Dorothy Arzner

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Dorothy Arzner (1934)

Dorothy Arzner (born January 3, 1897 in San Francisco , California , † October 1, 1979 in La Quinta , California) was an American film director and film editor . As a director, she made nearly 20 films between 1927 and 1943 and is considered by film historians to be the most important filmmaker of the Hollywood studio system .

life and career

As a teenager, Dorothy Arzner worked as a waitress in her father's Los Angeles pub, which was frequented by film greats like Mary Pickford , DW Griffith , Douglas Fairbanks and Mack Sennett . The film business initially left her cold and she originally wanted to become a doctor, but eventually dropped out. During the First World War she worked as a hospital nurse and ambulance driver. During a labor shortage due to the Spanish flu , she entered the film business in 1919 and began working as a stenographer for William DeMille , brother of Cecil B. DeMille , in the script department of Famous Players, which soon became Paramount . She soon rose to be a film editor , and her work on The Bullfighting Scenes in Blood and Sand , a huge 1922 Rudolph Valentino hit , was so brilliant that James Cruze made her chief editor of The Covered Wagon the following year.

In 1927, Arzner himself directed the film Fashions for Women for the first time and became very well known during the transition from silent films to talkies at the end of the 1920s. This was unusual in that, although there were a few examples of women directors in Hollywood's early phase, they had been pushed out of the film business by the time the talkies began. Arzner was the first woman to direct a sound film and the first female member of the Directors Guild of America , founded in 1936 , in which she remained the only woman until she retired from the film business in the 1940s. Many press articles also reported on Arzner, as she was the only female director in Hollywood at that time to be a curiosity.

Arzner shot with some of the studio's top female stars, preferably in films that were particularly aimed at female audiences. She directed Clara Bow's first sound film, The Wid Party, from 1929. The publicity surrounding the microphone fuses that were supposedly blown due to Clara's volume helped turn the shallow triangle story into a financial success. Especially Arzner's two films with Ruth Chatterton , the studio's top female star at the time, were great financial successes. Sarah and Son told the story of an Austrian soprano who had to give up her illegitimate child and who later looked for him for years. Chatterton was praised for her perfect modulation of the initially heavy German accent into an almost perfect English diction towards the end of the film. In view of the still primitive recording technology, that was a great achievement. At the Academy Awards in November 1930 , Ruth Chatterton was nominated for Best Actress for her performance . Arzner also shot other love dramas later, including Merrily We Go to Hell with Sylvia Sidney and Fredric March and Anybodys Woman , her second film with Chatterton. Filming for a third collaboration, Stepdaughters of War , was canceled in mid-1931. The film would have been about the traumatic experiences of a British medic and ambulance driver on the French front in 1916. Two scenes were used by the studio in The House that Shadows Build , which celebrated the company's 20th anniversary.

In 1933, Arzner took over the direction of Christoper Strong with Katharine Hepburn , with whom the screen image of Hepburn , who was then just in the film business, was significantly shaped by her role as a fearless and independent pilot. Nana (1934) was supposed to turn Anna Sten , the latest discovery by star producer Samuel Goldwyn , into a star, but the strict censorship regulations of the Production Code only allowed a defused version of the novel by Émile Zola . Arzner 's 1936 film Craig's Wife, starring Rosalind Russell in the role of a manipulative, cold-hearted wife, is one of the most widely received works today. The film was based on the Pulitzer Prize- winning play of the same name by George Kelly , Grace Kelly's uncle . There was already a film adaptation with the main actors Irene Rich and Warner Baxter from 1928, followed in 1950 by a third adaptation with Joan Crawford . In 1937, Arzner directed the film The Bride Wore Red , which was plagued by quarrels when it was made , a material that was originally bought by MGM for Luise Rainer in 1937 and then passed on to Joan Crawford.

The musical film Dance, Girl, Dance , shot in 1940 , in which Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball rival each other as showgirls, is considered to be the final highlight of Arzner's oeuvre . The film showed feminist sensitivities that were rare for Hollywood cinema at the time and is now sometimes considered Arzner's masterpiece, especially since RKO Radio Pictures allowed her greater artistic freedom in this production. Her last feature film was the war drama First Comes Courage starring Merle Oberon, staged for Columbia Pictures in 1943 . The reasons for the end of Arzner's career in Hollywood are still not clear: The lack of commercial success of her last two films, a protracted pneumonia and the increasing conservatism in Hollywood after the introduction of the Hays Code in 1934, which probably made work difficult for the lesbian director , are given as possible reasons. Arzner later stated that she had left the film business voluntarily, but that at the same time she felt abandoned by Hollywood, because the type of film she was most interested in was no longer in demand there.

