The below essay is the final essay that I wrote for the purpose of completing my Bachelor of Arts (major in Film Studies) at the University of Sydney. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I attained a High Distinction 85/100 for the course. The essay combines my interests in actresses and acting.
Marlene Dietrich and Isabelle Huppert are two iconic actress stars that toil with the abject in their film work. In depicting and exploring variant forms of abjectness throughout their careers, both have embraced the figure of the ‘monstrous-feminine’. This ‘monstrous-feminine’ figure has had great expediency for Dietrich and Huppert, as it has allowed each to stake out a unique female-type within their respective (Hollywood and French) star system image schemas as well as create a distinctively and attractively perverse star persona. Although Dietrich and Huppert are from different historical milieus and cinematic cultures, the ways in which each has constructed and cultivated her own star image seem to parallel one another – suggesting a kind of kindred spirit between the pair.
This essay will examine the star images of Dietrich and Huppert, and consider the ways in which their respective Weimar/Hollywood and French star systems, from which they originated from, influenced (or rather dictated) the type of actress each came to be. After exploring these cultural, socio-political and aesthetic conditions that gave rise to the two stars, the essay will then take a hermeneutic leap to consider the legacies that Dietrich and Huppert have erected via their acting stylistic and screen performances – with special reference made to Der Blaue Engel / The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) and La Pianiste / The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001). One such legacy for both has been the presentation, representation and cultivation of the ‘monstrous-feminine’ figure.
The ‘monstrous-feminine’ figure, according to Barbara Creed, is a woman who represents or signifies darkness and monstrousness in society.[1] Monstrousness, either male or female, is essentially abject.[2] The abject, as Julia Kristeva writes, is that which does not “respect borders, positions, rules” and “disturbs identity, system, order.”[3] The place of the abject is a place where meaning collapses; the abject threatens life, and therefore must be radically excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border.[4] Creed recognises that “all societies employ notions of the abject to define those things that threaten the meaning of what constitutes the proper, human subject and the proper, civilised society.”[5] To one society, abjectness could be defined as incest, murder, infanticide, cannibalism, masochism and sadism; to another, more conservative, society, abjection may also include prostitution, destitution, adultery, lesbianism and homosexuality. Creed explains that “despite the horrific nature of the abject, [audiences] are fascinated by it.”[6]
Art, such as cinema, allows for audiences to encounter and explore the abject from a safe distance afar, and through that, renews their sense of ‘self’ and ‘civilisation’. The abject is paramount to the process of defining and safeguarding the constituents of ‘self’ and ‘civilisation’ – just as the post-structural cultural theorist Jacques Derrida remarks that the process of theorising ‘the self’ is one, which is conceivably marked by difference; whereby the phenomenon is ontologically defined by its relation to what it’s not, rather than by its essence.[7] Art does indeed fulfil this ‘self-discovery’ function for society. But also, by continually exploring the abject, art offers audiences the opportunity to reconsider the definitions of abjectness; to re-evaluate the issues, subjects and phenomena that were once deemed as abject. Therefore, art – by pushing society to more liberal directions or by simply reflecting society’s move toward these liberal destinations – is able to naturalise and normalise certain forms of abjection, to the point where they no longer become viewed as being abject in that society. Art demonstrates how the definition of abjectness is a shifting one; what is ultimately considered ‘abject’ and ‘non-abject’ is open to societal, cultural and personal interpretation.
