| Tomorrow marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Marlene Dietrich There are emblematic images in the history of cinema. Bowler hat, cane and baggy trousers - this is Chaplin. The fedora hat, the crooked tie, the look of a beaten dog, which, however, has not yet forgotten how to bite - this is Humphrey Bogart. For some reason, the name Marlene Dietrich brings to mind not the translucent dresses she adored, or even the tuxedo in which she performed her famous number in Joseph von Sternberg’s “Morocco,” but furs. She wraps herself in them and cannot keep warm. The coldness of dispassion lives in her. She seems indifferent to the camera. It seems that she is even a little dissatisfied that she was torn away from some important matters of her own and was forced to film. She makes no effort to please; on the contrary, she warily pushes the viewer away from herself. But this is precisely what turns her into a vague object of desire without gender or age. Not into an attractive woman, but into the visual mechanism of attractiveness itself. Before us is a machine that grinds our desires and fantasies, and it gives us a strange pleasure to watch how this happens.
In fact, Marlene Dietrich is a question mark posed to the acting profession, to the very concept of acting. It would be hard to call her a non-professional actress: at the beginning of her career, she studied at the Max Reinhardt acting school, received excellent training on the German stage, and acted in Hollywood with the best directors - von Sternberg, Raoul Walsh, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Stanley Kramer. At the same time, she was manically preoccupied with her own appearance: in every set there had to be a mirror hanging so that Marlene could check at any moment that everything was in order with her makeup, and during filming she stood under a lighting fixture (so that her cheeks were in the shadows and seemed even more more sunken) and flatly refused to turn to face her partner. And yet I can’t help but feel that even in the most sensual and electrifying scenes she is not completely present in the frame, escaping too close a glance, too frank desire. She did not play according to Stanislavsky's system: transformation was an empty phrase for her. She stated that she never gave the heroines a single trait of her own, and acting always seemed to her a dreary and boring task. And it's not just the pose. But it was precisely the combination of regal indifference with defiant eroticism that gave her image a strange depth. As a German critic aptly put it in a review of one of her first films, “she knows how to be great without doing anything.”
Fame came to Dietrich in 1930, when von Sternberg's The Blue Angel was released worldwide. What happens next is well known. Hollywood, six great films by Sternberg with her participation, in which the director tries to enchant her beauty with veils, fur robes, and fantastic scenery. Acceptance of American citizenship and active anti-Hitler position during the Second World War. In Germany, she was never forgiven for entertaining the Allied troops with her songs. The Berlin grave was desecrated several times. “Fur whore” is the mildest of the insults scrawled on her tombstone. What else? Novels - with women and men, directors, actors, writers and the President of the United States (they completed it in half an hour, as she later told the American critic Kenneth Turan). Countless plastic surgeries allowed her to appear on a bright pink stage in the 1972 film and, as if nothing had happened, to perform her entire classic song repertoire, including Falling in Love Again, the song that brought her fame more than forty years ago. And the decline: a dangerous turning point, forced seclusion and death in 1992 - rumored to be from a heart attack caused by reading her daughter’s frank memoirs.
In one of Dietrich’s biographies there is a funny mention of the jewelry that she borrowed from a relative in order to once again amaze the bohemian environment with the extravagant luxury of her outfit. In diamond necklaces and bracelets, every third stone was fake. This allowed prudent Germans to save money: they seemed to have real stones, and the price was a third cheaper. It seems that in this mixture of real and false brilliance, when it is no longer possible to understand where is the diamond and where is the glass, is Dietrich’s real answer. She couldn't and didn't want to be completely authentic. But this inauthenticity contained its own truth about the world and man. The truth is much more important than what sincerity and openness can tell us. Alexey MEDVEDEV |
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