The Brooklyn Rail

Controversial film director Leni Riefenstahl made two of the landmark movies of the twentieth century. Triumph of the Will, an adulatory documentary of the Nazi Nürnberg rally in 1934, opens with a plane descending spectacularly from the clouds, bringing Adolf Hitler like a god to be worshipped by masses of civilians and soldiers. Olympia, her two-part film of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, celebrates, with a fascist lens, the healthy bodies of the athletes and features Hitler as a benevolent dictator, presiding over the games.

Riefenstahl, who began her artistic life as a dancer before turning to acting and eventually filmmaking, concluded her post-World War II career with eerily racist

photographs of the African Nuba tribe. She lived to be 101, constantly revising her life story to erase as much as possible her role in German fascism, notably by participating in a 1993 documentary called The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Scottish-born writer/director James Clements tackles this tricky subject matter in his play Beauty Freak, which focuses on the pivotal years from 1935 to 1939, and runs April 23 to May 17 at the cell in Manhattan, produced alongside his and Sam Hood Adrain’s company What Will the Neighbors Say? and directed by Danilo Gambini. We spoke at New York University where he is an adjunct professor at the Tisch School of the Arts. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Paul David Young (Rail): Why did you write this play?

James Clements: The reasons changed. I’ve been working on it, including the research period, on and off for ten years. I’ve never spent that long on a piece of theater. There have been long periods where I haven’t worked on it at all. I decided to create it in 2016 because it felt like the cycles that we find ourselves in, as people and as societies, were coming around to a moment where things were moving to the right. A lot of events in 2016 really crystallized that for me, and I felt that it was worth exploring how an artist can contribute in an era of misinformation and propaganda disseminated in brand-new modes—ways that we’re not yet trained to identify.

Looking at it through her lens—if you forgive the pun—was useful in two ways. It allowed me to interrogate an aesthetic vocabulary of the Right in a moment where it felt like that was resurging, and a play about Joseph Goebbels or Hitler—in a funny way—is too easy, because almost no one would ever do the things they did. The things that Leni Riefenstahl did are harder to define and reject, which felt more useful. What first drew me to it is, I thought, how interesting that in a regime that is so racist and anti-Semitic and sexist and homophobic—everything—that this woman was the filmmaker for them. It felt so incongruous and worth exploring.

Rail: Did you find her struggle credible?

Clements: What I have emerged with is a sense of more than just her immorality, because I think there was a great deal of immoral behavior on her part. It’s kind of an amorality and an apoliticism that is almost more haunting because she said she could have made those films for Joseph Stalin. I think that might be true, but I don’t think that’s any better than being a committed Nazi. She lived two-thirds of her life after that and never repented and never took any accountability or responsibility, and saw herself as a victim of repression, which I think is completely outrageous.

Rail: Would you characterize hers as a kind of willful blindness?

Clements: I think so. If you’re someone like Riefenstahl, who’s having dinner with Goebbels and with Hitler, surely you’re privy to most of it, just from overhearing things—jokes at the table. “I never heard Hitler say anything anti-Semitic”—this is what she says. But where I think she becomes interesting for an artist—or, I hope, for anybody who watches the show—is it’s very easy for us to say, “I never would have done what she did,” and, “How much she participated is more than I would do.” But what is our personal line in the sand in moments of political tension or injustice? What does that mean then if you were a civil servant or a teacher? It opens up questions for us all.

Rail: She does more than nothing. She is the principal propagandist.

Clements: Yes, exactly.

Rail: Hitler had scarcely been presented on film prior to Triumph of the Will. She crafted his image for the German public and even the international audience.

Clements: Oh, yes. That film led directly to so much violence and suffering. Even if she claims that she was in no way a National Socialist, it doesn’t matter. She still contributed to deaths in the Holocaust and in other ways at that time. The most important question is surely: What responsibility does she bear for the horrors that unfolded? And what responsibility do we have as a society to be discerning about what we consume? What are our lines in the sand—our unequivocal moral benchmarks? Are we doing enough with enough robustness to analyze what we are seeing and what we’re being shown and what is true and what is not and what is propaganda and what is reality and what is AI? And so we have a set of questions that are very contemporary.