Читать книгу Hedy Lamarr - Ruth Barton - Страница 11

BY THE TIME he began filming Ecstasy, Gustav Machaty enjoyed a reputation as a director of art films. His most celebrated work was an erotic masterpiece, Seduction (Erotikon), made in 1929. The film concerned the sexual encounter between the daughter of a station master and a stranger and opens with scenes from their night of love, which marked the film as highly explicit without being pornographic. Immersed in Czech modernism, the Jewish Machaty had reputedly worked in Hollywood as an apprentice to D. W. Griffith and Eric von Stroheim, though this may be a self-penned myth. He was definitely back in Czechoslovakia by 1926, when he made The Kreutzer Sonata and Seduction. He followed this in 1931 with his first sound film, From Saturday to Sunday (Ze Soboty Na Nedeli), which was also the first Czech sound film. Scored by the Czech avant-garde jazz composer Jaroslav Jerek, the film still feels like a silent era production. Structured again around a young woman's awakening desire, the story follows a prim secretary who is offered money for sex while out with her friend at an up-market nightclub. Outraged, she slaps her escort and flounces out into the rain. In a sequence that anticipates Ecstasy, she is soaked in a downpour and accepts a passing stranger's offer to come and dry off in his apartment. There follows an intensely erotic sequence, after which a series of misunderstandings leads the couple to part and finally be reunited.¹

Machaty met Hedy in Berlin in 1931. He liked casting unknown or nonprofessional actors and struck by Hedy's looks, he chose her for the part of the young woman Eva in Ecstasy. Shooting on Ecstasy began in July 1932, although the film had been in preparation long before that. While she was waiting for Machaty to begin, Hedy returned to the Viennese stage. In February 1932 she replaced Marta Lille in the role of Sybil (originally played by Karin Evans) in the Komödie Theatre in Noel Coward's Private Lives for the last few weeks of its run. Sybil is one of the four main characters in Coward's comedy of manners; it was another good part for the young actress. Hedy Kiesler's star was quickly rising.

To shoot Ecstasy, the cast and crew traveled to Czechoslovakia. The bathing scenes were shot near Jevany, close to Prague. Otherwise, the outdoor scenes were shot in the Carpathians, in and around Dobšiná (site of the famed Dobšinská Ice Cave). They lived in this “godforsaken place,” according to Hedy, “like the most simple of people from the Steppes. And because the sun only shines brightly there for a few hours, and in the morning and afternoon a thick mist falls over everything, we had to be careful to use every minute we could. At lunchtime, we huddled in the small camera van to grab a quick bite of food.”² The café sequence was shot on the elegant Barrandov Terraces on the outskirts of Prague, a location that would have been easily recognizable to locals, as it was a popular day trip from the city. The film was shot in three language versions—German, Czech, and French. For the French version, Aribert Mog was replaced by Pierre Nay and Leopold Kramer by Andre Nox. The Czech actor Zwonimir Rogoz played the father in all three versions. Hedy, too, played Eva in all three versions; “she learnt Czech in a few weeks,” Aribert Mog told a reporter.³ In fact, as Joseph Garncarz has demonstrated, Hedy was post-synched by a Czech speaker having first of all delivered her lines in Czech to camera.⁴ Not only could she play her role in multiple languages, she also endeared herself to her director by translating for him on set.

Ecstasy continued the celebration of awakening female sexuality that had made Seduction such a conversation piece. The story focused on a young woman, Eva (Hedy Kiesler), who marries a much older man, Emil (Zvonimir Rogoz). He turns out to be impotent and she leaves him. During a nude swim in a lake, her horse bolts, taking her clothes with it. She is rescued by a young engineer, Adam (played by Aribert Mog), working with a gang of laborers. They fall in love. Her humiliated husband shoots himself and she leaves Adam. The film ends at this point in certain versions; in others, an added scene sees Eva nursing a child, while in another shot Adam is at work, apparently dreaming of his lost love.

