We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars…
Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892
I Love acting, It is so much more real than life…..
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Oscar Wilde
Love is not only the only thing worth living for, it is disease, often fatal...
Stendhal
Marlene Dietrich’s aura created a myth. She was at once a prima donna full of attitude, an impossible creature with a husky voice, stunning legs, weird eyebrows, and the way smokes a cigarette that could make the thing actually seem alluring. Marlene Dietrich is a most extra avant-garde persona in Hollywood. She was an icon for over five decades. She was femme fatale, elegant, with ambiguous sexual appeal. Marlene Dietrich was born in Schonberg/ Berlin(1901). Her original name is Maria Magdalene Dietrich.
The Blue Angel is based on Heinrich Mann’s novel it called “Professor Unrat “After the great success of Der Blau Engel (The Blue Angel), Dietrich signed contract and agreed to Paramount’s terms. Dietrich left her local celebrity behind and embarked a voyage into international stardom, under the protégée of Sternberg. She made a spectacular entrance in December 1930, American Film goers were entire to her first film in Hollywood.
Dietrich’s career in United States made her legendary icon. She played extremely ….roles like a mysterious cabaret singer in Morocco, elegant femme de rue in Dishonoured, lost in train avantganza character in Shanghai Express, an portrait of Aristocrat in Scarlett The Empress,
Stefan Zweig called it at the time “Babylon of the World”. The post-war revolution that profoundly impacted the social atmosphere of Berlin society changed certain rules. The chaos led creative and colourful environment. As a young girl Marlene found herself in Bohemian Life of Berlin. She applied for competition to Marx Reinhardt’s Drama School in Berlin. M.Reinhardt was an infamous impresario in the German Theatre History. He directed most prestigious plays in spectacular venues: The Deutsches Theater, the Kammer Spiele, Grosses Schauspiel Haus.
She had played a few minor roles in Reinhardt’s productions. The Taming of the Shrew and A Mid Summer Nights Dream (1923).Her debut professional appearance with a movie camera, she made an impromptu screen test in 1922. Directed by a young Photographer Stefan Lorant. But her first encounter was in 1923,the costume drama-film called “Der Kleine Napoleon”(The Little Napoleon) She played a role as a maid who helps the courtesan to escape from Napoleon’s Younger Brother Jerome. Dietrich kept working hard both direction, stage and films. Arthur Labson’s Manon Lescaut(1926),became the first film of Dietrich’s career to be shown in United States. Marlene Dietrich’s momentum continued.
Joseph Von Sternberg, as this is the director whose name it springs to mind most inseparable couple of Cinema, like the other German Auteur R.W. Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla, or Helmut Berger and Visconti. He is the person who was inextricably linked with Marlene Dietrich’s extraordinary transformation into a legendary icon, and he gave her international reputation as a world famous star. Joseph von Sternbeg was another example of Autodidact Author with strong discipline, like the other celebrated autodidact and dictator director Charles Chaplin. Austrian Émigré director Joseph von Sternberg had brilliant career in Hollywood and his own power at the Paramount Studios. J. Von Sternberg moved to Berlin for his new project in the name of UFA. Joseph Von Sternberg had been granted enormous powers by UFA, which is also easy connection to help to Jannings Film an entrée to the United States Market. Der Blau Engel(The Blue Angel,1930),was a vitally significant project, but the protagonist actress role wouldn’t become clear? The thing is who would she be? That part was the most speculative nominee audition for the right cast picture.. Joseph von Sternberg described his image that was already in his own mind’s eye….”here was not only a model who had been designed by Rops, but Toulouse Lautrec would have turned a couple of handsprings had he laid eyes on her.
Her appearance was ideal: what she did with it was something else again. That would be my concern….”
Dietrich came to stage, and she performed with great élan. She was quite cool to handle enough. Marlene Dietrich became the muse of Joseph Von Sternberg. That was the beginning of journey, collaboration with Marlene for to create those immortal masterpiece films in Hollywood. Marlene Dietrich was lucky, because her previous films performance show she were coquette rather than an enigmatic-mysterious femme fatale. Her Persona was hiding in someway. Finally it is significant that Joseph von Sternberg realized its potential in her stage performance instead of using her film references. By the other way, she had no any strong artistic connections like the other actresses which gave those actresses (like Brigitte Helm or Lucie Mannheim) a privilege status in the inner circle of Berlin Film Business.
