When hearing laughter ring out in a lecture hall, one would expect to see students in stitches over a silly YouTube video or a professor’s unhinged rant. Most would never guess they were watching a 1940’s comedy.
The screening was a part of Il Cinema Ritrovato on Tour, hosted at Tawes Hall Thursday to a packed crowd of students and faculty.
Presented by the cinema and media studies and Italian programs, this year’s festival stop at the University of Maryland hosted a day commemorating German-American actress Marlene Dietrich and her unforgettable contributions to cinema. The event included a Dietrich-starring double feature and a panel Q&A.
Hester Baer, professor of German studies and cinema and media studies and a festival organizer, said the event chose to honor Dietrich because of her incredible star power that younger viewers may be unaware of.
“These are not the kind of movies that people are regularly choosing to stream, but when you see them on the big screen, there’s an iconic quality,” Baer said.
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The first film, Blonde Venus, is a drama directed by Josef von Sternberg that stars Dietrich as a retired cabaret girl who returns to show business to pay for her husband’s medical treatment. The second, A Foreign Affair, directed by Billy Wilder, is a comedy also starring Dietrich as a cabaret girl, but this time as a former Nazi collaborator and the girlfriend of a high ranking United States Army captain.
The festival also highlighted Dietrich’s groundbreaking status as a queer woman involved in anti-fascism movements.
“She’s somebody whose biography is really timely,” Baer noted. “She was living as a queer person in a time when most queer people were closeted, especially public figures like her.”
Dietrich’s on-screen presence fusing Berlin with Hollywood is impossible to deny. As soon as she enters the frame, entire crowds are transfixed by her distinct beauty and androgynous fashion sense. She elicits laughter from her comedic abilities as easily as awe from her incredible talent in drama.
A Foreign Affair was particularly a crowd favorite, leaving the entire room howling with laughter at jokes and gags filmed nearly 80 years ago.
“There’s something amazing about seeing this artifact of time and everyone laughing,” said senior cinema and media studies major and president of the Maryland Filmmakers club Ilana Maiman. “That’s what brings me back, this sort of connection we have to people of the past.”
Between the films, panelists held a roundtable to discuss Dietrich’s cinematic history and her incredible legacy in the 21st century.
Mauro Resmini, associate professor of cinema and media studies and Italian, said that the choice of screening Blonde Venus and A Foreign Affair at the festival was made to show Dietrich’s incredible range as a performer.
“With minimal gestures and minimal movements of the eye, or the eyebrows even, she’s able to change the register of a scene completely,” Resmini remarked during the Q&A.
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As one of the event’s organizers, Resmini said seeing the crowds of students flocking to the screenings made the intense festival preparations, including coordinating with sponsors and partners such as the National Gallery of Art and the American Film Institute’s Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, worth the effort.
For Resmini, seeing people come out to enjoy historic cinema was “the rewarding part.”
“You work for a year to put it together, and then you see a full venue like this where people are laughing out loud at Billy Wilder,” he said. “It’s great.”
