Who are you going to believe?

“In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias,� Orson Welles’ Harry Lime famously says in “The Third Man,� “they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had 500 years of democracy and peace -- and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.�

While the ascendancy of Paris Hilton and reality TV does not seem to be pointing toward a new Renaissance, as far as the nexus of politics and entertainment is concerned, we are certainly living in hellaciously interesting times.

This has been a year in which Michael Moore and the Fox News Channel both reached unprecedented levels of success, where liberals ended up getting their news from Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart� and feeling-left-out conservatives started a Liberty Film Festival of their very own.

So it’s a provocative coincidence that Tuesday’s climax to the most bitterly contested, polarizing presidential election in memory will be followed just days later by a retrospective look at the films of Leni Riefenstahl, considered the most controversial political filmmaker of all time and the director of “Triumph of the Will,� called by Susan Sontag “the most successfully, most purely propagandist film ever made.� It’s certainly food for thought, if not despair.

But the more I looked at the Riefenstahl films (showing at the UCLA Film and Television Archive starting Nov. 12) and considered the coming election, the more my thoughts went in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

What Riefenstahl’s career makes clear is that if you really wanted to figure out which movies are going to change minds politically, you wouldn’t look at films like “Triumph of the Will� that are overtly concerned with party positions and philosophies, but rather at those that aren’t. It’s when politics goes underground and infiltrates entertainment that it is most subversive -- and most effective.

Just as it’s unlikely that “Fahrenheit 9/11� did any more to change minds than “Celsius 41.11� and “FahrenHYPE 9/11,� so too Riefenstahl’s undeniably masterful record of the 1934 Nazi Party congress in Nuremberg might not have convinced that many undecided German voters that Adolf Hitler was the key to their future. It was too late for that, largely because, then as now, there were less partisan, more subtly persuasive movies already embedded in the public mind.

So what’s most interesting and provocative about Riefenstahl’s films is not the story of “Triumph of the Will� and its efficacy as a work of propaganda. It’s the way her earlier work as both star and director had so permeated popular culture that her films formed a backdrop against which the nation came to judge the emerging Nazi Party and its ideology of Aryan superiority. It was the movies she was previously making, the nominally purely entertainment movies all Germany was watching, that subtly but unequivocally contributed to the ascension of Germany’s ultimately singularly catastrophic leader.

The UCLA series offers an excellent selection of these “mountain films,� pictures like “The Holy Mountain,� “S.O.S. Iceberg� and the wonderfully titled “The White Hell of Pitz Palu.� They’re examples of a specifically German genre that first made Riefenstahl a star and then led to her initial directing effort, also a mountain film, “The Blue Light.�

As pioneered by the director Arnold Fanck, mountain films were visually stunning works imbued with an almost pagan awe of the power of nature, a rhapsodic, mystical reverence for the beauty of the untamed wilds. When a character in “The Holy Mountain� asks, “Why is nature so beautiful to us?� the reply is, “Because we invest our very soul in it.�

Swept away by mythology

Riefenstahl, who invariably played paragons of Nordic vitality and health attracted to dominant Aryan males, finally became swept away by the mythology she helped create. Here, she must have felt in the Nazi Party’s early days, are men to match my mountains. The romanticism of the mountain films made her -- and in some ways all of Germany -- susceptible to a leader and a political party whose pre-Final Solution platform built on a similar passion for the German land, and the people, and for the ideal of strength through beauty. In one critic’s formulation, “for Riefenstahl beauty was an aesthetic inspiration -- for the Nazis, it was a moral imperative.�

While no one is suggesting that the United States is on the edge of fascism, it’s intriguing that the same social dynamic applies here and now, that both George W. Bush and John Kerry are also trying, possibly without consciously realizing it, to play to the movies in our minds that have shaped how we view the world. Forget the films that hammer their points home. Instead, both presidential candidates seem to be trying to hook into our entertainment movie memories. They want us to see their candidacies in terms of the kind of cinematic archetypes that owe their power to the fact that we accept them as valid without so much as a second thought.

Let’s assume that, like all American politicians, Bush and Kerry want first of all to connect their image with Frank Capra’s 1939 “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,� starring Jimmy Stewart as Jefferson Smith, the farm state naif elevated to the U.S. Senate who learns his way around in no time and even wins the girl.

What politician doesn’t want voters to think of him as a wholesome idealist, willing to talk himself hoarse (Stewart swabbed his throat with mercuric chloride to achieve the effect) fighting for the little guy against the insidious power of special interests?

This nifty encapsulation of American politician mythology let citizens know why we had to be in World War II just as effectively as did the “Why We Fight� series of documentaries specially produced later on for just that purpose.

But when it comes to what’s on the second half of the dream double bill with “Mr. Smith,� each presidential candidate would seem to have another film in mind, another world view he wants the electorate to share.

For Bush, it would be all World War II movies, all the time: “Sands of Iwo Jima,� “Back to Bataan,� “Gung Ho!,� “Guadalcanal Diary,� “God Is My Co-Pilot� and more, played over and over on a continuous loop. The world is a dangerous place, these films say to an audience that largely knows the war through movies; we need force and resolve and an unassailable sense of rectitude if we are going to come out alive.

For Kerry, the mood feels more nuanced, the films he wants us to be seeing in our mind’s eye are “All Quiet on the Western Front,� Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory,� the Michael Caine-starring “The Quiet American.� Yes, the world is a dangerous place, these movies say, but confronting it mindlessly, without a sense of war’s realities, can cause more harm than good.

While Bush would like us to see Kerry as the queasy soldier John Wayne has to buck up, Kerry wants us to associate Bush with the character in “Quiet American� of whom it is said, “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.�

It’s not too much to say that whoever is more persuasive in making more people hit the replay button and watch the movie of their choice is going to be the next president of the United States.

It is, frankly, this same habit of seeing the world in terms of the movies in our minds that could be seen as feeding the unusual haste with which we got involved in Iraq. Decades of films assured Americans that we were the good guys, sure to win easily because we had right on our side. The fact that the world in general and angry Iraqis in particular feel no obligation to abide by John Wayne rules has come as a harsh shock we still have not completely absorbed.

But just because Americans have been repeatedly co-opted by the movies in our mind doesn’t mean we will stop listening to them. They’re so hard-wired into our psyches that we can’t cease and desist even if we wanted to. Will future post-constitutional-amendment social historians be examining “The Terminator� films and “Twins� to figure out how they prepared the way for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s becoming a force to be reckoned with on the world stage? Never say never: betting against the power of film has rarely been a wise idea.