Author: So Mayer
Translator: Qin Tian
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: Sight & Sound (December 14, 2020)
Judith Mayne, a professor of humanities and social sciences at Ohio State University, included a photograph of pioneer female filmmaker Dorothy Azner, but it certainly doesn't belong to Dorothy, but it's now in Dorothy's archive at UCLA. This snapped photograph shows Marlene Dietrich holding a fat, extremely grumpy cat in the yard of Dorothy and Marion Morgan's home in Hollywood, and she loves it.
Marlene Dietrich
Although several biographies of Marlene Dietrich have revealed the queer circle around the star and the subculture of sexy Hollywood — the "sewing circle" — the "sewing circle" —usually refers to a group of people, mostly women, who often get together to chat for the purpose of sewing and doing handicrafts), Judith Mayne points out that she can't find a friendship between the only lesbian director (Dorothy) from the studio era and his most famous bisexual female star (Marlene Dietrich). Historical facts of acquaintance or love.
Dorothy Azner (left)
In this informal group photo between friends, the image of Dietrich holding a cat looks amusing, a reference to her stardom: in a scene after the opening scene of Humiliation (1931), she playfully picks up a more hairy, moody cat from bed and deliberately places it in front of her lower body.
Humiliation (1931)
The scene became a double-coded reference, linking her stardom before the Hayes Code, the decline of Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic, the global capital of gay culture at the time, and Dietrich's overt sexuality.
In addition to her brief connection with the Queer community (which remains unwavering in American culture), Dietrich's stardom builds on the aura she formed from Weimar's Cabaret culture, which added a sexual advantage to her first studio film with Joseph von Sternberg, the first time Stemburg gave her a role in the Ufa film The Blue Angel (1930).
The Blue Angel (1930)
"How can a well-off girl utter vulgar sentences like a Berliner?" Dietrich asked bluntly in her memoir, My Life. She painstakingly hinted at the gulf between herself and the character Laura she played, and mentioned that Sternborough had hired herself as a Guide in Berlin Slang. Stenburg's dazzling trick in The Blue Angel will lead Dietrich into Hollywood—from making the public feel that both Dietrich and Laura are one person, and Laura, the good girl educated in the convent, is also portrayed by Dietrich in her memoirs.
In Morocco (1930) and Venus Blonde (1932), von Sternborough portrayed her as a cabaret performer flirting with men, women, and misfortunes. Laura Horac, a film professor at Carleton University in Canada, believes that the film gives Dietrich what may be the "most reproduced portrait" of our time, and also gives Dietrich a comical name – the performer Amy Jolly, is Jolly synonymous with homosexuality? She wore a perfect, fitting top hat and tuxedo, with a cigarette dangling from her hand.
Morocco (1930)
As Horac explores in Girls Become Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema: 1908-1934, the shot of Dietrich wearing pants on the screen dangles in the blink of an eye. Horac cites more than 400 Silent American films featuring women in cross-dressing, a metaphor that "is associated with healthy entertainment." In the movie "Morocco", when Dietrich kisses the lips of a female audience, it is also a rare flash of light for the star to be intimate with another woman on the screen.
It wasn't until Light of New Orleans (directed by René Claire, 1941) that Dietrich played a role that held on to another woman: she played Countess Leddell spent more time on Clementine, a maid played by Theresa Harris, than she did on either of the two men.
The Light of New Orleans (1941)
Clementine dressed and undressed Mrs. Ledell, and played tricks to delay her male suitors, even defending her at one point with a gun. However, their intimacy is bound to be broken and defined by racial hierarchies, and Horac argues that Amy Jolly/Dietrich's outstanding pansexual orientation and positive desires are diffused and extended by the "ubiquitous" Oriental context of Morocco.
In 1933, Dietrich's off-screen wearing pants caused an uproar. It's a warning of the upcoming Hayes Code, which, more than many people are willing to admit, is closer to Nazi ideology, which imposes severe restrictions and censorship on visual representation, queer groups, feminism, and physical and mental illness.
