Christina Riley: Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair -- Marlene Dietrich's Star Persona and American Interventionist Strategies in Postwar Berlin

Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair: Marlene Dietrich's Star Persona and American Interventionist Strategies in Postwar Berlin
by Christina Riley
Bright Lights Film Journal



Marlene Dietrich's distance from the term "immigrant" represents her unique approach to conceptions of the home, nationalism, and citizenship. Throughout her life, the star moved as fluidly through countries as she did the screen. Upon Dietrich's arrival in Hollywood in 1930, her work with Josef Von Sternberg in The Blue Angel(1929) had been held back for its U.S. release due to Paramount's insistence that the star first be introduced to the public in an American production, ironically Sternberg's Morocco (1930). Dietrich starred as the ubiquitously "foreign" cabaret singer opposite America's hero Gary Cooper. Dietrich's star status quickly exploded, and when The Blue Angel was released that same year, audiences began to construct a composite picture of the actress: at once representative of Weimar Republic's decadence (Blue Angel) mixed with the connotations of the alien seductress (Morocco), while simultaneously acknowledging the star's new Hollywood home.

Along with Sternberg and Dietrich, another young cinema maverick fled Berlin for the safety of Hollywood: Billy Wilder. He arrived in 1934, and immediately began working as a screenwriter. Along with other émigrés, Wilder and company began to employ their alien influences across the American cinematic machine. Wilder first worked with Dietrich in A Foreign Affair (1948). The film focused on the American reconstruction of postwar Berlin, with Dietrich playing an ex-Nazi seductress opposite Frank Capra's girl next door, Jean Arthur, and Joseph Lund, a poor man's Gary Cooper. The film, with its manifold ur-texts and multinational insights, provides a cinematic exposé that attempts to deconstruct codified notions of nations and their people while exposing the jingoism of postwar U.S. interventionist policies. Revolutionary in its cinematic and historical context, A Foreign Affair wryly questions American interventionist policies in postwar Berlin, while Dietrich's Erika von Schlütow works as a tool to dislocate conceptions of a fixed national identity.

Wilder's film was born amidst the didactic rulings outlined in The Government Manual for the Motion Picture Industry released in 1942 by the Office of War Information. This document established ways in which American productions should and would uniformly applaud the U.S. war effort. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Blackexplore the OWI's disputes and persuasions with Hollywoodites, writing of the U.S. film industry under OWI influence, "Interwoven with economic realities, censorship laid the basis for an eventual resolution of the conflict between propaganda and mass entertainment" (112). The OWI's efforts to publicize Roosevelt's Four Freedoms in film began on the hope that pure patriotism would autonomously spur such cinematic devotion. The OWI's unrealized hopes quickly devolved into governmentally imposed censorship for Hollywood-produced pictures. If patriotic pictures would not naturally spring forth from the émigrés of Hollywood, then the OWI would un-surreptitiously thwart film productions that did not espouse the flag-waving of post-WWII America.

Upon Germany's collapse in WWII, the United States adopted the Marshall Plan, which focused on the economic reconstruction of Western European states. With the U.S. settlement in bombed-out Berlin, Americans attempted to usher in a new era in German-American film relations. Joseph Lowenstein and Lynne Tatlock's article "The Marshall Plan at the Movies" considers how American manipulation of Germany's postwar film industry proffered the transmission of American ideals to German audiences. Lowenstein and Tatlock write, "In place of German-made films, American movies flooded the German market, and Hollywood taught Germans about the American way of life, inculcating the values ostensibly necessary to the success of the Marshall Plan, the plan that this time would enable the Americans to save the Germans from themselves" (432). Thus, under the rubric of denazification, Americans set about disassembling the former Nazi state, focusing great attention on the now defunct German film industry.

Billy Wilder was given the task of returning to his former home of Berlin to aid the military in its reconstruction of the German cinema. Films that occupied Berlin's theaters carried two goals: to serve as diversions from the horrid conditions of Germany; and to provide educational, democratizing tools for the German public. Gerd Gemünden, a Wilder scholar, considered his role in Germany's cinematic restructuring, writing, "Wilder postponed his actual task . . . which was to write a report on the state of the production facilities and personnel available for use in the industry, and instead pitched his own idea about a film to the Office of Military Government in Germany" (58). What the director actually wrote became known as the "Wilder Memorandum," elucidating his beliefs regarding the politics of filmic propaganda. While discussing the shortcomings of Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth's Cover Girl (1944), Wilder's profound understanding of the potentiality of filmic indoctrination was exhibited by his call for "an entertainment film with Rita Hayworth or Ingrid Bergman . . . with Gary Cooper if you wish . . . and with a love story — only with a very special love story, cleverly devised to sell us a few ideological items — such a film would provide us with a serious piece of propaganda" (58). Wilder then goes on to outline the plotline of what was to be A Foreign Affair — a film that was a commercially viable option while simultaneously incorporating Wilder's own brand of au courant propaganda.

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Claudia Springer: Taken by Muslims -- Captivity Narratives in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Prisoner of the Mountains

Taken by Muslims: captivity narratives in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer
and Prisoner of the Mountains
by Claudia Springer
Jump Cut



Prisoner of the Mountains does not simply reverse the terms of typical Muslim captivity narratives and naively assert that all Russians are destructive and all Chechens are kindhearted. Quite the contrary: there are trigger-happy Chechens eager to kill the two captive soldiers, and a Chechen man shoots his own son for the offense of working for the Russian police. Their violence, though, is shown in the context of their motivations, not as resulting from sadistic impulses. On the Russian side, even the Commander seems to have a change of heart and indicates that he may be ready to trade Abdoul-Mourat's son, an event that is foiled when the son tries to escape and is shot. Rather than paint a simplistic picture, the film suggests that empathy becomes possible when people learn about the realities of others' lives.

