Ecstasy (film)
"Ecstasy" is a 1933 film that features Hedy Lamarr, credited under her real name Hedy Kiesler, in her debut role as Eva, a young bride navigating the complexities of her marriage to Emil, an older and emotionally distant husband. The film is notable for its exploration of themes such as desire and marital dissatisfaction, culminating in Eva's decision to leave Emil and seek a more passionate connection with a construction worker named Adam. This leads to moments of intimacy depicted in the film, which were groundbreaking for the time. The film's release was met with significant censorship, particularly in the United States, where its erotic content and nudity were heavily edited, reflecting the era's conservative attitudes toward sexuality in cinema. Despite these challenges, "Ecstasy" has since been recognized for its cultural impact and as a representation of the struggle between artistic expression and societal norms. The film's portrayal of foreign narratives and eroticism contributed to the stereotype of immoral foreign films, which affected how subsequent international films were received in America. Overall, "Ecstasy" stands as a notable piece in the history of cinema, illustrating the tension between artistic freedom and censorship in the early 20th century.
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Ecstasy (film)
Identification Czech film about a love triangle involving an old man, his young wife, and a young man
Director Gustav Machatý
Dates Released in Europe in January, 1933; released in the United States on December 24, 1940
Ecstasy, known as Extáze in Czech and either Ekstase or Symphonie der Liebe (symphony of love) in German, is generally recognized as the first nonpornographic feature film to show full frontal female nudity and to present a woman’s libido, erotic passion, and sexual frustration sympathetically. The sensuality of this soft, impressionistic, and intricately symbolic film was understated by later standards, but revolutionary in its own time.
Under her real name, Hedy Kiesler, nineteen-year-old Hedy Lamarr portrayed Eva, the new bride of Emil, a kindly but inattentive, obsessive, and unresponsive gentleman, old enough to be her grandfather and either unable or unwilling to consummate their marriage. She leaves him, goes home to her father, and gets a divorce. One day, as she is skinny-dipping in a nearby stream, her horse runs off with her clothes on its back. While still naked, she meets Adam, a strapping young construction worker, who helps her get her horse and clothes back. Subsequent scenes with Adam depict their copulation and her orgasm. Events lead to Emil’s suicide, Eva’s guilt and despair, and Adam’s shattered hopes.
Impact
Ecstasy defined for American censors and audiences the stereotype of the immoral foreign film. The usually lenient German censors delayed its release there for two years. American censors, after cutting or covering its nudity and severely muffling its erotic content, finally allowed the film to be shown in the United States in 1940, probably only because Lamarr, as the protégée of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer magnate Louis B. Mayer, had recently become a popular Hollywood star. Such puritanical attitudes toward foreign films persisted into the late 1960’s and early 1970’s and resulted in American authorities banning or bowdlerizing many Swedish, French, Italian, German, and Japanese films whose producers tried to release them in the United States. The stereotype did not begin to dissolve until the American releases of the British surrealistic mystery Blow-Up (originally titled Blowup in the United Kingdom) in December, 1966, and the Swedish sexual drama I Am Curious (Yellow) in March, 1969.
Bibliography
Gardner, Gerald C. The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office, 1934-1968. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987.
Lamarr, Hedy. Ecstasy and Me: My Life as a Woman. New York: Bartholomew House, 1966.
Thomas, Alfred. The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.