28 June - 4 July 2001
Issue No.540
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 June - 4 July 2001 Issue No.540 |
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The shadows
Billed as her final interview, Marlene, Maximilian Schell's 1983 filmed interview with Marlene Dietrich, remains an oddity within the genre, largely because it was so effectively subverted by the actress. The restrictions she placed on the director were extraordinary, not least her insistence that throughout the 93- minute film she never appear before the camera. So she can be heard off-stage, in the kitchen, in the adjacent drawing room, answering questions, but not once does she appear on screen. Nor does she make the interviewers job particularly easy. Asked a question in English, she will reply in French. When the interviewer switches to French, she replies in German. And so the merry-go- round continues. She refuses to be pinned down linguistically as vehemently as she refuses her image to the camera.
Schell, in the end, was left with twelve hours of taped interviews in which he and the legendary star repeatedly argue, voices raised, as she dismisses much of the past and the majority of her performances, is defiantly assertive and absolutely refuses to be led into revealing anything new.
Dietrich was then approaching her nineties and living as a virtual recluse in Paris. Few actresses can have been quite so zealous in fabricating and then protecting their images as Dietrich: her imperiousness in dealing with cameramen and lighting assistants became fabled. To the left, she would demand, and then more light from beneath. Later, during her second incarnation as a cabaret performer, she developed the habit of cleaning the stage herself before every performance, on hands and knees, scrubbing away. Only then could she be sure that there was no dust to detract from the spectacle that she had become and which audiences paid to peruse, no splinters to jag the white fur coat she would drag around, no unwanted detail to mar the image she would project. "Here," she tells her interviewer, her voice accompanying the screening of one of her stage performances, "I turn to the left, and the audience applauds. And then I turn to the right, slowly, and they will applaud again, and cheer." And they do.
Her cabaret performances were immensely mannered, but by that point in her career Dietrich had long been established as one of cinema's great stylists of temperament. Her physical image had become fixed, and it was as far away from Lola, the dumpy hausfrau of Der blaue Engel, Dietrich's first starring role, as it was possible to be. Though the psychological complexities of Josef Von Sternberg's 1930 film, particularly its tortured exploration of masochism, were to be replayed in the seven films he and Dietrich made together after crossing the Atlantic, once in America the actress, with the encouragement of her mentor, quite literally recast herself. Gone was the slightly plump figure, the rounded cheeks, the twenties rosebud pout, to be replaced by something much more sleek and far more inflexible.
It is the outrageous aestheticism of the seven films Dietrich made with Von Sternberg, culminating in The Devil is a Woman, released in 1935, that fixed the screen persona of the actress. And despite her protestations to Schell, her brusque and unfair dismissal of the influence of Von Sternberg, it was he, as much as Dietrich, who was responsible for that creation.
Inevitably, it would mark all her later performances. Behind her bravura performance as the fortune teller in Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil, a role embodying the director's lifelong fascination with grotesques, lies the shadow of Concha Perez, Dietrich's character in The Devil is a Woman, who wanders through an operatic version of Spain wreaking havoc. Behind the comic, brawling saloon bar singer in the comic Western Destry Rides Again lurks both Lola, star of a far sleazier Berlin cabaret, and the Blonde Venus who, in the Von Sternberg film of the same name, ends up in a much less funny corner of America, the director's nightmare portrayal of the Deep South of the 1920s. As she croons "See what the boys in the back room will have" in Destry Rides Again, Dietrich parodies those earlier roles with a perfectly pitched irony.
By 1983, however, she was less willing to play with that screen persona. They never wanted to see me, she tells Schell, and if they want to see me now it is just morbidity.
Marlene, almost inevitably, came quickly to slot neatly into that ambiguous category, the cult film, the indeterminate appellation it receives in the majority of film guides. Schell had little choice, given his subject's refusal to comply with the ground rules of the documentary than to turn his film into a dissection of the impossibility of making the film that he wanted to make. The film he wanted to make would have juxtaposed the face of a by-then ancient, reclusive actress with the perfectly fabricated image that she presented on screen half a century before. It was an exercise in bathos into which Dietrich refused to be drawn. Conscious of her iconic status, aware that icons of the screen, like all icons, remain iconic only so long as they accept the reductionism that state demands (one condition of which is to abandon any right of reply), she refused to compromise Von Sternberg's and her own creation with any image of what it had become.
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