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The Legend of Greta Garbo, or Woman as Thing: Hollywood Creations in Max Frisch's Stiller
Author(s) -
Revesz Eva
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/gequ.10223
Subject(s) - art , legend , hollywood , hero , wife , allusion , literature , parallels , art history , representation (politics) , philosophy , theology , politics , mechanical engineering , political science , law , engineering
In this paper, I argue that the silent film director Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928), renowned for having discovered Greta Garbo and for fashioning her into one of the most famous screen icons of all time, served as a model for the eponymous hero of Max Frisch's Stiller . The reputedly odd, symbiotic relationship between Garbo and her mentor, who were dubbed by friends “Pygmalion and Galatea,” parallels on a number of levels the obvious Pygmalion‐Galatea relation between the sculptor Stiller and his beautiful wife and model, the ballerina Julika Stiller‐Tschudy. Seen in this light, the “feminine mystique” with which Frisch imbues his fictive diva is not only a purposeful allusion to his own film idol, but also a complex representation of man's creation of woman into the fundamentally inaccessible object of his idealized love.