In the opening moments of Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), a complacent Professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) chirps hopefully towards a corner of his breakfast-room cueing his pet bird into song. Receiving no answering chirp he advances towards the cage, a food morsel in hand. Sorrow and surprise cross his face; without a word he withdraws the body of the dead bird and hands it to his housekeeper, who receives it matter-of-factly and drops it in the fire. "No more singing", she says, "No more singing".
Marlene Dietrich, the glamorous and seductive star whose international career as a singer and sex symbol was launched by The Blue Angel was no caged bird. Dietrich gained her fame through a combination of beauty, timing, wartime gallantry, professionalism and an indefinable star quality. The singing was not so much the point but an image suggestive of an elegant dominatrix that she played to such effect in her cabaret scenes. Her fascination lay in the entire ensemble; aloof, indifferent, unapproachable, self- knowing - not a sex "object" but a sexual and sexualised "subject", the narrative and enigma of sex itself.
Made in Germany at the request of Emil Jannings The Blue Angel was the first of Sternberg's seven mutually beneficial collaborations with the hitherto unknown actress. The director supplied the film's basic conception - weak, masochistic males enthralled by an ambivalent, mysterious temptress whose occasional self-sacrifices fail to mask her mockery of the absurdity of romantic love and sexual infatuation. Dietrich supplied the aloof but sensuous charisma.
Prof. Rath, a repressed middle-aged high-school professor, decides to confront Lola (Dietrich), a cabaret singer, about her "bewitching" of his students. He is entranced by the sensual carefree Lola and continues to return to the Blue Angel night-club to be with her. Soon he becomes the object of ridicule and, in an attempt to protect some notion of "honour" marries her. We next see Professor Rath several years later where unemployment and humiliation have taken their toll on the once dignified teacher. He is dishevelled and broken, hypocritically selling provocative pictures of his wife to the cabaret patrons (an act he earlier promised would never happen while he is with her). He is subject to increasingly degrading circumstances, culminating in a pathetic clown act in front of his former collegues and students. Tragedy? Comedy? It is actually a surprisingly complex morality; a celebration of Lola's sexuality and an ironic observation of Rath's repression and masochism.
The film is embellished by Sternberg's brilliant, stylised compositions which conjour up exotic/erotic atmospheres. Stark, hyperbolic imagery symbolises a prevailing climate of moral degradation. Sternberg's narrative complements his experiments with lighting and décor and his loving exploration of Dietrich's visual and emotional possibilities. In essence "The Blue Angel" is completely homogenous; the plotting and acting are in exactly the same expressionist register as everything else. Here a highly nuianced portrait of a staid elderly man ruined by his obsessive, cuckolded love for a flirtatious woman - both are caught between the codes they live by and their deepest personal impulses - a devastating critique about the cruelty of love and fate.
The unification of East and West Germany that ushered in the last decade of the twentieth century was followed by a remarkable and controversial event that brought Berlin back into the limelight. The mortal remains of a certain famous Prussian were returned to her native soil: Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992). "Prussia's martial fantasies are clearly influenced by an imaginary topography of the sexes" wrote Sigrid Weigel, and Dietrich played a historical part in this projective topography of nations' races and sexes. The coincidence of her departure for Hollywood with the rise of National Socialism turned her Lola in The Blue Angel into an image iconic of both memory and leaving: the image of a woman as openly sexual and lascivious as she is motherly is one that died along with the Weimar Republic, in National Soclialism.
The intensity with which this image affected contemporary viewers as a "promesse de bonheur" is readily apparent in the reviews and descriptions of the film. On the occasion of Dietrich's death, Berlin's Tageszeitung printed a previously unpublished text by Franz Hessel from the twenties. It included the following passage: "Those dangerous women incarnated by Marlene Dietrich do not give one the feeling that they mean too much harm. As cheery Lola from the Blue Angel, she takes the schoolteacher's ruffled, bearded head in her kind and maternal hands, pats the cheeks of this man, so tenderly enchanted by her, as though he were a child, looks up at her poor victim with a bridal smile when he makes this supremely unworthy woman his wife, and smiles him his dream of pure happiness."
This strong maternal aura described by Hessel could only work with an image of motherliness that did not eschew sexuality. A highly ambivalent image, certainly, just as most of Dietrich's images are ambiguous - playing with sex without repressing it. In Sternberg's Blonde Venus (1932) she also plays a "mother-whore" figure", who becomes the projected ideal of her own son and of a series of other men.
Examine a close-up of Dietrich's face, looking straight into the camera. Her high cheekbones, translucent complexion and full lips are the essence of a controlled commanding sexuality but her gaze is intensely earnest and the settings are often morbid. Reflecting on her work, her notable roles reinforce her mature star image as a passionate and tragic femme fatale. Von Sternberg fetishised his star as a tragic, romantic icon whose eroticism was concentrated in her face, celebrated in lingering close-ups. In each case the visual effect isolates her in a pool of historicism and iconicity; at this point she is no longer a character but a vision of eternal feminity.
Dietrich's discovery was not the secret sexuality of the mother figure, but an image of bisexuality which, counter to all her assertions, was part of her aura from Berlin in the '20s. In fact throughout her career much of her audience was derived from various subcultures. Her funeral in Berlin was a scene of avant-garde "colour", enhanced by a parade of the city's transvestites. This "appropriation" by lesbians and feminist sections has led to a re-interpretation of her image, releasing the notion of a female icon functioning purely for the male gaze.
What Dietrich expressed in terms of melancholy, brazenness and corrupt pride metonymically signifies the ironically fragmented non-identity of the contemporary German psyche and the internal historical constitution of that culture from which she derived her formative images.
Reviewed by Adrian Gargett
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