Session 8: Cinescapes – Women Onscreen
1st Global Conference
Friday 1st May 2009 – Sunday 3rd May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
The Modern Woman and Weimar Cinema
Barbara Kosta
University of Arizona, USA
German Cinema of the 1920s is scattered with images of sexualized, predatory females who bear the sign of vamp or modern woman. Their sexual lawlessness is portrayed as a threat to masculinity and to society at large. In this paper, I will look at the two films featuring Weimar starlets whose styles although different were nevertheless represent the modern deceptive woman: Marlene Dietrich and Lya da Putti.
The 1929 Robert Land film Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt (the woman for whom everyone longs) starring Marlene Dietrich has long been overshadowed by her role as Lola in The Blue Angel that launched her into international stardom. Here she plays Stascha, a woman who has her husband killed in order to free herself from his tyranny but whose complicity binds her to the murderer, Dr. Karoff (Fritz Körtner). Desperate to free herself, she draws into her web of intrigue Henri Leblanc (Uno Henning), an unsuspecting newly wed who is just boarding the same train as Stascha for his honeymoon. Here the street film genre is unleashed spatially with the streets of the metropolis expanded to more radical representations of mobility. Like other ?street film? protagonists, who have fallen to sexualized women, Henri is absorbed by the image of promised sensuality when he first lays eyes on Stascha who draws open the curtain of the train and invites his gaze. Her image is framed doubly: first by the window frame and second by frostwork that lends an ethereal sense to the image. It is this static, yet emotionally moving portrait of Stascha (Dietrich) that ?arrests? Henri.
In Karl Grune?s 1925 film Eifersucht (Jealousy), Lya da Putti plays a wife whose arouses her husband?s jealousy much like in a play both of them have witnessed. While the husband scoffs at the display of jealousy on the stage and doubts that in his ?modern time? such drama exists, he enacts the very same drama in his private life. Putti is cast as the modern woman that destabilizes the family structure merely through her erotic presence and the notion of the modern woman?s unrestrained sexuality.
Using these films as a point of departure, my paper addresses the modern woman during the Weimar Republic and how gender is used as a foil against which society?s anxieties and desires can be read. As is expected, she became the focal point of debates that pitted modernity?s enthusiasts against its despondent detractors, resonating with the politically polarized debates throughout the 1920s about the state or ?health? of the nation. On one hand, she embodied social changes, freedom from restrictive social norms, liberalism and the seductive promises of the new age and progress. On the other hand, she was perceived as an aberration of nature, lacking motherliness and therefore representing an affront to family values and the clear, traditional division of gendered spheres, and the respective roles men and women were to play in those spheres. Film obsessively exploited the latter image.
The ‘Light’ Side of Feminine Evil: Film Comedies
Betty (Despoina) Kaklamanidou
Film Studies Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Feminine evil has long been associated with certain film images: the vamp of the 1910s, the flapper of the 1920s, and the femme fatale of the 1940s are the main stereotypical evil women the dominant patriarchal hegemony created in order to suppress any form of feminist demand. Much has been written about the monstrous-feminine in drama, crime, action and horror films; yet much of the discussion does not take into consideration the genre of comedy.
My paper explores the aspects of feminine evil in contemporary romantic comedies. I aim to prove that these deliciously evil representations are also used to perpetuate the stereotypes that have existed since the birth of the cinema, in a genre whose socio-cultural role is significant, focusing on three paradigms: women and power, women who betray or try to avenge men as well as their own gender, and evil mothers.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Seduction, Fascination, Medusation : Evil Women as Mythical Hybrids in 1940s Hollywood Melodramas
Muriel Andrin
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
In the 1940s, Hollywood Melodramas proposed a new kind of heroine, far from any stereotyped and sacrificing representation of the genre: the heroine of the evil melodrama (1940-1953). Represented in emblematic films like, amongst others, Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1945) with Gene Tierney, The Letter (William Wyler, 1941) and Beyond the Forest (King Vidor, 1949) both with Bette Davis or The Strange Woman (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1946) with Hedy Lamarr, the evil heroine (a woman who cheats, lies, commits abortion, pushes men to suicide or even kills them) was one way of crystallizing the fears of a society which, after defeating the war enemy on and off-screen, turned against ‘the enemy inside’. These characters were shown as social counter-examples, yet, their path did not lead to the usual moralistic punishment that one might expect; the justice of men seems insufficient to restrain and master them.
The argument presented in this paper (and in my PhD thesis published by Peter Lang in 2005) is that these characters are hybrids, depending both on a realistic representational system and on an intricate integration of mythical elements (bringing forth what anthropologist and historian Jean-Pierre Vernant calls the ‘legendary imagination’) that transforms them into mythical characters. Reinforcing the evil nature of the characters but also allowing a new kind of narrative structuring, one of the most determining mythical influence, next to Lilith, Eva or Pandora, is to be found in the Medusa narration. Through their association with the ‘lethal look’ but also other significant elements of the mythical narration (like the use of the shield, or the beheading), feminine characters of the evil melodramas became hybrid monsters. First seducing their prey through a fascination process (very similar to the sirens’ way of seducing sailors), the evil melodramatic women then induce what French theorist Jean Clair called a ‘medusation’ process that simultaneously still fascinates and repulses whoever face them, revealing the true evil nature of the heroines. Linked to the Burkean idea of the delight, the ‘medusation’ appears as a visual and narrative breakthrough. But it is also built on recurring mythical elements that appear throughout the narration (implicit dialogues and shots that refer to pictorial representations of the myth).
This paper proposes to analyze the traces left by the Medusa myth in this specific cinematographic sub-genre and their moral implications in the films in which they appear. But it also wants to put forward the filmic specificities of this Medusa influence since the ‘medusation’ is used on a narrative level but also works on the filmic spectator throughout the paradoxical combination of fascination/repulsion engendered by the star and the evil nature of the character she embodies.
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