Berlin Film Festival: Revealing the 'dream girls' of the 1950s

Who needs stars when you can have Volkswagens? That seemed to be the philosophy behind the art installation conceived to support the "Dream Girls" retrospective at the Berlin Film Festival. A fleet of 30 tiny red cars was parked in a street leading up to the main festival hub, every one of them celebrating a glamorous starlet of the 1950s. Their windows were frosted, but each had a peephole. Voyeurs and passing pedestrians were thus able to peer at clips from movies by the likes of Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe.

The one actual actress who came to Berlin to take part in the retrospective - 45 films showcasing 30 "screen heroines" - was Harriet Andersson, Ingmar Bergman's muse and lover in the early 1950s. Back in 1952, when she played the voluptuous greengrocer's daughter in Bergman's Summer With Monika, Andersson helped define a new kind of sex symbol: to put it crudely, one without a bra.

"At that time, the (Hollywood) films had no possibility to show the breasts," the retrospective's curator Hans Helmut Prinzler confides. "The form of presentation of an attractive, erotic person was different from today."

In Sweden, though, different rules applied. Monika is shown splashing naked in the water and frolicking in the woods with her boyfriend Harry (Lars Ekborg), though Andersson tut-tuts at any idea that her back-to-nature scenes with Bergman paved the way for Brigitte Bardot, Russ Meyer and the rest.

"I started in a private theatre school when I was 15 years old and I started working in the theatre in 1949," she says, emphasising her "legitimate" credentials. When I try to talk to her about representations of femininity in European and Hollywood films of the 1950s, she clams up. "I didn't think about that. I was working. That was my life," she says. "Also, in the 1950s, women didn't talk so much. They were supposed to look sweet and nice and keep their mouths shut."

That, Prinzler argues, is precisely what makes the decade so fascinating. Andersson sums up the contradictions in a decade in which prudery and liberation walked hand in hand. In Europe, the 1950s marked the beginning of the Nouvelle Vague, a time when directors and their actors embraced a new, far less inhibited style of film-making, There were cracks, too, beginning to appear in the patriarchal world of Hollywood. The women were beginning to talk back. (Witness Jane Russell and Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as the golddiggers terrifying any male they meet.)

With television threatening to suck away the cinema audience, the studios began to present their biggest stars in ever more strident and exaggerated formats. Monroe stands alongside 3D and Technicolor as one of Hollywood's secret weapons. Fox showcased her in a series of big-budget star vehicles. Meanwhile, they promoted her as the star "whose kisses fired men's souls". There was a sense, though, that they couldn't contain the force that they had unleashed.

Sounding like an anthropologist describing rare tribes, Prinzler lists the different kinds of femininity that Hollywood portrayed in the era. There was Doris Day, "a good comrade, very practical and active"; Audrey Hepburn, "romantic and a little bit sentimental"; Monroe, "expressive but naive". And then there was Lana Turner, the blowzy star whose colourful private life made even her most lurid movies (Peyton Place or An Imitation of Life) seem understated. She changed lovers and husbands with such frequency that gossip columnists struggled to keep up.

In the austere, post-Nazi era, German audiences were fascinated by such exotic figures. "We were not familiar with [Hollywood] movies of the 1940s because in the middle of the 1930s there had been a break," Prinzler explains. "I remember that we were very interested to see American movies [in the 1950s]. People were open to new faces."

In stark contrast to the Hollywood "glamour queens" were the actresses in Europe: self-consciously defiant types like Andersson or Bardot who were open about their sexuality and chafed against the male-dominated society in which they lived. "Many actresses [in the 1950s] play self-confident characters, shaped by existential experiences, who want to assert themselves in a male-dominated world," Prinzler notes.

Stardom can't help but seem slippery and elusive as a subject for scholarly debate. By discussing the careers of the Dream Girls in political and sociological terms, the experts risk ignoring what made them special the first time - namely the pleasure they gave to audiences. Nonetheless, as the British film critic Raymond Durgnat once noted, you can tell the social history of a nation through its film stars.

Prinzler, who acknowledges that many of the retrospective's films were the ones he enjoyed discovering as a young cinephile/ adolescent male, is unapologetic about taking a highbrow approach to populist material. He argues that any retrospective has two main goals: to "open a chapter of film history for young people" and to spark debate. With this retrospective, there was a third purpose: to put the Dream Girls back where they belong, on the biggest screens possible.