|
|
Article: Gay-themed Films of the German Silent Era.
- Article from:
- Cineaste
- Article date:
- December 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Cineaste Publishers, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
In Europe, it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman--we make love with anyone we find attractive." If this scintillating bon mot from Marlene Dietrich aptly captures the diva's enduring image as sexually ambiguous erotic flaneuse (first assumed in her American debut, Morrocco, by kissing another woman on the mouth before following Gary Cooper into the desert), it evokes no less suggestively the cultural climate of her pre-Paramount terrain--Weimar Germany. Indeed, the salacious spin that links Dietrich's early Depression-era Hollywood vehicles with much of Ufa's output in the decade after Versailles would seem to point to a larger axiom of which the movies themselves ...