‘Beauty Freak’ Offers Unsparing Look at the Avant-Garde Art and Atrocity of Leni Riefenstahl

The German actress and director Leni Riefenstahl is the protagonist — diva would be a better word — at the center of “Beauty Freak,” a new play at the Cell Theatre on Manhattan’s west side. Written by James Clements and directed by Danilo Gambini, the play plants its flag at the bloody crossroads where art and politics meet. It centers on the filming and promotion of “Olympia,” Riefenstahl’s film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics.“Beauty Freak” stars Baize Buzan as Riefenstahl and Keith Rubin as Werner, an assistant who stands in for the audience as a witness to the evasions and equivocations that accompany Riefenstahl’s rise. The set substitutes pink armbands for swastikas, and leans into the director as a species of “girl boss” avant la lettre. Ms. Buzan plays Riefenstahl with imperious gusto. She’s more focused on framing the right shot than reckoning with her soul. Riefenstahl, who died in 2003 at the age of 101, was a dancer and artist who began acting during Weimar but whose breakthrough was “The Triumph of the Will,” from 1935. She writes in her memoir about the first time that she heard Adolf Hitler speak: “I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth’s surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle.”In 1937, two years after directing “Triumph of the Will” — a propaganda production that captured a rally at which more than one million participated — Riefenstahl told the Detroit News that “Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived. He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.” The ardor went both ways, as the Führer admired his prize filmmaker and greenlit her budgets no matter how extravagant.Leni Riefenstahl watching as civilians are shot by German soldiers at Końskie, Poland, 1939. Via Wikimedia CommonsRiefenstahl’s techniques were as innovative as her politics were rancid. In “Olympia” she pioneered surprising camera angles, smash cuts, extreme close-ups and underwater shots. Riefenstahl spent two years editing the footage shot during the Games of the XI Olympiad. The film’s premiere was delayed by the Anschluss, and it was eventually released on Adolf Hitler’s 49th birthday. The final product is reckoned among the greatest movies ever made.“Beauty Freak” — the phrase belongs to Susan Sontag, who coined it in 1975 to describe Riefenstahl in an essay in the New York Review of Books — covers the origins of “Olympia” as well as a subsequent publicity tour that Riefenstahl undertook to America. Hollywood, then largely a Jewish affair, recoiled from the Reich’s star filmmaker. She did, though, secure meetings with Henry Ford, America’s premier antisemite, as well as Walt Disney.Riefenstahl’s charm offensive, though, was blunted by news of Kristallnacht, the Nazi organized pogrom of November 9-10, 1938. That orgy of violence saw the destruction of some 1,400 synagogues, widespread looting and looting, and the imprisonment of 26,000 Jewish men in concentration camps. The Jewish community was ordered to pay a one billion Reichsmark Judenvermögensabgabe or “atonement payment”, for the damage.An organizer of Kristallnacht was the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. “Beauty Freak” shows Riefenstahl and Goebbels butting heads. A similar dynamic is depicted in one of this year’s most lauded novels, Daniel Kehlmann’s “The Director.” That book, which joins another Riefenstahl play this year, centers on Riefenstahl’s contemporary, G.W. Pabst, who also makes arrangements with Goebbels — and his own conscience.The years following the events described in “Beauty Freak” witnessed Riefenstahl descend deeper. She accompanied German troops into Poland in 1939, and reports emerged that at the town of Końskie, she ordered that Jews be removed from the marketplace in advance of filming. A massacre ensued. A photograph captures her distraught on that day. Her film “Tiefland”used interned Roma as extras. Many were subsequently deported to Auschwitz. After the war Riefenstahl spent three years in Allied-controlled prison camps. She was tried four times as part of the denazification regime, and eventually was determined to be a Mitläufer, or “fellow traveller” of the Third Reich, a status she shared with the likes of Hugo Boss and Martin Heidegger. She told the BBC before her death that “I was one of millions who thought Hitler had all the answers. We saw only the good things.”

‘Beauty Freak’ Offers Unsparing Look at the Avant-Garde Art and Atrocity of Leni Riefenstahl

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