Insight Out presents Leni Riefenstahl drama

By Paul Haist

There has been little if any love lost between Jews and the late Leni Riefenstahl. In fact there has been little love lost between most principled people and Riefenstahl, who is best known for her cinematic propagandizing for Hitler's Third Reich.
Many would agree that the one-time German film star who became the director responsible for the films "Triumph of the Will" and "Olympia"—both widely accepted as cinematic paeans to Aryanism—was a gifted artist, a genius even, but one who was horribly flawed by a willingness to employ her gift as a tool of evil even more monumental than her art.
"Triumph of the Will" chronicled the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg. To this day, it is held up as a penultimate model of the propaganda film.
"Olympia" documented the 1936 Berlin Olympiad. Some hail the film as the greatest sports documentary every made, while others rank it with "Triumph" as a Nazi propaganda film.
Now, a Seattle playwright has created a drama that explores Riefenstahl's life during the time she created "Triumph of the Will" for the Third Reich.
Portland's Insight Out Theatre Collective will present Sarah Greenman's "Leni" at the Academy Theater starting on Friday, Oct. 20 and running every Thursday through Saturday, beginning at 8:30 p.m. until Nov. 20. A 1 p.m. Sunday matinee is scheduled for Oct. 29.
"Leni" unfolds in the context of Riefenstahl directing her own autobiographical film. It explores themes of artistic responsibility, modern media and personal and social myth making, according to its creator.
The play features Portland actors JoAnn Johnson and Cecily Overman both of whom play Riefenstahl. The playwright directs.
When the play opens, Riefenstahl is already dead.
"She is in this purgatory or limbo, a liminal space, where she comes out at the very first scene and she's reading her own obituary," said Greenman. "From there she decides to remake the story of her life. And throughout the filmmaking process she comes into conflict with her own self about the validity of the events of her life."
Johnson and Overman represent Riefenstahl at opposite ends of her adult life: Johnson as Leni in the post-World War II era, Overman as the Leni during the era of the Third Reich.
Greenman explained her methodology.
"I found lots of things she wrote, said and did during World War II?and I found things she said in later years that were in complete opposition to one another," said Greenman.
"In order to get at all of that, the younger and the older self, I had to split them into two different women. The actors play the same woman, but they are two totally different characters. Those (differing) things that she says and does are juxtaposed next to each other. So we can see the changes, how memory changes and how we change it ourselves. Time does very strange things to our memories and our understandings of ourselves," said the playwright.
Greenman's interest in Riefenstahl arose about four years ago when, while a student of playwriting at Mills College, she saw the documentary film "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl."
"It brought up a lot of questions for me," said Greenman. "I had lots of questions about her."
What kinds of questions?
"Questions of artistic responsibility. What kinds of things are happening now that I will be held responsible for in my work, in the context in which I am living," said Greenman.
"I also had questions about aesthetics, personal aesthetics, cultural aesthetics, collective aesthetics and what that says about us as a culture or as an artist or as an individual."
Greenman seems to have little sympathy for Riefenstahl.
"I have huge problems with the choices that she made. There is no doubt that she was a cinematic genius, but in terms of politics she was a total nitwit."
Greenman expressed dissatisfaction with how Riefenstahl made her work, how she presented her subjects. She referenced Riefenstahl's postwar still photography among central Sudan's mysterious Nuba tribes and drew a parallel between that work and Riefenstahl's cinematic imagery from the Third Reich.
I look at the Nuba photos and I see "Olympia;" I see the perfect, athletic, gorgeous, beautiful Roman-looking body," said Greenman.
She notes, dutifully, that this is an aesthetic that has been around at least since Greek and Roman times, that it's not just Nazi or Stalinist, not a modern phenomenon.
"I seen nothing intrinsically wrong with it, but her (Riefenstahl's) ability to frame just that and eliminate everything else does create a kind of hierarchy, and if that's mass produced—and it's still being mass produced right now, in this country and so many other places—if that (alone) is what's being delivered to the public, then there is the view that that is right and that is the only way."
Greenman called it "deification" and, while acknowledging its beauty, added, "the complete absence of anything else makes me pause and wonder what is the message."
To help her audience understand what Riefenstahl did Greenman employs multimedia technology in the play to present examples of the filmmaker's work.
"We use clips of both films," said Greenman. "We're very interested in presenting her aesthetic on the stage while she's talking about it."
About whether Riefenstahl was fully conscious of what she was doing for the Third Reich, Greenman is circumspect.
"Was she a propagandist? Yes, absolutely, there's no way you can look at 'Triumph of the Will' now and say that's not a piece of propaganda," she said, and then asks, "But was she blind to the cataclysmic forces at work?"
Green dismisses as "difficult to follow" Riefenstahl's claim that her work "was art and it was not political and she had zero, nothing, to do with that."
She thinks Riefenstahl was blind, but not in any way that would absolve her.
"Was she blind because she was an artist and wrapped up (in her work)?" asked Greenman.
"I think she was blind because she chose blindness, and that is the dangerous thing," she concluded.
The Academy Theater is located at 7818 SE Stark St. in Portland.
Tickets are $15 except on Thursdays when they are available on a sliding scale between $5 and $15.
For more information, contact Insight Out Theatre Collective by phone at 503-493-8070 or by E-mail at info@insightouttheatre.org. Visit their Web site at www.insightouttheatre.org.