Since the pandemic began, I’ve been meeting weekly with three friends from Yale FMS to watch movies. Two of us are in Asia, two are in the exalted East Coast, king of time zones, so we’re half in the morning time, half in the evening time. We rotate movie selection and end up watching odd things & mysterious things.
Ecstasy (1933) is Hedy Lamarr’s big breakthrough production, a scandalous film for its time. Hedy Lamarr is famous enough that parents and grandparents all recognize her, but I don’t think many are familiar with this film, produced in Czechoslovakia in German, French, and Czech versions. Formally, the film mixes conventional melodrama narrative with montage sequences revealing characters’ psychological distress.
The film is known for a rather direct sex scene: Hedy’s character Eva has sex with an engineer she met after returning to her family home in the wake of her divorce. We see the scene through the actors’ faces in (title of film!) ecstasy. Orgasm is represented through Eva’s broken necklace, which later reveals her affair to her ex-husband, leading to his suicide and her guilt-ridden separation from her lover. This sex scene was underwhelming to me but must have been shocking for the time; personally, I almost missed it!
Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy (1933) runs naked after her horse.
More noticeable was the dramatic first meeting between Eva and the engineer Adam. Eva is bathing naked in a pond when her horse runs off with her clothes. The horse goes to canoodle with another horse and is captured by Adam, who sees Eva hiding in the trees naked. He gives her a set of fashionable overalls which fit her perfectly that he just happened to have with him. Then she hurts her leg and really can’t escape from him—true romance.
When I tried to post on Instagram about the movie, my image of Hedy’s topless horse chasing was flagged as inappropriate for including “female nipples.” First of all, I cannot tolerate the absurdity of female nipples. What about being attached to mammary glands makes nipples obscene? “Male” nipples are arguably more obscene because they are useless for anything besides pleasure. Second, the current era where the majority of personal expression must go through the content filters of mega-corporations is not far off from the time when the film was made, when national film boards insisted on cuts and the Pope himself denounced it.
Hedy’s deletion from my Instagram echoes the strangeness of the ending: when Eva, perhaps feeling guilt over her ex-husband’s suicide, leaves Adam at the train station, she vanishes from the film. Instead we accompany Adam through a hallucinatory sequence of workers where he sees a vision of Eva holding his child. But Eva herself, as a character who experienced the pleasure of a broken necklace, is gone.