Instructor: Walter Metz

Marlene Dietrich and Josef Von Sternberg in Hollywood

Josef Von Sternberg was a director and Marlene Dietrich an actress in Germany in the late 1920s. In keeping with Hollywood international production policy at the time, they made The Blue Angel (1930) in Germany in both a German and English version. As Peter Baxter describes in his essay, "On the Naked Thighs of Miss Dietrich," the film tells the story of the seductress Lola-Lola who leads the righteous Professor Unrath down a road of depravity toward his ruin.

Von Sternberg and Dietrich came to Hollywood shortly after and collaborated on 6 films for Paramount Studios: Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlett Empress (1934), and The Devil is a Woman (1935). These seven films became important in Film Studies when, in the late 1970s, the theory of psychoanalysis began to be imported into the analysis of the cinema and its spectators. Psychoanalytic film theory refers to an approach which asks questions about: 1) the psychic constitution of a film’s characters (i.e., why does the little boy in Blonde Venus ask so many questions about his parents’ sex life?), and 2) why we spectators love the cinema so much (psychoanalytic film theorist Christian Metz hypothesizes that the warm, darkened movie theater surrounds us in a womb-like atmosphere where we are more susceptible to the dream-like images of cinema).

Screening: Blonde Venus (Joseph Von Sternberg, 1932, 89 min)

Discussion Questions: How does Marlene Dietrich’s star image contribute to our expectations about what is going to happen to Helen as the film proceeds? What aspects of the film would the PCA have deleted had the film been made 2 years later?

Psychoanalysis and Cinema: An Introduction

Psychoanalytic film theory is based on the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud hypothesized that human beings could not just be understood by their conscious intents and actions, but also by the forces of the unconscious, the realm of our deep desires and fantasies. Freud speculated that these fantasies were often expressed in fictional narratives. Psychoanalytic film theory begins from this assumption, adding to it that the cinema represents an even more immediate conduit to our unconscious dream world than the literature that Freud was thinking of, since cinema, like dreams, operates in the realm of the visual.

One of the central discoveries that Freud made was that of the Oedipal trajectory, that psychic rite of passage experienced by young boys as they come to learn about their place in the family. Freud suggests that when a boy is born, he experiences a state of plenitude with his mother. The mother supplies all of the boy’s needs (food, warmth, love). At some point, the father arrives in the boy’s observations, adding a third party to the equation. The boy is threatened by the introduction of the father, since he distracts mother’s attention from him. At about the same time, the boy begins to learn about sexual difference. In a hypothetical psychic scene, Freud imagines that the boy discovers that he has a penis, his father has a penis, yet his mother does not have one. Since the family is a patriarchal one, in which the father seems to wield power, the boy unconsciously decides to identify with the father, as he figures that mother must have been bad, and that father must have cut her penis off. Since this is not a literal fear, but an unconscious one, Freud labels the psychic equivalent of the penis as the phallus. Thus, the boy is not literally afraid of having his penis cut off, but instead psychically fearful of the father’s control over the phallus, the repository of patriarchal power. The boy doesn’t want to lose phallic power, as he imagines his mother to have done (castration anxiety), so the boy aligns himself with the father. For Freud, this is the healthy passage through the Oedipal trajectory. It is named the Oedipal trauma after Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus accidentally kills his father and marries his mother. Freud argues that this sort of narrative (which has literally been re-told thousands of times, from Hamlet to Batman) gives literal voice to an otherwise repressed unconscious fear. Freud does not argue, as is popularly related, that boys want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers. In fact, he argues quite the opposite: boys are in fact quite desperate to repress the possibility that their mothers are sexual and their fathers castratory. This partly explains why Freud’s theory, to this day, is met with such passionate anger and denial.

However, the Oedipal passage often gets stalled. Here is where Freud tries to explain various neuroses and pathologies that it was his job as a psychoanalyst to diagnose and treat. Freud hypothesizes that often boys do not properly come to terms with this traumatic loss of the state of plenitude with the mother and identification with the father. Instead, they unconsciously repress the discovery of sexual difference. This will have traumatic effects on the boy’s sexual dealings with women as an adult. To repress this trauma, the male subject will develop a neurosis that Freud labels, "fetishism." To deny that woman has lost her penis to a cruel father, the subject invents a substitute object which psychically stands in for the imagined lost phallus: the fetish object.

In her vastly influential essay on psychoanalytic film theory, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey argues that most Hollywood cinema is pleasurable to its spectators because it participates in this work of repression. That is to say, Mulvey hypothesizes that Hollywood cinema enables our fetishistic desires with respect to women’s bodies. In general, she argues that women’s bodies are fragmented by the editing practices of classical cinema: that is, the woman’s body is cut up on the screen--a leg here, lips here, bust here, etc.--allowing the spectator to fetishistically allow one body part to stand in for the traumatic loss that he imagines her to have suffered at the hands of the father. Mulvey argues that the Von Sternberg-Dietrich films, like Blonde Venus, are merely the most explicit examples of fetishism in a Hollywood cinema that activates fetishism in its very aesthetic practices. For example, when Dietrich sings her final number in Paris, she wears a top hat and tuxedo. The argument would be that the woman in a tux is a perfect fetish image because it allows the male spectator to think of her as a man, that is, as possessing the phallus, the loss of which he so desperately wants to repress.

Return to the MTA 101 ("Film in America") Syllabus

This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to: metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman