[Reader-list] Pianos, torpedos and mobile phones (from Gayatri Chatterjee)

[Rana Dasgupta]

Gayatri Chatterjee just sent me this interesting response to my earlier
posting on Hedy Lamarr which I thought should go on the list.  The intensely
masculine way by which history is thought to advance in a corporate art form
such as film - and the inability to narrate female curiosity and creativity
except with distancing terms like "unlikely"...

R


The report should have read: Hedy Lamarr did this and this and incidentally
she was also a 'femme fatale'. Of course, The Economist person is just doing
his/her (most probably his) job of attracting readers to read.
Incidentally, the Czech film 'Ecstasy', where she had appeared nude is there
in the Archive. The film isn't much, but that can hardly be her fault.
But she was stamped for life after that -- as a great body no brains/no
skill beauty. Readers today perhaps do not know who Lamarr was -- which is
ok. But I question such re-writings of history.

As I write , I have taken out an Encyclopaedia to check entry on her. She
was 'discovered' by Max Reinhardt...Imagine...
No, it isn't difficult to imagine. Did you see Reinhardt's version of
Bertolt
Brecht's 'Arturo Ui' in Delhi. It can very well be the best 'modern play' I
have ever seen. But I can also imagine women from such groups going out --
leaving the group and going crazy. The way the main actor is worshipped is
simply amazing! Granted, that got to be, if he has to act the way he
did....Imagine being able to explain fully through acting the phenomenon of
a Hitler and his rise to power. What that does to the audience is you hate
the character and at the same time you're filled with admiration for the
actor before you as Brilliant.
No one can match such a 'brilliant' female-creations on stage; and women
actresses are so often on the brink of being 'redundant' and dispensable.

Equally fantastic is the Lamarr story of her marrying a man who wanted to
buy up and destroy all copies of 'Ecstasy'. She divorced her before he could
accomplish her mission and so the film was released over and over again all
across the world. Imagine a man wanting to take from her that first -- and
the only real -- claim to fame.
She had married six husbands and was in later life charged twice for
shoplifting. Why couldn't she go on discovering things? The reporter writes
'she was a femme fatale but she also played an "unlikely" role' -- why
unlikely?
Why couldn't she become famous in that or other ways -- this is what we
should be thinking.

I am reacting this way for I speak against the backdrop of erasures of women
from Film History. Have you read Guillianan Bruno's book
'Streetwalking on a Ruined Map' on the Italian silent filmmaker Elvira
Notari? Brilliant!
It is amazing how even now, many do not bother to mention Alice Guy when
teaching film history . Just turn Guy into a man...can you imagine the
excitement, the efforts to give 'him' THE legitimate place in the pages of
History.
What will happen to the history of Realism, if Notari's films are found?
Why did the Nazi suppress only her and why are only her films are 'lost' so
damnably?
I dare not say anything about the contribution of women in Indian film
industry. There was a mother who had helped the Father in the kitchen, after
her cooking and feeding was done (I speak of Mrs Phalke) and thereafter, no
woman did anything. They only 'acted'. They cannot 'be'; they can only
act -- or react!

Gayatri Chatterjee