Joseph Von Sternberg instructed her, and she became most iconic figure in the Hollywood Stars. After great success of Der Blau Engel (The Blue Angel), Dietrich signed contract and agreed to Paramount’s terms. In the Studio Years, Paramount called European Sophistication, and working with some European directors like Ernst Lubitsch, and Josef von Sternberg.
Marlene Dietrich, She arrived in New York on April 9, 1930.In her American debut with “Morocco” in 1930. Morocco was the first film on Dietrich and Sternberg collaborated in Hollywood. After first film, their work together spanned 5 years and 6 movies in Hollywood...
Morocco where Dietrich as Amy, a cabaret chanteuse in black tuxedo, and top hat, she roaming around and singing a chanson with her husky voice, and she moves rapidly forward to kiss a lady, just on front of Foreign Legionnaires and Rich Tourist gazed at the surprising scene with staring eyes. She was unconventional figure on the Hollywood Scenery. This extra avant-garde sense created by Sternberg. He was the one of remarkable director of cinema’s allure and most elaborate stylist. This kind of female protagonist image was contrast to predominant female image of Hollywood Star System. The Depression time female protagonist at Warner Brothers was the gold diggers. Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell played roles the type gold diggers. But also in the time was unlike stereotype heroines like Key Francis. The most of the Stars under the heavy contract which highly competition with several other major Studios. MGM’s Swedish Star Greta Garbo and sensational Katherine Hepburn were labelled box-office. And the other side is Warner’s infamous revolutionary star Bette Davis. The case of Bette Davis was really unexpected. Maria La Place’s article on Bette Davis”….
Davis came to signify rebellion against male authority, demand for control over her work, the struggle for autonomy and artistic integrity. In the context of the Thirties, it is remarkable kind of signification for a woman. Even more remarkable is the fact that Davis went on to greater success and power throughout the period under consideration without overt punishment….”
Morocco, Maghrib is such an abstract territory, being in the middle of no where or metaphorically not belongs to anywhere, the atmosphere in 1930’s shocking liberation, imperialist desires and human borders mixed up; we understand clearly terror, delight, sexual lust, exhibitionism, passion. In the sense of Paul Bowles or the other Flaneurs. ( Paul Bowles became icons of the expatriates&bohémien centered in Tangier.) Amy Jolly (Dietrich), She is a cabaret singer, she sings the ambiguously titled” what am I bid for my apples” to the macho men of Legion, and expatriate elites in the principal Night Club, soon after fell in love with a simple legionnaire Tom Brown (Cooper), but hung around with rich guy and finally Dietrich in an evening gown shedding her cocotte’s life style ,abandoning a sweet millionaire ,walking off through the Moorish town Gateway in the company of bunch of conscious local women on the desert towards the disappearing legion and her lover. In Morocco, she is the embodiment of self-consciousness and desire of exotic territories melancholy.
The performances of Dietrich in each composition and framing, gesture, facial expression, vocal toning is marked by Sternberg’s authority, highly stylized and meticulously selected and manipulated by Sternberg himself. That’s make Sternberg is a master of certain manners and an Author of the Cinema’s delicate and most fine stylist. His manner reflects the connection between director and painter.’Mise-en scene that primarily reference of Sternbergian Style.
The other most confound point is Sternberg’s heroine sculpted and painted. That physical extension shocks us like in Renoir. The type of visual experience is sculpture in motion. When Amy Jolly seizes up Menjou, a particular manner of Sternberg’s films are partially theatrical, they are located by the special nature of their actions. In Morocco, Sternberg’s shots noonday sun that creates a shadow filled atmosphere.