The camera delights in caressing Hedy's face and framing her body in one erotic pose after another. In the film's early sequences, as long as she is trapped in her marriage to Emil, she is presented as a precious object, part of the opulent furnishings of that wealthy man's life. Only when she frees herself of the city's glamour, by literally tearing off her clothes and throwing herself in the water, is Eva able to return to the Garden of Eden and find her Adam. Machaty did not require that Hedy act, she simply had to let herself be filmed. He saw to it that through framing and diffuse lighting, this slightly plump teenager was transformed into an object of post-pubescent desire. Gone was the small-town daughter of the house that her audiences knew from her Weimar films; this Hedy Kiesler was defined by her languid movements and natural sexuality.

Shot just three years after D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley’s Loverhad been the subject of an obscenity trial, Machaty revisits much of the territory that made Lawrence's novel so controversial. Here, again, is the story of a young well-bred woman caught in an impotent marriage and finding sexual release in the freedom of the outdoors with a younger, more earthy lover. In his essay on the film, written shortly after its release in Europe, Henry Miller teased out the connections between the two. Each time he saw Ecstasy, and that was four or five times, he noticed that the audience responded in the same way: “cheers and applause mingled with groans and catcalls.” The hostility, he was convinced, “has nothing to do with the alleged immorality of the film. The audience is not shocked but indignant.” This indignation he ascribed to the film's pacing, which delivered none of the conventional pleasures of narrative drive but rather forced the spectator “whether he will or no, to swim in the very essence of Machaty's creation…Beneath the public's hostility is the grudging admission of the presence of a superior force, a disturbing force.” Since Miller locates this force in the solar plexus, we needn't doubt his point; what is disturbing about this film is its sexual energy, an energy that moves beyond the boundaries of the screen and, in Miller's description, into the auditorium. Machaty's Adam and Eva are creations of the instinct rather than the intellect: “Their meeting is that of pure bodies, their union is poetic, sensual, mystical. They do not question themselves—they obey their instincts…In Extase the drama is one of life and death, life impersonated by the two lovers, death by the husband. The latter represents society as it is, while the lovers represent the life force blindly struggling to assert itself.” So in the final sequences of the French version, as the lover is left sleeping on the bench and the train pulls out of the station bearing away his mistress, the audience was most disturbed—”Is there perhaps the flicker of a suspicion in their addled pates that life is passing them by? I notice that the resentment is largely confined to the male members of the audience. Could one read into that a Freudian story of bankruptcy?”⁵

Miller was dismissive of the undertones of Soviet filmmaking that he picked up in Ecstasy, but they influence its aesthetic as much as Lawrence. The engineer, by virtue of his profession alone, is highly reminiscent of the idealized virile hero so beloved by Soviet filmmakers. Similarly, the repeated shots of the husband's monocle and his perfectly shined shoes seem like a direct steal from Eisenstein.

What is most striking about the film's politics is its refusal to punish Eva for her sexuality, either for abandoning her husband or having an affair with the engineer. Whichever ending we see, she remains in control, a figure of nature and an object of desire, but equally a strong, independent young woman, who cedes authority neither to her father, nor her husband, nor her lover. If her association with water and horses are representational cliches, the film's narrative, such as it is, never seeks to contain her or limit her freedom of choice.

Aesthetically, Machaty's film is strikingly beautiful. It could have easily been a silent era production, and it comes as a surprise when the characters talk to each other (the entire film contains fifteen lines of dialogue).

The two key scenes that garnered the film such publicity, and a misleading reputation for pornography, were the nude swimming sequence and a close-up of Hedy's face as she simulates orgasm. All this was filmed, according to Hedy, without her being aware of the consequences of what she was doing: “The director shouted ‘If we do not do this scene, the picture will be ruined, and we will collect our losses from you!’…‘I won't. I won't take off my clothes!’ I was thinking of my parents…not to mention the crew we were shooting with, and the public, later on. Impossible!”⁶

She did take off her clothes: “I remember it was windy but warm, and the breeze was refreshing on my body as I undressed gingerly behind the broadest tree I could find…One deep breath, and I ran zigzagging from tree to tree and into the lake. My only thought was ‘I hope they get the splash.'” Evidently not; Machaty was behind the microphone, urging the young actress to do one more take: “I wanted to refuse, but there was no turning back now. Shivering, I scooted back to the first tree. Mysteriously, somebody had put a terrycloth robe there. I dried off, and waited for the damned gun. It had jammed! After a moment, the megaphone voice shouted, ‘Go!’ Again I zigzagged, probably breaking all speed records, again I swam a bit, and then stuck my head up.”⁷ This time the take was good.