In this fashion, Dietrich and Huppert, in performing the ‘monstrous-feminine’ figure and all that it represents, come to play a socialisation role. Erika Fischer-Lichte would undoubtedly agree with this assessment, as she argues that actors and their bodies are “culturally conditioned in accordance with the actual state of the civilising process”;[8] “the particular mode of their presentation [on film] may contribute to [this] ongoing process by representing and propagating new models of self-presence and self-presentation for audience imitation.”[9] The main point to be gleaned from Fischer-Lichte is that actors – in promoting and ridiculing modes of behaviour both common and uncommon / saintly and sinister / abject or non-abject for the time – come to inform, reinforce and challenge audiences’ (personal and collective) understanding of appropriate modes of behaviour, and from this, modes of being. Dietrich and Huppert show and teach audiences the myriad of possible ways in which one can reconcile and negotiate with the abject in one’s life. The two stars also present us new possible forms of being – forms that although seem abject to some (such as excess consumption, promiscuity, adultery, prostitution, destitution, murder, even suicide, matricide, patricide, filicide and genital mutilation), will represent a necessity; a bliss; a means of survival; a coping mechanism; an addiction to others. Dietrich and Huppert’s work not only affirms this politically expedient notion that abjectness is a shifting idea, but also illuminates Gilles Deleuze’s theory that “Fundamentally there is the impulse, which, by nature, is too strong for the character, whatever his personality.”[10] At the end of the day, humans are just a set of impulses, and to deem certain impulses as abject is to make a cultural-political value judgement; such value judgements are what Dietrich and Huppert aim to deconstruct and debunk in their work.
The means and methods by which Dietrich and Huppert created their respective star images interestingly parallel one another. Both began their film careers, more or less, as nude, mute models/muses to their director’s authorial painterly camera; Dietrich to Josef von Sternberg’s Weimar aesthetics, and Huppert to Claude Goretta and Claude Chabrol’s post-French New Wave auteur-ship. However, gradually along their careers, both were able to reclaim the images that these male directors had created of, and for, them. Dietrich and Huppert each shifted from the nude, subservient muse to that of the creator, or as Bridget Birchall calls it, the metteuse-en-scène of her own image and desires.[11] The term ‘metteuse-en-scène’ describes the ‘putting together’ of one’s image and desires by an actor, rather than the director; it is a term that Huppert has also used in talking about her performance in The Piano Teacher.[12] As a cautionary remark: it is uncertain if Marlene Dietrich created her own distinct image during her time on the Weimar cabaret stage, or if Sternberg actually moulded her from his own imagination and desires – all we can go by is speculation and the (contesting) claims of each; likewise with Huppert, it is unknown if Goretta, and then Chabrol, moulded a specific image of her, or if Huppert, through her childhood affinity with ‘the little mermaid’ and ‘the little match girl’ (“one dies of love, one dies of cold”),[13] created her own image and acting stylistic from her experiences on the ‘literary’ theatre stage. A third option, which surprisingly many critics do not explicitly contend, is the likely possibility that both actresses, in collaboration with their directors, mutually constructed specific, relevant images for the type of persona, role and character that the film demanded.
James Naremore, in considering the acting style of Marlene Dietrich, insightfully announces that although she was “neither a realist nor a comic,” Dietrich was able to inhabit “a realm where visible artifice becomes the sign of authenticity.”[14] Such a fusion of artifice and authenticity, as Naremore contends, problematises and challenges audiences’ ability to judge her acting skills.[15] Indeed, Dietrich, probably more than any other film actress of the twentieth century, depended heavily on a controlled, artful mise-en-scène for the creation of her star image. Josef von Sternberg, her director for The Blue Angel – the film which made her a star in both Europe and Hollywood, once famously boasted “Marlene is not Marlene in my films … I am Marlene, Marlene is me, and she knows better than anyone.”[16] Sternberg’s comments assert that he, as the director of Dietrich in seven of her most acclaimed films[17], was ultimately the active creative force behind her star image. Sternberg took Dietrich’s 1920s Weimar flapper image, and all that it symbolised (sexual liberation, decadence, loose morals, libertine values), and marketed it to a relatively conservative Hollywood audience as the exotic ‘other’. Sternberg’s claim to Marlene’s iconic images is further supported by Dietrich’s curious admission that she “never paid much attention to what she was doing” in her early Weimar-Hollywood Sternberg films and regarded them as “kitsch”.[18] This is further reinforced from the fact that many critics, as Naremore points out, have deemed Dietrich’s work after the dissolution of her partnership with Sternberg as “relatively disappointing”, with her only notable performance being in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) as a minor player.[19] Together, these accounts suggest that Dietrich alone was not a formidable actress or screen presence; rather she relied heavily on the craftsmanship of auteur directors like Sternberg and Welles. It would not be until the 1940s, when she reinvented herself as a solo stage star, would she be able to reclaim the star image that was initially created for her by Sternberg.[20]