According to Carole Zucker ….”The acting is theatrical in two senses. First, because it transgresses the type of expressive behaviour that is considered “life-like” in films. ‘Theatricality in ordinary life consists in the resort to this special grammar of composed behaviour; it is when we suspect that behaviour is being composed according to this grammar of…conventions that we regard it as theatrical. We feel that we are in the presence of some action which has been devised to transmit beliefs, attitudes and feeling of a kind that the composer wishes us to have.’ An example this type behaviour in Morocco occurs when Dietrich is brought into Ulrich Hauptmann’s (Captain Caesar) office, where Gary Cooper is being held for his assault on two Arabs the previous night….The second way of the performance in Sternberg’s films are theatrical is their utilization of behaviour and conditions peculiar to the stage. The Dressing room shot between Paul Porcasi and Dietrich provides examples of the various ways in which the performances are invested with theatricality…”
Dietrich second film was “Dishonoured “(1931), directed by Von Sternberg. Marlene’s cod name X-27 was the original title of World War I. espionage melodrama which she played like a legendary Mata Hari. Dietrich is cast as an officer’s widow who has taken the direction as a prostitute than later o joining to Secret Service. Dietrich, particularly in Dishonoured, kind of her frozen figure, mechanic gesture, only thing is all body language. Sternberg used certain angle to create heroic gesture of Dietrich.
Shanghai Express was the third project Dietrich with Von Sternberg. The story of a group of passenger held hostage by a Chinese, the train voyage along from Beijing to Shanghai, extremely existentialist platform, under the symbolic Kanji characters, lights and shade alternating in its corridors and couchette wagons, travellers and the unknown geography. China is the other exotic platform, as a chosen subject matter as desirable exotic territory, evocative and erotic. Marlene, the creature of the half-light and demi-monde is Shanghai Lily, the chiaroscuro she constantly moves in establish that her majestic statue, like goodness is only half obscured by her worldliness.
Carole Zucker writes:”….Dietrich’s de-eroticization is comparable to the suppression of the erotic among the figures in icon painting. (In many icons it is not only the intimation of the erotic that is checked, but gender identity, acknowledged only by pictorial convention, is also concealed.) In Sternberg’s films the narratives centre on the Dietrich figure’s love affairs; it is implied that she has known and knows of a world which partakes of erotic. And yet all glimpses of Dietrich engaged in amatory acts are expressly forbidden. More important than the denial of explicit sexual acts (which may constitute a part of eroticism) is the mode in which Dietrich is represented. In order for Dietrich to truly obtain a quality of eroticism she would have to be presented as a more “real” being. Eroticism is a part of a condition of humanness from which Dietrich is excluded; the many formal strategies previously enumerated withdraw her from the vital existence that embraces the erotic. The moment of erotic recognition of Dietrich that is continually promised is obstructed use it would communicate an intimacy to the spectator and to Dietrich’s fellow actors that is expressly prohibited by laws of the Sternbergian world….”
Blonde Venus (1932), the simple story is a mother’s affection for her child. In Blonde Venus, Herbert Marshall falls in love with Helen (Dietrich) when he sees her swimming nude in the Black Forrest like a nymph. The truth is Marshall fell in love with a fairy tale, an image. His frustration makes him obsessive and transforms the lover a monster. When Dietrich back to her stage career, to except even invite sexual enslavement by a rich protégé and re-enter into the ambience of around of night-clubs acts with sado-masochistic trapping. The general concept of the film is structured on classical Hollywood themes where the woman struggle economically, sexually, and double standard of matriarchal society. Blonde Venus in particularly plays over the family breakdown syndrome, and the reflection and child’s separation from his mother. In Blonde Venus, Carry Grant plays a wealthy businessman who helps Helen/Dietrich, she became his mistress.
Blonde Venus is the film in which the Hollywood and extra-avant-garde manners of Sternberg’s work are controversially linked. Blonde Venus was intended to be a similarity that American Audience could familiar identify in term of the parallel concept it showed with films from the other Studios.
