian’s vision. We know that Stone spent 8 years shooting this, most of that in the hopes that Overling would finish his wall. Why? Was it stubbornness on Stone’s part, or masochism? For all his rambling—and Stone spends the entire movie talking to us—a credible answer is never provided. He constantly whines about how long things are taking, how frustrated he is, how he can’t get any money for his “vision” and that he’s not sure what form his movie will eventually take. On occasion, he tell us something about stonemasonry. Meanwhile, we get the sense we’re watching dailies, not a finished product. This haphazard nature feels like a game of 52-Pick Up played with ideas; Stone tosses them up in the air and films them in whatever pattern they land. It’s incredibly annoying.
I kept trying to give Triumph of the Will a chance, but like Sisyphus, my benefit of the doubt kept rolling back down the hill. Eventually, I got tired of pushing it. After 30 minutes, I turned the damn thing off. My dash for the remote control came after Stone made the following statement:
“To be truthful, I am not sure what the focus of my film is anymore. The original focus is pretty thin considering the wall isn’t really even a wall. So the main focus has kind of lost focus and I don’t really want to split my focus that really isn’t focused even more.”
This is the kind of narration Triumph of the Wall has for 102 minutes.
I should have left it alone, but again, like Sisyphus, I returned to the futile task at hand. I sat through the other 72 minutes of Triumph of the Wall observing that, on occasion, Stone did get some nice footage of rural Quebec. The skies are blue, the earth is green, and animals strike curious poses. For all of this natural wonder, I should be thanking God, not the director. Still, I would not have minded seeing a Bill Stone nature film, or the pseudo-Malickean type of non-linear film Stone hints at early on with some vacation footage. He can frame a shot, and when his camera runs, without his narration, while his subjects chat nonchalantly, there are hints at what Triumph of the Wall could have been.
After the credits, I thought about what I’d just witnessed, and why I felt so compelled to hate this movie. I was hopelessly bored, to be sure, but that’s not a completely viable excuse. Questions filled my head. Why didn’t Stone abandon this idea? Is this really about the creative process rather than an outright documentary? Was Chris Overing supposed to be Stone’s elusive muse? My answers were always the same: This is so poorly done it doesn’t matter. I don’t know how this got released in its current state.