In Vanya's friendship with Dina, we see the film reject Orientalist divisiveness and replace it with what philosopher Martin Buber calls an "I and thou" relationship based on nonjudgmental respect. Vanya and Dina overcome inherited cultural myths that would make them enemies and learn to perceive each other as individuals, not symbols. This is the type of connection called for by Czech theorist Vilém Flusser, who critiques the insularity of people who identify too strongly with their homelands—their heimats—to the point that they reject foreigners and anyone with unfamiliar customs. Flusser offers as a solution to intolerance the condition of the migrant, a person who is not anchored to any one place and who "carries in his unconscious bits and pieces of the mysteries of all the heimats through which he has wandered" (14). The migrant, Flusser writes, works on "the mystery of living together with others" and poses the following challenge to all of us:

"how can I overcome the prejudices of the bits and pieces of mysteries that reside within me, and how can I break through the prejudices that are anchored in the mysteries of others, so that together with them we may create something beautiful out of something that is ugly?" (15).

Prisoner of the Mountains gives us a glimpse of two people—Vanya and Dina—who break through prejudices and briefly create something beautiful. Their friendship develops awkwardly and tentatively, initiated by curiosity and followed by small acts of generosity, leading up to her secret visits to the deep pit within which Vanya is chained after his failed attempt to escape with Sacha. In addition to lowering bread and water to him on a rope, Dina informs him of his fate, standing above him at the edge of the pit: "My brother is dead. You have one more night to live." Her elevation indicates her power over him, but their conversation reveals mutual respect, she by acknowledging that he has a right to know what lies ahead, and he by responding patiently. Their cultural differences are apparent, because her idea of being helpful originates in her beliefs about the afterlife, which are meaningless to him, but his responses, while indicating his despair, avoid undermining her. She says, "Usually they throw the enemies' bodies to the jackals. But I will bury yours." He asks her to bring the key to release him. She says, "No. I will dig a wide grave for you. And you will see the Angel of Death. I'll put my necklace in the grave as your wedding gift. Maybe your soul will find a bride in heaven." He responds with a gentle smile: "I don't think so."

Later, she does bring him the key to his leg shackle after finding it hidden in a box while the film crosscuts to her father returning to the village with his son's body in the back of a truck. Before she throws the key to Vanya, she says to him, "Don't kill any more people, promise?" Her request represents a significant shift away from her former acculturated hatred for Russians as well as an attempt to break the cycle of revenge that has trapped both sides in the conflict. She has learned through her friendship with Vanya to respect life—everyone's life. Vanya responds in kind when he refuses to leave in order to protect her from punishment. Her father, Abdoul-Mourat, finds the two of them together at the edge of the pit and sends her home after scolding her for being more concerned about Vanya than about her own dead brother. But even Abdoul-Mourat—perhaps following his daughter's example—rejects vengeance when he lets Vanya go after marching him into the mountains.

Vanya's respect for Dina extends to the film's refusal to eroticize her. Even when she dances for him, she is not objectified; her dance is grave and earnest and shot from a respectful distance. She wears a headscarf and boots and an ankle-length red dress with a dark jacket. Her dance is accompanied by wailing diegetic music from a funeral procession winding its way through the village. She and the other Chechen women—most of them weather-beaten and wearing headscarves—are frequently seen at work. It is their labor, not their sexuality, that defines them. Dina is seen working with donkeys, preparing food, cleaning up, knitting—preparing for life as a village woman—and she calmly explains her future to Vanya before she dances for him. He asks her, "Did you get married yet?" She replies, "No." He says, "I would marry you." She says, "We cannot get married. I can get married next year. We marry early here." Later, when she returns to the pit to tell Vanya that he has one more night to live, she is dressed entirely in black to show that she is in mourning for her brother but also suggesting that she is preparing to mourn for Vanya, taking on the role of his widow although they have never even exchanged a kiss. She stands above him in her black robe, embodying the Angel of Death as well as the bride she speculates he might find in the afterlife. Their union is symbolic, impossible in the world they inhabit but indicative of the connection they have made.

The film also treats the Chechen landscape, customs, and music, all initially strange and unfamiliar to the Russian captives, with respect. Perched on rocky cliffs, the village is both precarious and solid, built of stone to withstand the ferocious winds. A song sung by the village children tells of the longevity of the Chechen culture and the inability of visitors to tolerate the wind. The film was shot on location in the Russian Republic of Dagestan, neighboring Chechnya, just twenty miles from where fighting was taking place at the time. (Ironically and sadly, the region's harsh conditions proved fatal for the actor Sergei Bodrov Jr. a few years later when he returned to direct a film and was killed by an avalanche.) The music, cinematography, and editing combine to emphasize endurance. But it is all obliterated at the end with the offscreen Russian assault. Vanya's inability to conjure up the villagers in his dreams symbolizes the military attack's total erasure of their existence, eliminating their history along with their future. Instead of exalting military might—as does The Lives of a Bengal Lancer—the film raises questions about the morality of bombing raids on civilian targets as a military strategy.

The final crucial element that sets this film apart is its slow, deliberate pacing, counteracting the speed with which the Bengal Lancers engage in their adventures. Unhurried panning shots linger over the mountains and valleys and the village's worn cobblestone streets. It takes time to overcome enmity, and Prisoner of the Mountains measures time very slowly. Its choices provide a cinematic model for relinquishing Hollywood's tired anti-Muslim clichés.[2]

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