 Commemorating
the 100th Birthday of Marlene Dietrich
October 25-28, 2001
Link to conference
schedule
Link to travel information
One of the most multi-valent icons of the 20th century
is the German-American actress and chanteuse Marlene
Dietrich, the only world star the German cinema ever
produced. Her film career spans from Weimar Germany
to the Hollywood studios where she worked between 1930
and 1961 with the most acclaimed Hollywood directors,
including Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder,
Orson Welles, Ernst Lubitsch, René Clair, Stanley
Kramer, and most notably Josef von Sternberg with whom
she made seven films between 1929 and 1935. Her subsequent
career as a singer extended her fame through performances
around the world. Combining Prussian discipline and
work ethic with an extraordinary talent for reinvention,
Dietrich had a professional career of some 70 years,
one that included not only classic Hollywood cinema
and the concert hall, but also silent film, classical
theater, modern theater, musical comedies, vaudeville,
the army camp shows, radio, recordings, television,
even circus and the ballet.
 The
life of Marlene Dietrich reflects the tumultuous and
catastrophic history of Germany and its changing relation
to the United States during the 20th century. Born in
Berlin in 1901, she was a witness to World War I, the
turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, and the rise
of Nazism. After leaving for Hollywood in 1930, she
only returned to her native country for short visits,
resisting Joseph Goebbels’ many offers to join
the film industry of the Third Reich. In the United
States she rose to international stardom but she also
experienced the callousness of the Hollywood studio
system; when her films ceased to attract audiences she
was labeled “box office poison” in 1937. A
US citizen as of 1939, she actively supported the war
effort by performing for US troops stationed abroad
and was awarded the “Medal of Freedom” in
1947, the first woman to receive this distinction. Dietrich’s
first return to Germany after the war was in the company
of US combat troops. Many Germans never forgave her
for what they perceived as a betrayal, picketing her
1960 tour through Germany by demanding that “Marlene
go home.” Her last public concert appearance was
in Sydney in 1975. A recluse in her apartment for the
last years of her life, Dietrich died in Paris in 1992,
having willed her remains to be buried in her native
Berlin.
The hundredth anniversary of Marlene Dietrich’s
birth provides a particularly suitable occasion not
only to take stock of the person and the persona, but
also of Dietrich’s life and career which reflects
the century to which she was such a prominent witness.
A central concern for the study of Marlene Dietrich
has to be the intersection of her biography and the
image created of her in her films and public appearances.
As a film star the camera of male directors formed her,
and yet she remained very much a self-directed myth
and became a legend already during her lifetime. As
her biographer Steven Bach noted the perpetuation of
“Marlene Dietrich”—the legend and the
artifact—was one of the most disciplined and sustained
creative acts of the 20th century. The Blue Angel established
Dietrich’s image of a woman who is as openly sexual
and lascivious as she is motherly. Yet truly provocative
and innovative was her bisexuality—first in her
1920s performances with Margo Lion, and later in her
US films directed by von Sternberg, most notably Morocco
and Blonde Venus. “She has sex but no positive
gender,” Kenneth Tynan wrote of her. Cool but triumphant,
Dietrich is an index of gender crossover and star power,
quoted and copied everywhere, from Liza Minelli to Raquel
Welch. With Madonna, another blonde Venus, Dietrich
shares a penchant for paradox, pertinence, and power,
and like the rock star, Dietrich’s maiden name
Maria Magdalene connotes the sinner-saint. Today, the
performative value of her star persona is still being
recognized in the transition to digital technology.
Dietrich’s image has been purchased from the estate
by #3DMaxMedia to create “virtual humans”—or
what in the industry is called “synthespians”—to
allow long-dead celebrities to appear in extensive roles
in films, and thus her career will extend into the 21st
century via new digital technologies.
Marlene Dietrich has become the focus of many divergent
fields of academic inquiry, and it is the explicit purpose
of this conference to create an interdisciplinary dialogue
between modes of study that too often have remained
monolithic. The invited speakers will therefore represent
approaches to Dietrich from across a broad spectrum,
including feminism, gender studies and queer theory;
star discourse and the study of divas; exilic and diasporic
cinema; studies of authorship, spectatorship, and censorship;
studies of aging; analyses of Dietrich within the context
of German-American (film) history and those countries'
rival studio systems; and analyses of contemporary filmic
and theatrical fictionalizations of Dietrich’s
life and her legacy. There will also be discussions
of the changing role of Dietrich within the cultural
memory of contemporary Germany, and the challenges of
organizing and exhibiting her “Nachlass.”
A special attraction will be the cabaret show “Black
Market Marlene” by New York actor James Beaman.
More Marlene Dietrich links:
http://www.marlene.com
- the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin's Marlene Dietrich
site
http://www.fffb.de
- Freunde und Förderer des Filmmuseums Berlin
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