There also interestingly parallel thematic between two major Studios, MGM and Paramount, it’s kind of secret deal between Garbo’s film subjects and Dietrich’s which suggests that each studio. For Garbo’s Mata Hari there is Dietrich’s Dishonoured, for Grand Hotel there is Shanghai Express, for Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise there is Blonde Venus, and finally Queen Christina there is Catherine The Great (The Scarlet Empress ).
The Scarlet Empress (1934), the film contains the extraordinary master pieces of lighting effects in the Cinema History. Von Sternberg transformed Dietrich into an icon Madonna, particularly the sequence the glint of a teardrop diamond she is fondling against her cheek, restore the hardness to her looks and suggest the harsh rule of the future Empress of Russia. Dietrich as a courtesan Empress: with ambiguous reference uniform she slips on for her coup d’etat and her transvestite cabaret uniform. She is in the middle of conspiracies of love, passion, power and perversion in the baroque court. Dietrich’s sexuality is remained surface through the exercise of destructive reign. Political despotism and sexual dominance combine into sadistic pleasure. In Shanghai Express, the acting style becomes more mature, remarkably refined. Her poses extends her ability, the moment of indulgencing herself. Laura Mulvey interprets radical use of Freudian and Lacanian perspective,” Sternberg’s ‘fetishistic scopophilia ‘and Hitchcock’s sadistic voyeurism. Both alternatives are phallocentric: both depend on ‘the image of castrated woman’…”
“The Devil is a Woman”, (1935) the last film which Von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. The Devil is a Woman novel by Pierre Louys, and the script written by John Dos Passos and Sam Winston. Dos Passos, his major work is the U.S.A trilogy, comprising The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936). Doss Passos as a leaing novelis his days, he moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter like Faulkner ( films of Howard Hawks ), he had frequented with good friends Fernand Leger, Ernest Hemingway, Blaise Cendrars.
“The Devil is a Woman”, Concha who humiliates her men for no other reason than for her super-ego and perversity. She is the one of cold portrait, betrayer in the name of her desires, and female sadist to the male masochist.
Von Sternberg left Paramount for Colombia Pictures. His contract was cancelled, because; his refusal to compromise with the studio system and by his own profligate style. His next project was The Crime& Punishment, Sternberg transformed Dostoyevsky’s classic to the cinematographic vision. He created a Kafkaesque fable, dark dreams, and ambiguous still life portraits with Peter Lorre. It’s is the unexpected combination in the name of Cinematographic Adventure: Dostoyevsky, Lorre and Sternberg…
The conclusion is Von Sternberg’s works for well deserved to profound analyse than the speculative shimmering of his extra avant-garde style or baroque camp. There is highly political concern, social critics, and the structure revolutionist, expressionist, proto-feminist, marginal, provocative, iconoclast for the Studio Years, in the Thirties, in these films with his muse Dietrich. Particularly most of the individual elements in his films: especially lighting schemes produces profoundly expressionist and evocative scenes. Dietrich becomes an Icon.
According to Susan Sontag….”the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of tree million feathers. Camp is the painting of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l’oeil insect and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Steinberg’s six American movies with Marlene Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, Devil Is a Woman….In Camp there is often something demesure in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work it self….”
Generally, women have been portrayed in the Studio Years of Hollywood movies as pathetic, sacrificial, and passive. Their roles are frequently constructed within patriarchal norms and they function as ideal house-wives, bad girls and good girls, objects of desire, perfect mother or great educators. They live without self-determination and without individuality. Hollywood female characters are typically products of cliché and stereotypical male point of views. There are a few exceptional directors during the Studio Years, like Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. Howard Hawks he is an infinity modernist Author, he offers to audiences exceptional Modern female portraits. Hawksian women play self conscious roles and posses’ remarkable self awareness. Marlene Dietrich and Sternberg films were strongly characterised and coded with intellectual terminology. Sternberg left behind gigantic mark for female screen personae in terms of pre-coded types. Dietrich image is extremely unique. Sternberg developed a unique visual experience and auditory style. Her image is quite unusual, unconventional in Hollywood Scene. Hollywood norms tend to hold the traditional values, dominant moral issues, subcultural meaning in check, but Sternberg vision was deconstructive, anarchist, exhibitionist, his perspective offer a radically critique of patriarchal convention. Dietrich’s radical manifesto as appeal was magical. Dietrich is a most paradoxical persona: often wearing trousers, femme fatale, to adopt posture of men, vamp, standing with legs spread, sexually domineering women, and arms akimbo.
