Studia Litterarum

I propose to discuss Ernst Lubitsch’s decision to tailor Ninotchka (1939), his film with  I propose to discuss Ernst Lubitsch’s decision to tailor Ninotchka (1939), his film with   Greta Garbo, to Garbo in the role of a Soviet revolutionary, which  — given the over whelming importance of Garbo to classical Hollywood  — is how the October Revolution  is situated at the heart of American cinema at the time while Garbo’s proverbial cinemat ic melancholia is shown to entail the structures of affect residual to revolutions. More over, by divorcing Garbo’s revolutionary melancholia from melodrama and attaching it   to comedy, Lubitsch extricates this particular psychopolitics from the fact of genre, now   as an insight into the construction of film. Finally, I show how Lubitsch engages Russian   literature, especially Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, as a code-holder for Hollywood iconicity.

1       Barthes R. Mythologies. Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1957. 241 p. (In French) 

2       Cavell S. Contesting Tears. The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman.   Chicago, London, The University of Chicago Press, 1996. 255 p. (In English) 

3       Cavell S. Cities of Words. Pedagogical Letters on a Register of Moral Life. Cambridge   (Mass.), London, Harvard University Press, 2004. 458 p. (In English) 

4       Felman S. Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis. Modern Language  Notes, 1983, no 98.5, pp. 1021–1053. (In English) 

5       Harvey J. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood. From Lubitsch to Sturges. New York,   Da Capo Press, 1998. 716 p. (In English) 

6       Zupančič A. Kaj je ‘Cluny Brown’? Zadeva Lubitsch. Eds. Ivana Novak, Jela Krečič.  Ljubljana, Slovenska kinoteka, Društvo za teoretsko psihoanalizo, 2013. S. 167–179.   (In Slovenian)