Sternberg employed rich costumes, expressive yet clean-cut makeup and careful lighting to create the glamorous and striking images of Dietrich. He would often cast her as the “gilded, extravagant figure” of the stage; a kind of star who acted stardom, as Naremore confers.[21] The acting style at which Sternberg demanded of her was one that was more (German) expressionistic and theatrical than the Hollywood talkies had encouraged. In fact, although both she and Greta Garbo (MGM’s legendary Swedish screen actress whom Dietrich was modelled after) often represented the exotic ‘other’ and were seen as “vestiges of an older, elitist sensibility” within the Hollywood star system image schema,[22] the pair were viewed as “pretentious” by American audiences and deemed as “box office poison” in 1938 by the National Theatre Distributors of America.[23] [24] For instance, John Grierson complained that Dietrich’s “pose of mystery” was “too studied”, “her makeup too artificial, her every gesture and word too deliberate for any issue in drama save the gravest.”[25] James Naremore, however, disagrees with this derisive criticism and argues that Grierson is missing the humour of Dietrich’s performances and the possibility that, maybe, her near-ridiculous poses were intended to challenge the normal canons of taste and decorum.[26] Naremore’s insightful analysis of Dietrich goes beyond the surface, and he hints at her star image, its appeal and socio-political significance: the Dietrich character “is an independent character, capable of grand romantic (or masochistic) behaviour, ready to shock her audience or thrill them by flouting convention.”[27] This quote pertinently mirrors Richard Dyer’s theory of stars as ‘reconcilers of contradictions’, through their charisma.[28] It also exemplifies how Marlene Dietrich is able to enact the figure of the ‘monstrous-feminine’; through her characters’ masochistic, or sadistic, behaviours and actions. Throughout her career, she played prostitutes/courtesans, who lead men to their demise, on countless occasions.
One such occasion was The Blue Angel, in which Dietrich plays the morally and sexually dubious cabaret singer Lola-Lola to Oscar winner Emil Jannings’ demoralised professor. Siegfried Kracauer, in his seminal study on Weimar cinema From Caligari to Hitler (1947), perceptively notes that the appeal of The Blue Angel laid in two areas – the first being Dietrich’s Lola as “a new incarnation of sex”; and the second being the film’s “outright sadism”. [29] In Kracauer’s own words: “the masses are irresistibly attracted by the spectacle of torture and humiliation, and Sternberg deepened this sadistic tendency by making Lola-Lola destroy not only Jannings himself but his entire environment.”[30] Hence, Dietrich’s depiction and exploration of sadism, a thing of abjection, becomes both her star image’s and film’s key selling point. In dedicating her talents to explore characters that have a close affinity with the abject and embracing the ‘monstrous-feminine’ figure, Dietrich sheds light on the inner lives and minds of the women, who have been too easily branded by society as Jezebels; those prostitutes, destitutes, temptresses, courtesans, so-called ‘femme fatales’ and other ‘fallen’ women. In this way, Dietrich not only extends audiences’ understanding of the abject and the ways in which one can reconcile and negotiate with it in their lives, but also espouses proto-feminist ideals and values in her work. She introduced audiences to these marginalised, objectionable women and, regardless of how one-sided or stereotyped they were presented, gave audiences the opportunity to identify and empathise with them.
Barbara Creed has singled out Isabelle Huppert, comparing her to the best: “all great actors are capable of expressing emotional intensities, dramatic moments and subtle nuances, but not all are prepared to run the risk associated with challenging social, moral and sexual mores.”[31] Creed’s assessment of Huppert highlights the socio-political expediency of her work. Huppert says that she is attracted to “unusual characters” and loves to play with ‘contradiction’, to show how “the good and the bad live together”;[32] throughout her career, she has played the whole spectrum of female characters and experiences, dealing mostly with the abject in explicit and implicit ways. Huppert has appeared as a bourgeois daughter who commits parricide (Violette Nozière, 1978), an insulated student who has a nervous breakdown (The Lacemaker, 1977), a prostitute (Slow Motion, 1979 and The Promised Life, 2001), a battered wife (Clean Slate, 1981), a wife and mother who embraces her latent lesbianism (At First Sight, 1983), an executed abortionist (The Story of Women, 1988), a murderer (The Ceremony/A Judgement in Stone, 1995), an incestuous mother (Ma Mère, 2004), a sado-masochistic sexually dysfunctional teacher (The Piano Teacher, 2001), and a parody of herself (8 Femmes, 2002). For this body of work, she has won prestigious accolades from various industry groups, including two Cannes Film Festival Best Actress prizes, two Venice Film Festival Volpi Cups, a Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement, a BAFTA, and a César along with 12 other César nominations – further evidencing Huppert’s appeal to French and international audiences, and extraordinary influence over the art of acting.
