and she leaves Adam. The film ends at this point in certain versions; in others, an added scene sees Eva nursing a child, while in another shot Adam is at work, apparently dreaming of his lost love.
The camera delights in caressing Hedy's face and framing her body in one erotic pose after another. In the film's early sequences, as long as she is trapped in her marriage to Emil, she is presented as a precious object, part of the opulent furnishings of that wealthy man's life. Only when she frees herself of the city's glamour, by literally tearing off her clothes and throwing herself in the water, is Eva able to return to the Garden of Eden and find her Adam. Machaty did not require that Hedy act, she simply had to let herself be filmed. He saw to it that through framing and diffuse lighting, this slightly plump teenager was transformed into an object of post-pubescent desire. Gone was the small-town daughter of the house that her audiences knew from her Weimar films; this Hedy Kiesler was defined by her languid movements and natural sexuality.
Shot just three years after D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley’s Loverhad been the subject of an obscenity trial, Machaty revisits much of the territory that made Lawrence's novel so controversial. Here, again, is the story of a young well-bred woman caught in an impotent marriage and finding sexual release in the freedom of the outdoors with a younger, more earthy lover. In his essay on the film, written shortly after its release in Europe, Henry Miller teased out the connections between the two. Each time he saw Ecstasy, and that was four or five times, he noticed that the audience responded in the same way: “cheers and applause mingled with groans and catcalls.” The hostility, he was convinced, “has nothing to do with the alleged immorality of the film. The audience is not shocked but indignant.” This indignation he ascribed to the film's pacing, which delivered none of the conventional pleasures of narrative drive but rather forced the spectator “whether he will or no, to swim in the very essence of Machaty's creation…Beneath the public's hostility is the grudging admission of the presence of a superior force, a disturbing force.” Since Miller locates this force in the solar plexus, we needn't doubt his point; what is disturbing about this film is its sexual energy, an energy that moves beyond the boundaries of the screen and, in Miller's description, into the auditorium. Machaty's Adam and Eva are creations of the instinct rather than the intellect: “Their meeting is that of pure bodies, their union is poetic, sensual, mystical. They do not question themselves—they obey their instincts…In Extase the drama is one of life and death, life impersonated by the two lovers, death by the husband. The latter represents society as it is, while the lovers represent the life force blindly struggling to assert itself.” So in the final sequences of the French version, as the lover is left sleeping on the bench and the train pulls out of the station bearing away his mistress, the audience was most disturbed—”Is there perhaps the flicker of a suspicion in their addled pates that life is passing them by? I notice that the resentment is largely confined to the male members of the audience. Could one read into that a Freudian story of bankruptcy?”5
Miller was dismissive of the undertones of Soviet filmmaking that he picked up in Ecstasy, but they influence its aesthetic as much as Lawrence. The engineer, by virtue of his profession alone, is highly reminiscent of the idealized virile hero so beloved by Soviet filmmakers. Similarly, the repeated shots of the husband's monocle and his perfectly shined shoes seem like a direct steal from Eisenstein.
What is most striking about the film's politics is its refusal to punish Eva for her sexuality, either for abandoning her husband or having an affair with the engineer. Whichever ending we see, she remains in control, a figure of nature and an object of desire, but equally a strong, independent young woman, who cedes authority neither to her father, nor her husband, nor her lover. If her association with water and horses are representational cliches, the film's narrative, such as it is, never seeks to contain her or limit her freedom of choice.
Aesthetically, Machaty's film is strikingly beautiful. It could have easily been a silent era production, and it comes as a surprise when the characters talk to each other (the entire film contains fifteen lines of dialogue).
The two key scenes that garnered the film such publicity, and a misleading reputation for pornography, were the nude swimming sequence and a close-up of Hedy's face as she simulates orgasm. All this was filmed, according to Hedy, without her being aware of the consequences of what she was doing: “The director shouted ‘If we do not do this scene, the picture will be ruined, and we will collect our losses from you!’…‘I won't. I won't take off my clothes!’ I was thinking of my parents…not to mention the crew we were shooting with, and the public, later on. Impossible!”6
She did take off her clothes: “I remember it was windy but warm, and the breeze was refreshing on my body as I undressed gingerly behind the broadest tree I could find…One deep breath, and I ran zigzagging from tree to tree and into the lake. My only thought was ‘I hope they get the splash.'” Evidently not; Machaty was behind the microphone, urging the young actress to do one more take: “I wanted to refuse, but there was no turning back now. Shivering, I scooted back to the first tree. Mysteriously, somebody had put a terrycloth robe there. I dried off, and waited for the damned gun. It had jammed! After a moment, the megaphone voice shouted, ‘Go!’ Again I zigzagged, probably breaking all speed records, again I swam a bit, and then stuck my head up.”7 This time the take was good.
Hedy also insisted that she had not known what a zoom lens could accomplish or that the script contained nude scenes.8 Subsequent comments by the production crew suggest that she knowingly agreed to do the nude scenes: “As the star of the picture, she knew she would have to appear naked in some scenes. She never made any fuss about it during the production.”9 That a nude performance was expected of the film's star was confirmed by Lupita Kohner. According to her, her future husband and then producer, Paul Kohner, had proposed her for the part of Eva. Lupita Tovar (as she still was) was already working in Hollywood but traveled to Berlin to meet Machaty, anticipating the role would be hers. However, when Kohner saw the script, which made it clear that nudity was expected, he insisted Lupita not take the role.10
Hedy's next test was the lovemaking scene. Machaty was looking for a sequence that would suggest beyond doubt that the expression on her face indicated to the audience that she had reached orgasm: “I was told to lie down with my hands above my head while Aribert Mog whispered in my ear, and then kissed me in the most uninhibited fashion. I was not sure what my reactions would be, so when Aribert slipped down and out of camera, I just closed my eyes.” Machaty was not impressed. Mumbling about the stupidity of youth, he looked around until he found a safety pin on the table: “You will lie here,” he said, “I will be underneath, out of camera range. When I prick you a little on your backside, you will bring your elbows together and you will react!”11 Numerous pinpricks later, a howl of agony from Hedy gave Machaty the shot he was looking for. If the nude bathing had not been enough, here was a scene that made the film censors of the world draw a collective breath.
• • •
The descriptions of the shoot from Ecstasy and Me were written (by Hedy, we may assume) many years after the event and in the knowledge of the effect the film had on her reputation, being both her making and her undoing. At the time, however, she prevaricated over her participation in Machaty's picture. She told one interviewer that this film would finally allow her to demonstrate her acting skills on screen, and that she was lucky to be in the hands of such a talented director as Machaty.12Elsewhere she said her part offered good opportunities and was from quite a different mold than her previous two films. In the same interview it was also reported that “officially” she and Aribert Mog were “unofficially engaged.”13 A few days before the premiere, however, she gave an interview to the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, where she clarified her feelings about her role. She was just, the paper explained, recovering from a bout of flu that had kept her from working for several weeks. Going back over her casting in the film, she insisted that Machaty had been clear that there were nude sequences in the film, but these were very brief and she would be covered by leaves and flowers.
