Free Thinking17 Des 2020

Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich: sensual screen siren, political radical, 20th-century sex symbol, and - eventually - septuagenarian cabaret star. Cabraret legend Le Gateau Chocolat, film historian Pamela Hutchinson, writer Phuong Le, and academic Lucy Bolton join Matthew Sweet to delve into a life fully lived.

From her formative collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, to entertaining the troops throughout World War II, to a late blossoming live performance career and touring as a cabaret artist into her seventies, Dietrich's life traces the line of western history throughout almost the whole twentieth century. What did she mean, and what did she become? Matthew and his guests follow the story through films including The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express, and Touch of Evil.

Pamela Hutchinson is the curator of The BFI's Marlene Dietrich: Falling in Love Again, which runs at BFI Southbank throughout December.

Le Gateau Chocolat’s work spans drag, cabaret, opera, musical theatre, children’s theatre and live art.

Lucy Bolton is the editor of Lasting Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure and Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary University London.

Phuong Le is a Paris-based film writer. She writes for publications including Music Mezzanine, Vague Visages and Film Comment magazine.

You can find Le Gateau Chocolat discussing Weimar the subversion of cabaret culture in an episode recorded at the Barbican centre https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b7r7

And you might be interested in other discussions of film stars and directors including Billy Wilder, Cary Grant, Betty Balfour and Early Cinema and director Alice Guy-Blaché which are all available to download as Arts & Ideas podcasts from the Free Thinking programme website.

Producer: Caitlin Benedict

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Episoder(1526)

The Ethics of Knowledge

Do we have a responsibility to inform ourselves about the state of the world? Is the experience of some people valued more highly than that of others? Matthew Sweet investigates the ethics of knowledg...

10 Jul 56min

Trade and traffic

What does trade set in motion beyond the exchange of goods? Anne McElvoy explores the movement of commerce across time as a carrier of habits, ideas, ambitions and influence, as well as of material th...

3 Jul 56min

The Child's Eye View

Shahidha Bari investigates the child’s-eye view of the world. From navigating AI, to living through war, to the joys of reading, what makes children’s perspectives so distinctive? With writer Katherin...

26 Jun 56min

Eccentrics & Outsiders

How has the figure of the outsider or eccentric has been used to explore English culture, history, politics, and our relationship with nature and the countryside? Matthew Sweet discusses, including a ...

19 Jun 1h 54min

Satire and Gulliver's Travels

300 years after the publication of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Matthew Sweet looks at satire, past and present. How can satirists reflect critically and humorously on political events in an a...

12 Jun 56min

Wealth

Anne McElvoy and guests discuss the concentration, distribution and morality of wealth now and look back at An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published by the Scottish ec...

5 Jun 56min

Free Thinking at the Hay Festival: Responsibility

Freedom is one of the leading values of our society. But with freedom comes responsibility, which is a much more contested principle. Deciding where responsibility lies, and what it means to take it, ...

29 Mai 56min

Thinking with Food

The links between food and philosophy, ideas about experimentation, taste and how food and traditions become part of our identity are explored by Matthew Sweet in Radio 4's round-table discussion prog...

22 Mai 56min