Hedy also insisted that she had not known what a zoom lens could accomplish or that the script contained nude scenes.⁸ Subsequent comments by the production crew suggest that she knowingly agreed to do the nude scenes: “As the star of the picture, she knew she would have to appear naked in some scenes. She never made any fuss about it during the production.”⁹ That a nude performance was expected of the film's star was confirmed by Lupita Kohner. According to her, her future husband and then producer, Paul Kohner, had proposed her for the part of Eva. Lupita Tovar (as she still was) was already working in Hollywood but traveled to Berlin to meet Machaty, anticipating the role would be hers. However, when Kohner saw the script, which made it clear that nudity was expected, he insisted Lupita not take the role.¹⁰

Hedy's next test was the lovemaking scene. Machaty was looking for a sequence that would suggest beyond doubt that the expression on her face indicated to the audience that she had reached orgasm: “I was told to lie down with my hands above my head while Aribert Mog whispered in my ear, and then kissed me in the most uninhibited fashion. I was not sure what my reactions would be, so when Aribert slipped down and out of camera, I just closed my eyes.” Machaty was not impressed. Mumbling about the stupidity of youth, he looked around until he found a safety pin on the table: “You will lie here,” he said, “I will be underneath, out of camera range. When I prick you a little on your backside, you will bring your elbows together and you will react!”11 Numerous pinpricks later, a howl of agony from Hedy gave Machaty the shot he was looking for. If the nude bathing had not been enough, here was a scene that made the film censors of the world draw a collective breath.

• • •

The descriptions of the shoot from Ecstasy and Me were written (by Hedy, we may assume) many years after the event and in the knowledge of the effect the film had on her reputation, being both her making and her undoing. At the time, however, she prevaricated over her participation in Machaty's picture. She told one interviewer that this film would finally allow her to demonstrate her acting skills on screen, and that she was lucky to be in the hands of such a talented director as Machaty.¹²Elsewhere she said her part offered good opportunities and was from quite a different mold than her previous two films. In the same interview it was also reported that “officially” she and Aribert Mog were “unofficially engaged.”¹³ A few days before the premiere, however, she gave an interview to the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, where she clarified her feelings about her role. She was just, the paper explained, recovering from a bout of flu that had kept her from working for several weeks. Going back over her casting in the film, she insisted that Machaty had been clear that there were nude sequences in the film, but these were very brief and she would be covered by leaves and flowers. When shooting started in the Carpathians, she found herself to be the only woman on set. When the nude scene was announced, she refused to participate but Machaty produced her contract and insisted. “What else could I have done all alone in the godforsaken Carpathians?” she demanded. Hedy first saw the finished film in Prague and wasn't too upset by what she saw, since no one knew her there. In Vienna, however, the situation was extremely embarrassing as all her friends and acquaintances would see her performance. Now she wanted Machaty to remove the sequences but he refused.

She also claimed a body double had been used for some of the sequences (indeed, it seems that a body double was deployed in certain of the scenes, although not in the swimming shot). Perhaps most surprisingly Hedy announced that she was shortly going to Berlin and then would return to Vienna before leaving for America with her mother, where she had a contract with Paramount and would soon be appearing in Hollywood films.¹⁴

In another interview she said that she was never paid for the role and had taken it, “because I was in love with somebody.” This “somebody” was presumably Aribert Mog. Even more salaciously, a further rumor claimed there was a version of the film where the two really made love.¹⁵

This is after all the story of Adam and Eve, with the emphasis on the pleasure rather than the punishment that temptation brings. Hedy's nudity is associated with the outdoors and freedom, sentiments that might have recommended it in Germany, where naturism was enjoying a boom and where Machaty hoped the film would reach a wide audience.