During the Second World War, Arzner shot several commercials for the Women's Army Corps, the women's wing of the United States Army , and in the 1950s dozens of commercials for the Pepsi concern - the latter at the request of her friend Joan Crawford, who was then on the company's board of directors . Arzner taught film students at the Pasadena Playhouse and from 1961 at the University of California (Los Angeles) , where the young Francis Ford Coppola was one of their students.

Dorothy Arzner (left) with Marion Morgan in 1927, photograph by Arnold Genthe

Arzner was in a relationship with the dancer and choreographer Marion Morgan (1881–1971) for over 40 years until her death , and she was also rumored to have had affairs with well-known actresses such as Alla Nazimova . She did not spend her twilight years in Los Angeles, but in La Quinta in the California desert, where she was working on an ultimately unfinished historical novel. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is dedicated to her.

reception

Arzner was able to experience a renewed interest in her films in the last years of her life. In 1975 the Directors Guild of America organized a film festival with their films in their presence. Especially in film studies with a feminist focus, Arzner's work has been scientifically examined since the early 1970s, for example with regard to its portrayal of gender roles and female sexuality. Her biographer Judith Mayne summarized that not every film by Arzner was completely successful and that, like all Hollywood directors, she had to work under commercial pressure, but that differences to the films of male directors and a critical consideration of social norms would permeate her work. From a feminist and queer point of view, Arzner's work is viewed as subversive , as it seldom directly but subliminally questions gender concepts of the time and particularly often focuses on the relationships between female characters.

Filmography (selection)

Complete filmography as a director

literature

  • Donna R. Casella: "What Women Want: The Complex World of Dorothy Arzner and Her Cinematic Women." In: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 50 No. 1/2, 2009, pp. 235-270.
  • Judith Mayne: "Directed by Dorothy Arzner". Indiana University Press, 1994. 212 pages.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Dorothy Arzner - Women Film Pioneers Project. Retrieved November 15, 2020 .
  2. a b c Karyn Kay: Interview with Dorothy Arzner. In: agnès films. July 16, 2011, Retrieved November 15, 2020 (American English).
  3. a b c Dorothy Arzner: Queen of Hollywood | Sight & Sound. Accessed November 15, 2020 .
  4. Dorothy Arzner | UCLA Film & Television Archive. Retrieved November 15, 2020 .
  5. ^ Judith Mayne: "Directed by Dorothy Arzner". Indiana University Press, 1994. p. 151.
  6. ^ Dorothy Arzner - Member, 1938-1979. Accessed November 15, 2020 .
  7. See background here: [1] and here: Scott O'Brien - Ruth Chatterton, Actress, Aviator, p. 127 ff.
  8. see here: [2] . The two scenes can be seen here: [3]
  9. Jump up ↑ Sheila O'Malley: Dance, Girl, Dance: Gotta Dance. Accessed November 15, 2020 .
  10. ^ Judith Mayne: "Directed by Dorothy Arzner". Indiana University Press, 1994. p. 89.
  11. ^ Judith Mayne: "Directed by Dorothy Arzner". Indiana University Press, 1994. pp. 78-79.
  12. ^ Theresa L. Geller: Arzner, Dorothy - Senses of Cinema. Retrieved November 15, 2020 (American English).
  13. ^ Dorothy Arzner: Queen of Hollywood | Sight & Sound. Accessed November 15, 2020 .
  14. Anthony D'Alessandro: Francis Ford Coppola & Paramount Dedicate Studio Building To Trailblazing Female Filmmaker Dorothy Arzner. In: Deadline. March 2, 2018, Retrieved November 15, 2020 (American English).
  15. ^ The Most Prolific Female Director in History Took Feminism to the Masses. Retrieved November 15, 2020 (American English).
  16. Burt A. Folkart, Susan King: Dorothy Arzner. In: Los Angeles Times. January 25, 2003, accessed November 15, 2020 .
  17. Queer & Now & Then: 1940. March 27, 2019, accessed on November 15, 2020 (English).
  18. ^ Judith Mayne: "Directed by Dorothy Arzner". Indiana University Press, 1994. p. 7, pp. 86-87.
  19. ^ Judith Mayne: "Directed by Dorothy Arzner". Indiana University Press, 1994. pp. 7, pp. 143-145.