Leontine Sagan

Leontine Sagan
Born	Leontine Schlesinger (1889-02-13)13 February 1889 Budapest or Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died	20 May 1974(1974-05-20) (aged 85) Pretoria, South Africa
Occupation(s)	Theatre director and actress
Spouse	Victor Fleischer

Leontine Sagan (born Leontine Schlesinger; 13 February 1890 – 20 May 1974) was an Austrian-Hungarian theatre director and actress of Jewish descent. She is, however best known for directing a film, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), a film that has been celebrated for its scathing indictment of Prussian military-style schooling, as well as its sensitive portrayal of same-sex intimacy between a teacher and a student at the school, in the last years of Germany's Weimar Republic,

Sagan was born in Budapest in 1890 but grew up in South Africa. After training with Max Reinhardt in Vienna, she acted on stage in the Austrian provinces, and later in Germany, Britain, and South Africa, where she also directed theatre, first in Germany and, after she had to flee Hitler, in Britain, South Africa, and Australia. She co-founded the National Theatre Organisation of South Africa in 1947, and died in Pretoria, South Africa in 1974, at the age of 85.

Personal life

Born in Budapest in 1890, Sagan spent her early childhood in Vienna at a time when these cities were the twin centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father Isidore Schlesinger was largely absent, as he traveled to seek fortune in the South African diamond fields. Leontine and her siblings were raised by their working mother, a rarity among educated Europeans at that time, and she credits her mother with inspiring her to likewise seek a career. In 1899, as a child, they moved to South Africa with to join her father, just before the Second Boer War. She was educated in a German-language school in Johannesburg and later worked for the Austrian consulate there.

After returning to Vienna to study with Max Reinhardt, Leontine adopted the stage name Sagan and acted on stage first in Austrian provincial theatres and then in the 1910s and 1920s in Vienna, Frankfurt and Berlin. In 1916, she married Austrian art publisher and writer Dr. Victor Fleischer. Forced to leave Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933, the pair moved to Britain, and later,in 1939, to South Africa, where they spent the years of World War II (1939-45). After the war, Sagan directed theatre abroad in Britain and Australia, but remained domiciled in South Africa, where she founded the National Theatre Organisation and also taught theatre practice to black as well as white students.

Despite her long marriage to Fleischer, who died in South Africa in 1950, Sagan expressed interest in lesbian themes and characters throughout her career as an actor before making Mädchen in Uniform. This film and Sagan's choice to play the role of the teacher in English versions of the original stage play, variously titled Girls in Uniform and Children in Uniform, in Britain and South Africa in the 1930s, as well as her taste for masculine dress as seen in the photographs illustrating her autobiography Lights and Shadows, suggests at least a commitment to sensitive representation of lesbian lives and loves, if not also to personal attachments.

Career

Supported by her mother and funds from working in the Austrian consulate in Johannesburg, Leontine moved to VIenna in 1911 to train with Max Reinhardt, who was already known for elaborate and imaginative sets and theatrical direction, as well as his theatre school. After acting in small roles in provincial Austrian theatres, she moved to Germany, where she played Abel in Comrades by August Strindberg in the Munich Kammerspiele This major role in a play by a controversial modern playwright led to an engagement at the Albert Theatre in Dresden, where Sagan played Nasya in Maxim Gorky's Lower Depths in 1913, and at the avant-garde Neues Theater in Frankfurt am Main, during World War I, where Sagan originated roles in expressionist drama by Walter Hasenclever and Georg Kaiser. After the war, she played major roles at the Frankfurter Schauspielhaus, in classical German plays by Goethe and Schiller, as well as the lead in a historical drama on Catherine the Great. She also appeared in films, such as The Holy Mountain (1926), The Great Leap (1927), The White Ecstasy (1930). At the Schauspielhaus she also turned to directing, including Strindberg's Ghost Sonata, and G.B. Shaw's Caeser and Cleopatra. as well as plays on topical Jewish themes such as Die Jagd Gottes (Hunted by God), a play about a pogrom by the Rabbi Emil Bernhardt, which proved controversial. Sagan's choice to play the lesbian Countess Geschwitz in Frank Wedekind's play Pandora's Box in 1919, early in her career at the Schauspielhaus, reflects not only her interest in lesbian subjects, but also the relative tolerance of same-sex lives and institutions in the Weimar Republic, including the Institute for Sexology (1919-1933) as well as informal groups.