She became an icon who acted stardom, extra avant-garde figure on the stage. She was also provocative and controversial. In the context of the Thirties, Sternberg and Marlene were marginal figures in Hollywood. Dietrich & Sternberg collaboration was an extra ordinary partnership in Hollywood. Sternberg’s films insist that life is not a subject to moral cliché. Dietrich’s persona clearly derives from Christian Iconography to Muse of Modern Times. Dietrich’s persona obviously derives from femme fatale aspect inspired by her creator’s alter-ego, like the way Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Sternberg one of the last dandies, his words “Marlene is not Marlene in my films, let’s get that clear. Marlene is not Marlene, I am Marlene, Marlene is me, and she knows better than anyone.”
Sternberg’s films occupy a unique platform where the star system built that Sternberg himself presented Marlene as star. Stenberg identified to himself the value of the star. Morocco is the perfect example of Sternberg’s relations with Marlene .La Bessiere’s behaviour since the early scenes as the protector and suitor of Marlene. In the port scene, he just wants to help her, and gives her card for any help.
Marlene’s persona built up under the tutelage of master’s vision. Bill Nichols who notes on Sternberg “…. Promises pleasure in a context of presence and absence, hide and seek…he stresses the tenuous alliance between our belief in the illusion and our belief in its reality. He threatens to unveil a scandal before our very eyes; he invites us to play in the gap, the wedgelike opening that his style unveils...”
Marlene Dietrich, She became Hollywood’s star of glamour, allure, and mystique. She is the one of most sophisticated and extremely fetishist. Dietrich is a body of pure Art, she become a form of aestheticism. Dietrich body’s an ambiguous platform of sexual symbols.
In the Thirties it is an actor presented slightly different form as being desirable and attractive in a man with sexual ambiguity. Carry Grant is also phenomenon actor in the Studio Years. His persona developed by Screw-ball Comedies which he plays naïve, boyish/childish characters. His representation of heterosexual personality which is so different approach in the period of the actors. Carry Grant is signalled as different from most of the Hollywood Actors; his performance is integrally linked with Homosexual manners. The Central couples of screw-ball comedies are in the films metaphorically integrated the play action means liberating non-phallic energy. Screwball films to signify in the terms of recovered infantile polymorphous ness.
The case of Carry Grant, there is clearly connection which is something like personae of a positive reference for bisexuality.
Marlene Dietrich was a close friend and companion of Max Reinhardt, friend of Hemingway, and being romantically linked some of Hollywood playboys, actors like Yul Brynner, Frank Sinatra, Boyer, and Remarque… She had great love affair with French Actor Jean Gabin and some romantic affairs with actresses Ona Manson and writer Mercedes De Acosta ( Greta’s friend too ).Undoubtedly, Marlene Dietrich’s legend still with us, ‘Lili Marlene’ the marching song of her and we still singing “Falling in Love Again”….
MMVI & LONDON, C.CERIT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Zucker, Carole, The Idea of the Image: Joseph Von Sternberg’s Dietrich Films, Associated University Presses, Inc., 1988
Baxter, John, The Cinema of Joseph Von Sternberg, Barnes&Co.NY, 1971
Baxter, Peter, Sternberg, Paramount and America, (BFI, 1993)
Baxter, Peter, Sternberg, (BFI, 1980)
Nichols, Bill Ideology and the Image, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981
Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Screen 16,no.3 (1975)
Sontag, Susan, Against Interpretation, New York: Delta, 1966
Sternberg, Josef Von, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, San Francisco: Mercury House, 1988
Carr, Larry, Four Fabulous Faces: Garbo, Dietrich, Crawford and Swanson, Galahad,
New York, 1978
Sarris, Andrew, The Film of Josef von Sternberg. New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1966
