Marlene; or, Marlene Dietrich Refuses to Be in Marlene

How do you make a documentary with the participation of someone who doesn't want to participate, who refuses to answer questions or even think about them, who won't help you examine her life—who thinks that the very idea of a documentary about her is idiotic? Faced with such questions, famed German actor-turned-documentarian Maximilian Schell answered them: his Marlene, about reclusive star Marlene Dietrich, is how you make a documentary about someone who refuses to participate. This fascinating, sometimes enraging film is mostly about the impossibility of making it, and through this paradox I think we learn much more about Dietrich than we would have if she had submitted to the usual paint-by-numbers, fawning Biography Channel type of film.

Her contract, which we can imagine her waving constantly, stipulated that she won't appear on camera, so we never see her as she was in 1983 when the documentary was filmed, although late in the film we see her hands as she holds family photos and refuses to discuss them—"Why should anyone be interested in where they were born?" Her voice is pretty much as we rememeber it from her later films, such as Judgment at Nuremberg and Touch of Evil. She hasn't watched any of her films since she created them; she disputes that she was any good in them anyway. "Do you think I'd sit in some stuffy old cinema and watch an old film? I read books!"

Still, we get illuminating glimpses of her real feelings about the people she worked with: Fritz Lang was a terrible director and an autocrat, she loved Spencer Tracy enough to tear up at the mention of his name, we should all cross ourselves before speaking the holy name of Orson Welles, she thinks Emil Jannings was a horrible ham, and she dismisses improvisation as "amateurish" and the Method as nonsense. And we get some of her personal feelings about other things: women's lib is a mistaken psychosis, because women's brains weigh less than men's—perhaps a surprising belief from the bisexual woman who dressed like a man in Morocco, but part of this doc's point is that the screen woman and the real woman have little to do with each other.

Although she steadfastly refuses to rewatch or discuss her old movies, it's fascinating that her second career as a cabaret singer was built on songs from those movies she dismisses as junk. Late in the documentary, after Schell finally browbeats her into watching some of her early performances on video in her apartment, she becomes increasingly combative and bitchy when he asks her to comment on them. And although she's said a dozen times that she thinks they're "kitsch", she switches gears, arguing that it's like asking someone to look at the Sistine Chapel and then offer observations—"Who the hell am I to comment?" It's a tantalizing crack in her armor, and it casts her entire performance in this documentary about her life into a new perspective. Because it is a performance.

How much of her previous refusal to talk about her films as art or herself as an artist was an act? Buried approximately halfway through the film's running time is what I think is the real answer behind her refusal to really participate. Finally, after decades in which her every move was documented by tell-all magazine articles, gossip columns, and newsreels, she has the power to decide what's public and what's private. Now Maximilian Schell, and behind him the public who's still interested in the Marlene Dietrich they remember from the screen and stage, is demanding that she cede some of her control. She frustrates him to the point that he stalks out of the room, and she makes him pay for it when he comes back, calling him an ill-mannered lout who should return to his momma for lessons in manners. "You have a masochistic complex, dear," she cackles, but we already know that—he stuck around to finish his film, despite her best efforts to drive him away. We should all be grateful that he did.

This post is part of Joe Valdez's Class of 1984 Blogathon. Make sure to check in there for the rest of the entries, all of which were released when I was nine years old and already an established film critic, at least in my living room. I'm posting early because it's past my bedtime.