Accompanying Huppert’s ability to portray a spectrum of female characters is her capacity for expressing the whole gamut of relevant emotions. Creed identifies two acting ‘gestus’/techniques that Huppert tends to employ – first is tears, and the second is her ‘blank’ face; arguing that Huppert has the aptitude for expressing emotions through the absence of emotion.[33] Ginette Vincendeau agrees with this judgement and remarks that Huppert is able to communicate her feelings through “the blankness of her performance” – “her dull, vacant stare speaks volumes”.[34] Interestingly, Huppert also embraces the speculation on her acting stylistic and performances: “I’ve always felt that I have a slightly ‘blank’ face, without real definition. So, obviously, that means I can transform it endlessly.”[35] Such transformations and manipulations of emotion and distance are what allow Huppert to explore monstrous impulses and the abject. It also must be noted that these explorations are never just one-sided; rather a fine line between sympathy and horror is tread.[36] Huppert may disgust us, but simultaneously, we remain fascinated. And, this outcome, it would seem, is her intention – “Being an actor is … a business between self and self, all the way – to self-disgust.”[37] Hence, in exploring her own encounters with the abject, via her screen and stage characters, Huppert is doing the hard work for us; but also, at the same time, is encouraging us to explore, play with, and negotiate with the abject in our very own lives. This dangerous potential is what has allowed her to create a unique star image of the grotesquely fascinating ‘monstrous-feminine’; an image that has permeated the French star system and excited audiences around the globe.
For her performance as Erika in The Piano Teacher, Huppert won, among other awards, the esteemed Best Actress Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This performance, according to Bridget Birchall, signifies Huppert’s developing status as a metteuse-en-scène.[38] Michael Haneke helps Huppert achieve this through the ways in which he frames her in the film. Birchall argues that Huppert’s body tends to escape/subvert the frame in The Piano Teacher, and through this, destabilises the idealised female nude by rarely showing the female body in its naked form – indeed, quite unusual, when the majority of the film deals with sexually explicit content.[39] For example, in the sequence where Erika is raped, her beaten body is framed in a mid-shot; this image of her ruined beaten body, as Birchall perceptively observes, is a visual reference reminding the audience of Erika’s inescapable bodily functions (bleeding, urine and vomit), which Haneke persistently captures on film.[40] Together, these break the seamlessness of the traditional ideal female nude. Birchall builds a case for this theory and argues that the way Haneke regularly uses a close-up of the back of Huppert’s head creates a unique effect – in Birchall’s own words: “The enunciation of the image relies less on the spectator’s image ‘memory bank’ of learned ‘knowledge’ related to Huppert’s face, and more on the immediacy of her performance.”[41] This is, certainly, an interesting proposition with regards to the star persona of Huppert; it inherently goes against some of Richard Dyer’s seminal star theories, e.g. of each performance contributing to a cumulative star image, and reveals that Huppert has the exceptional ability to forget herself and disappear into her characters. It could, ultimately, be this ability or quality of hers – in letting audiences forget her past screen incarnations, whether they were of an innocent young schoolgirl (like in The Lacemaker) or as a deviant teenage murderess (like in Violette Nozière) – that permits Huppert to continually explore the abject in her film work; Huppert, unlike less talented Hollywood actresses like Julia Roberts or Reese Witherspoon, is not bound by the roles that she has played in the past. Huppert’s acting talents allow her to transcend the mould, much in the same way as – say – Vanessa Redgrave, Meryl Streep or Isabelle Adjani.
