Comments on: Euphoria #18: Did you ever happen to hear…?

By: dcairns

dcairns — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:10:20 +0000

Great. Just pick an interesting film or subject and let rip!

By: alex

alex — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:42:27 +0000

really? i would love to do that! i will try to think of a topic and then i will get back to you

By: dcairns

dcairns — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:35:48 +0000

Beautiful! You should have your own blog, Alex. Or if you want to write anything for this one, I’ll post it!

Dietrich was always lit brighter than her co-stars, with a very hot light blasting the back of her head for that halo effect. No matter where in a room she stands, she has her own lighting.

By: alex

alex — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:32:52 +0000

i think richard burton said clint eastwood had “dynamic lethargy”, and that is essentially the way i feel about marlene dietrich in this clip. it’s like she’s conserving energy in order to generate that weird glow

By: David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:43:58 +0000

She was too much.

Her daughter Tina (who passed away rather recently) was teriffic in Bertolucci’s Partner, Garrel’s Le Lit de la Vierge, Losey’s Modesty Blaise and Minnelli’s A Matter of Time.

By: dcairns

dcairns — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 20:40:53 +0000

So did Sternberg! “I am Miss Dietrich.”

I read it in the Criterion Collection Scarlet Empress DVD (which people should order at once). Great stuff. Based on that and his truly revolutionary Maria Montez piece, I’d love to read more.

Maria Montez nearly played Death in Cocteau’s Orphee. When Cocteau decided to make the film cheaply and cast his friends, her husband Jean-Pierre Aumont told her she’d play other, more beautiful roles.

“But darling, DEATH should be beautiful!”

By: David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:47:13 +0000

The thing with Dylan, as Todd shows, is that we can never be sure of who we’re looking at from one persona to the next. Dietrich is always clear.

Have you ever read Jack Smith’s article “A Belated Appreciation of V.S.” ? He regards Dietrich and Sternberg as one and the same.

By: dcairns

dcairns — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 19:03:29 +0000

Yes, Marlene is a terrific film. Schell wanted very much to capture a last image of Dietrich, but she refused — and it actually enhances the film.

I was thinking of the term “structuring absence” as I watched I’m Not There. I would actually have preferred not to have had Dylan appear over the end credits, though it’s no biggie.

By: David Ehrenstein

David Ehrenstein — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:43:08 +0000

Have you seen Maximillian Schell’s Marlene ? It’s an interview film in which the subject refuses to appear on camera — a stement in and of itself of considerable import. The aged recluse once known as Marlene Dietrich couldn’t recreate herself for the camera and thus became an off-screen voice with her image a “structuring absence” (as Roland Barthes would say.)

By: dcairns

dcairns — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:55:40 +0000

Ah, but if there’s one thing Marlene loathed, it was “vulgarity”. Which is pretty rich, coming from her.
Not 100% sure what the story of such a film would be. The TCM documentary used the Gabin romance as a lynchpin, but that was just one relationship out of manymanymany.
The Sternberg creative partnership is much more interesting to me, with Sternberg as main character. But a lot of that was kept private and mysterious, so any film would be a work of interpretative fiction.