“In the 1920s,” according to Chad Ross,

organizations and publications—often working in tandem—that advocated nudism proliferated at a fantastic rate. As befits the first great age of mass culture, during the Weimar Republic nudism became a mass cultural phenomenon in which millions of Germans participated, whether as members of nudist leagues or more simply (and far more likely) as weekend beachgoers. Furthermore, nudist ideologues and proponents made use of the latest technology of the day—photographs, cinema—to further their movement.¹⁶

The difference, of course, was that German nudism (and its equally popular Austrian counterpart) was inspired by a moral outlook that equated the naked body, male or female, with a healthy, wholesome lifestyle. Machaty's ambition was to dispense with the conventions of bourgeois decorum; the heavy-handed Freudian symbolism that saw Eva's first encounter with Adam marked by wildly galloping horses was just one detail in a creation that would test the limits of the art film across Europe.

Hedy's parents must indeed have been horrified. Across their hometown, posters announced that Ecstasy was the “Talking point of Vienna” and promoted the film with the slogan “An erotic play of uninhibited natural drives.” The film's premiere was held on 18 February 1933 and it opened in four of the city's biggest cinemas. In a two-week period Ecstasy attracted audiences, so the publicity posters claimed, of 71,000. Viennese cinemagoers were able to see the uncut version of the film, though it may have been altered after its release.¹⁷ The reactions of the Viennese film critics were mixed. In the Neue Freie Presse, the reviewer noted that it was Hedy Kiesler's beauty and the expressiveness of her fine, spirited face that was the artistic achievement of Machaty's film. Otherwise, the writer continued, the film was confusing and a failed experiment in form, but striking in the beauty of its images. The nudity, he said, was tasteful, and nothing people had not already seen in pictures of lake and river bathing. The Wiener Zeitung reviewer Edwin Rollett also found fault with Machaty's ambitious attempt at a new kind of cinema and considered Eva's motives hard to understand. It seemed to Rollett that the film started three times and each time came to a halt. Yet again, however, Rollett was full of praise for Hedy Kiesler, who was not only beautiful but, as the many close-ups demonstrated, intense and expressive. The Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung's critic wrote lyrically of Hedy Kiesler's beauty. The Neue Zeitung was less appreciative of the film's finer qualities. “It shouldn't be called ‘Ecstasy,’” its critic stormed, “it should be called ‘Scandalous'!…Nudity in cinema is never aesthetic.” Even worse, Machaty's effort was boring and its narrative, mindless. It could only have passed the censors, the writer continued, warming to the theme, because they fell asleep during the screening, a dereliction of duty that might otherwise have saved the public the disappointment of seeing the film.¹⁸

If the Viennese film critics were divided over the artistic merits of Ecstasy, for the citizens of Vienna, the issue was a little different. At the seven o'clock screening on the film's opening night at the Ufa-Tonkino, some audience members hissed and booed; four people were forcibly removed by security staff. This evidently prompted the rest of the audience to join in, filling the auditorium with catcalls, hissing, and shouting. Some left of their own free will during the screening; others remained to the end and started demanding that management be called. Cries of “We want our money back. It's a scandal!” were heard. As cinemagoers for the next showing began attempting to take their seats, the police were called to restore order.¹⁹ Similar public outcries accompanied other screenings elsewhere; much of the public's unhappiness was not about the film's erotic content, but its misleading advertising, which had, according to Rollet, “awoken in them unjustifiable expectations of obscenity.”²⁰ This kind of response, over frustrated expectations, would be echoed by filmgoers from Paris to New York.

Audiences in Germany, where the film was first banned and then released under the title Symphony of Love (Symphonie derLiebe), also greeted the screening with laughter and whistles from certain seats and with reproaches for this behavior from others. The German version was heavily censored and contained two scenes shot especially for it. One scene made it clear that Eva was already divorced from her husband when she met her lover, a second added a happy ending, with the lovers united. Later, Machaty claimed that the film had been banned because Hedy Kiesler was Jewish, though there is no evidence to support this. More spicy rumors spread after the war: that a copy of the film had been found in Goebbels's private safe; that it was Göring's favorite film and he also had a private copy.²¹