In conclusion, both Dietrich and Huppert in portraying the misogynistic, masochistic and abject fantasies/visions of their respective directors came to inevitably, in reverse, showcase their directors’ underlying misogyny and masochism – in other words, using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. Yet in another way, these directors are champion lovers of women, much in the same vein as the way gay Spanish director Pedro Almodovar or Danish director Lars von Trier love women. These directors – Haneke, Charbol, Sternberg – by subjecting their heroines to the abject, and consequently by showing their bravery, courage and resourcefulness in the most dire of circumstances, are in fact admiring, respecting and celebrating the strength of women. Dietrich and Huppert in exploring the abject in their film work have been able to carve out a unique star image within their respective Hollywood and French star systems. This attractively perverse star image has not only made each an iconic star actress in her own right, but also allowed each to demonstrate how the definition of abjection is one that is socially, morally and politically contingent. Dietrich and Huppert’s characters continually encounter the abject; they play and negotiate with it in their lives. These brave explorations are what have ultimately made the pair so enduringly appealing and influential in cinema and art.
Bibliography
Naremore, James [A]. ‘Marlene Dietrich’. Senses of Cinema. Issue 7. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/cteq/dietrich/. Last accessed: 29/10/11.
[1] Barbara Creed, ‘Isabelle Huppert as Monstrous-Feminine’ Lecture, Australian Cinémathèque, Queensland Art Gallery –Gallery of Modern Art, 14/07/07, http://qag.qld.gov.au/cinematheque/cinema_resources/2007/isabelle_huppert_as_monstrous-feminine, last accessed: 29/10/11.
[2] Barbara Creed, 2007, ibid.
[3] Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Routledge: London, 1993, rev. edn. 2005, p. 11.
[4] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p.7.
[5] Barbara Creed, 2007, ibid.
[6] Barbara Creed, 2007, ibid.
[7] Philip Auslander, ‘“Just Be Yourself”: Logocentricism and Difference in Performance Theory’, in Phillip B. Zarrilli (ed.)’s Acting (Re)Considered: Theories and Practice, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 59.
[8] Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Theatre and the Civilising Process: An Approach to the History of Acting’, in Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989, p. 22-23.
[9] Erika Fischer-Lichte, ibid.
[10] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, London: Athlone Press, 1992, p. 137.
[11] Bridget Birchall, ‘From Nude to Metteuse-en-Scene: Isabelle Huppert, image and desire in La Dentelliere (Goretta, 1977) and La Pianiste (Haneke, 2001)’ in Studies in French Cinema, Vol 5, No. 1, Intellect Ltd., 2005, p.5.
[12] Bridget Birchall, ibid.
[13] Barbara Creed, 2007, ibid.
[14] James Naremore, [A], ‘Marlene Dietrich’, Senses of Cinema, Issue 7, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2000/cteq/dietrich/, last accessed: 29/10/11.
[15] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[16] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[17] The seven films are: The Blue Angel, Morocco, Dishonored, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, The Scarlet Empress, and The Devil is a Woman.
[18] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[19] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[20] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[21] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[22] James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, p. 175.
[23] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[24] Others on the “box office poison” list included Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – what is ironic now, is that all five actresses made the top 10 in the American Film Institutes’ ‘Greatest Female Stars of All Time’ list.
[25] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[26] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[27] James Naremore, [A], ibid.
[28] Richard Dyer, Stars, New Edition, London: BFI, 1998, p.82.
[29] Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, Princeton Press, 1966, p. 43.
[30] Siegfried Kracauer, ibid.
[31] Barbara Creed, 2007, ibid.
[32] Barbara Creed, 2007, ibid.
[33] Barbara Creed, 2007, ibid.
[34] Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Isabelle Huppert: The Big Chill’, Sight and Sound, December 2006, p. 2.
[35] Interview with Isabelle Huppert by Catherine Millet, ‘Isabelle Huppert, modele’, Art Press, no. 318, pp. 24-30.
[36] Barbara Creed, 2007, ibid.
[37] Catherine Millet, ibid.
[38] Bridget Birchall, p. 5.
[39] Bridget Birchall, p. 10.
[40] Bridget Birchall, p. 10.
[41] Bridget Birchall, p. 10.
