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Sometime in college, when I was taking a film class, I wandered into a bookstore and opened one of those books that existed before the internet, a compendium of famous people born on each day of the year. We had just screened The Blue Angel, in class, and there, on my very own birthday, was Marlene Dietrich. She of the vertiginous cheekbones and the intense eyes.

 

I'm not at all sure that the film communicated its message, any message, to my adolescent self. It held a critique of Weimar society as it tipped towards the Third Reich, sure. But that critique moved through depictions of a nightclub and a cabaret singer that were both wilder and more controlled, at the same time, than anything in my known universe. I had lived abroad for a year and traveled on night trains without a chaperone and I was so young and fucked up and immature that I thought this made me worldly. It did not. The Blue Angel brought me up short. It depicted a world I could not quite grasp, and I was fascinated by my inability to understand it. My lovely film professor showed me the power of angle and POV, in her perfect French accent. I might have become a film nerd, under different circumstances. Instead, I looked up enough info about Dietrich to make myself feel I had some cred and then, in command-line internet communities and early email software, I began using a new avatar: this blue angel. Sometimes people would ask me if I was a fan of the Navy flyers, and I would scoff and say, no, of course not, it's a reference the Sternberg Dietrich film. ... (read more)

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