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"Most works on actresses are largely biographical in nature, with some critical evaluation of particular films and stage appearances thrown into the mix. This anthology by Gerd Gemunden and Mary R. Desjardins, however, presents serious historical and theoretical work on Dietrich's star image and career--all expressed in clear and readable language, devoid of 'jargon.'"--Lucy Fischer, author of "Designing Women: Cinema, Art Deco, and the Female Form"

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Dietrich Icon

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................................viiMary R. Desjardins and Gerd Gemnden, Introduction: Marlene Dietrich's Appropriations................................3Steven Bach, Falling in Love Again...................................................................................25Lutz Koepnick, Dietrich's Face.......................................................................................43Nora M. Alter, The Legs of Marlene Dietrich..........................................................................60Amy Lawrence, Marlene Dietrich: The Voice as Mask....................................................................79Joseph Garncarz, Playing Garbo: How Marlene Dietrich Conquered Hollywood.............................................103Elisabeth Bronfen, Seductive Departures of Marlene Dietrich: Exile and Stardom in The Blue Angel.....................119Patrice Petro, The Blue Angel in Multiple-Language Versions: The Inner Thighs of Miss Dietrich.......................141Mary Beth Haralovich, Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus: Advertising Dietrich in Seven Markets........................162Erica Carter, Marlene Dietrich: The Prodigal Daughter................................................................186Gaylyn Studlar, Marlene Dietrich and the Erotics of Code-Bound Hollywood.............................................211Alice A. Kuzniar, "It's Not Often That I Want a Man": Reading for a Queer Marlene....................................239Mark Williams, Get/Away: Structure and Desire in Rancho Notorious....................................................259Amelie Hastie, The Order of Knowledge and Experience: Marlene Dietrich's ABC.........................................289Mary R. Desjardins, Dietrich Dearest: Family Memoir and the Fantasy of Origins.......................................310Eric Rentschler, An Icon between the Fronts: Vilsmaier's Recast Marlene..............................................328Judith Mayne, "Life Goes On without Me": Marlene Dietrich, Old Age, and the Archive..................................347Judith Mayne, Homage, Impersonation, and Magic: An Interview with James Beaman.......................................364Werner Sudendorf, "Is That Me?": The Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin..............................................376Bibliography.........................................................................................................385Contributors.........................................................................................................401Index................................................................................................................405

Chapter One

In 1934, a Film Pictorial article entitled "Composite Beauty-Hollywood Standard" surveyed the bodies and physiognomies of several leading female film stars in order to compile an image of physical perfection. Norma Shearer ranked first in the category of hair, Loretta Young was seen as having the most desirable eyes, and Irene Dunne and Claudette Colbert surpassed the looks of all other film stars when it came to the shape of noses and mouths. No other star, however, had as many perfect body parts to offer than Marlene Dietrich, the highest grossing screen actress of the time. After Paramount had marketed Dietrich two years earlier as "the women all women want to see" (John Baxter 75), the Film Pictorial essay now instructed the fans exactly what to look at when admiring their star on screen. Dietrich featured with no less than four body parts in the essay's normative vision of female beauty, three of them located in her body's lower regions and all of them, in Dietrich's early Hollywood films, often involved in a calculated aesthetic of display and concealment: her hands, legs, ankles, and feet.

Sarah Berry (Screen Style) has recently examined the extent to which Hollywood star images of the early 1930s encouraged fantasies of personal self-transformation and social mobility that, to some degree, challenged received notions of individual sovereignty, identity, and authority. Accordingly, star images were designed to empower individual spectators to flirt with temporary losses and mimetic transgressions of their ordinary selves; they promoted an ethos of individual self-formation that invited the viewer to adopt the star's features and translate them into a multiplicity of vernacular uses and meanings. In some sense, the 1934 article in Film Pictorial was the culmination of this trend. It not only presented the stars' bodies as prototypes for acts of personal self-redress, but literally dismembered the stars' corporeal appearances in order to fuel desire and capture the imagination. The notion of perfect beauty here bordered the monstrous. Far from recalling classical ideals of physical integrity, balance, and symmetry, the article's vision of composite beauty in fact reached Frankensteinian proportions. In its efforts to exploit the Hollywood cult of stardom at its fullest, Film Pictorial surreptitiously spoke the truth about the reifying logic of Fordist consumer culture. Instead of circulating star images as signs of authenticity and wholeness, Film Pictorial endorsed visions of the human body as marked by atomization and aggregation, by syncretism and montage. Instead of defining beauty as humanity's most captivating attraction, the article invited the fan to enter and exalt in nothing other than the realm of the posthuman, of prosthetic identities.

Given Dietrich's star status in Hollywood in the early 1930s, as well as the continual realignment of her persona with the tastes of Depression-ridden America, Dietrich's prominent position in the Film Pictorial ranking should hardly come as a surprise. What may astonish, however, is the fact that in its search for ideal body parts the article completely bypassed any mention of Dietrich's facial features: her sharp, elongated eyebrows, her dramatically elevated cheekbones, the enigmatic smile of her mouth, the canvas-like composition of her forehead and skin. In the perspective of the judges of Film Pictorial, Dietrich's body and its beauty seemed to begin somewhere below the star's neck. They had no eyes for how Dietrich tended to exhibit her face to her director's camera, nor did they encourage fans to mimic what has marked the circulation of the Dietrich image ever since, namely to emulate how Dietrich staged her countenance as a fetish, one that involved the viewer in a dazzling game of hide and seek, of lure and endless deferral, of multivalent attraction and theatrical artifice.

Film Pictorial's silence about Dietrich's face is particularly surprising if we consider the extent to which Dietrich, in her initial efforts to secure and increase her market value in 1930s Hollywood, subjected her face to a scrupulous process of remodeling and transformation. A good number of production stills and publicity materials, rejected by Dietrich for publication, and gathered at the Marlene Dietrich Collection in Berlin, document in a highly instructive manner Dietrich's quest for facial makeover during the 1930s. Time and again, we can see the trace of Dietrich's pen in these images, pointing out or even correcting certain unwanted aspects of her facial appearance: unwelcome shadows under her eyes; tiny wrinkles around her mouth; stray hairs, which by stubbornly...