Horac's exhaustive research reveals media reactions to Dietrich's decision to wear a tuxedo to appear in "the world's most evil film"—Cecil Kelly. Report on the premiere of B. Demir's "Spring colors of the Rogong Palace" (1932). In the film, Demir's refusal to cut out the "Naked Moon Dance" indirectly led to the intervention of the Hayes Code in 1934, and the scene was eventually removed.
Spring in the Luo Palace (1932)
At the Hollywood premiere in January 1933, however, any outrage (or awakening) caused by the dance seemed to shift to Dietrich's pants, though earlier in the month she also wore them to the premiere without telling anyone else— a low-budget German art film. That film, however, was Girl in Uniform (directed by Leontyne Sagan and Karl Florisch), and it is often referred to as the first lesbian film of all time.
The Girl in uniform (1931) The Girl in uniform (1931)
Given that the film depicts an uprising against authority at a Prussian girls' school, where a new student is imprisoned for wearing tights and stockings to confess to the teacher in school dramas, we can see how anxiety about what girls do together is entangled with the stockings they wear and placed on the long legs of Berliners, Hollywood's favorite.
The Girl in uniform (1931)
It is possible that Dedre and the film's director, Sagan, met. According to research on the lesbian community, Sagan, who was born in Austria, also attended Max Reinhardt's famous Berlin Drama School, where, as Dietrich puts it, "there are too many girls who make me feel like I'm back in elementary school again," though she goes on to say that she means "to be one of hundreds of amateur actresses." But her words also hint at the intense passion and attachment between women that we can see in The Girl in the Uniform.
It was through Reinhardt that Dietrich was able to compose a parody satirical of current events in his comedy theater, where she sang what is now considered the first (and best surviving) lesbian cabaret track, The Wen die Best e Freundin, composed by Marcellus Schiffer and Misha Spratsky, who were also the screenwriters of the burlesque. Dietrich said she completed the duet with the show's star (and Schiffer's wife), Margo Lyon, an established French actress who made Dietrich both fascinated and scared.
Stressing her innocence and piety in her biography, Dietrich claimed that she suggested tying violets around the shoulders of her clothes, completely unaware of their latent queer meaning, and she was shocked when some critics described the move as "hermaphrodite". Dietrich quickly eschewed any sexual topics related to the show, and she and Spolanski began to become intimate during their exile, and it was they who rescued the show's third performer, Oscar Calvis, from Nazi Germany.
Rather than avoidance, the Queer films of the Weimar period and the off-screen image of Dietrich resonate on a deeper level: it is not only a decadence, but also a rebellion. Unlike the lascivious connotations in von Sternberg's work, Dietrich suggests that the Weimar Republic shaped her wartime work, from becoming the famous host of the "German anti-Nazi" of immigrant artists such as Jean Gaben who fled the Nazis (Dietrich made lunch for them every week), to her overt trips to Europe organized by the American Labor Force, in short, from 1944 to 1945, when she was often under fire.
As the feminist and gay film critic B. Ruby Ricky pointed out in 1981, recognizing the anti-fascist critical tendencies in The Girl in Uniform also means recognizing how this critique exists in the desires of lesbians; thus, just as the queer films of the Deidre Weimar period were not just about gossip and quips, no matter how appealing they may be.
As I explored in A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing, sex, especially queer groups, is often ignored by politics, which in itself is a form of homophoby hatred. Dietrich is acutely aware that gay song and dance culture is under threat, while the media interprets her position as provocative.
Like the pun between "two girlfriends" in the song "My Best Girlfriend", Dedrey, who wears long pants and attends the premiere of Demir's movie, is like the schoolgirl in "The Girl in uniform" who wears stockings and confesses her love. At the time, Dietrich was taking a visionary position on freedom: What more queer interpretations could we come up with on this?