Although best known for her film Mädchen in Uniform, Sagan came to film directing indirectly. In 1931, she directed Gestern und Heute [Yesterday and Today], a play about an intimate relationship between a teacher and a student at a girls school, by the lesbian writer Christa Winsloe. On Winsloe's recommendation, Hertha Thiele played the role of the student and caught the attention of Carl Fröhlich, head of the German Film Chamber. Although Fröhlich maintained overall control as artistic supervisor and changed Winsloe's title to Mädchen in Uniform, allegedly to attract more male viewers, Sagan cast and directed the actors, including Thiele and, in the role of the teacher, Dorothea Wieck. Sagan's direction of the all-female cast was ground-breaking not only for its portrayal of lesbian and pedagogical eros and for its critique of Prussian militarism, but also for the production's co-operative and profit-sharing financial arrangements. The film was a national and international hit, despite some censorious responses in the U.S. and Britain. After the war, a more sentimental remake of Mädchen in Uniform, starring Romy Schneider, appeared in 1958, but from the 1970s, renewed interest in lesbian film brought viewers back to the 1931 original.

After Hitler's rise to power, Sagan moved to England. While her husband Victor Fleischer continued until 1938 to manage his publishing house in Vienna, Sagan directed stage plays, in 1933 first a stage version of Mädchen in Uniform called Girls in Uniform in London, and then in South Africa with the perhaps less controversial title Children in Uniform. Her reputation as a director of young people led to work with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, with whom she directed male students and professional actresses in plays by Shakespeare. Her observations of student rivalries at Oxford inspired the script for her second film Men of Tomorrow (1934), which Sagan directed for London Film Productions, but this film has since vanished. It was on the strength of Mädchen in Uniform that Sagan was invited to Hollywood by MGM studios, where she stayed for six months in 1936, describing the period as a "joyride". On the strength of her film, she renewed contact with former colleagues who had found work in Hollywood such as screenwriter Salka Viertel, whom Sagan had known as Salka Steuermann when they were both acting in Austria but, although Sagan wrote treatments, among them one for a biopic on the South African imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, she had no success in persuading MGM, possibly because Salka's husband, the director Berthold Viertel, had already directed a Rhodes film for Gaumont in Britain. Treatments based on historical women, such as Florence Nightingale, were likewise unsuccessful.

Instead, Sagan returned to acclaim in the London theatre; she was the first woman to produce plays at London's Drury Lane in the West End, where she directed Ivor Novello's hit musicals Glamorous Night (1935), Careless Rapture (1936), Crest of the Wave (1937), The Dancing Years (1939) and Arc de Triomphe (1943). The popularity of these shows is credited with saving Drury Lane from potential closure in the 1930s. In 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, Sagan and Fleischer moved to South Africa, where she directed mostly amateur actors but also taught black students including later famous theatre people such as the creator of the township musical Gibson Kente. After the war, she returned to directing Ivor Novello in London and to take his and other musicals on tour to Australia. Between international tours, she was also able to develop theatre in South Africa by co-founding with Andre Huguenet the National Theatre Organisation which toured the country from its base in Pretoria. In February 1948 she directed the NTO's first English production Dear Brutus by J.M. Barrie, followed by An Inspector Calls.

Filmography

*Mädchen in Uniform (1931) Sagan’s most significant film featured an all-female cast. It was the first film in Germany to be produced cooperatively (both the crew and cast obtained shares rather than a salary). It is based on the play originally titled Ritter Nerestan and later Gestern und Heute by Christa Winsloe. The film, like the play which Sagan directed as Gestern und Heute in 1931, centers on an all-girls boarding school, which was realistically depicted, as the film was shot on location, albeit at a boys' school. In the film the school is ruled by a strict Prussian headmistress but, where WInsloe's play has the student commit suicide in despair by throwing herself down the stairwell, Sagan revised the film plot to show how the student's suicidal intent was averted by solidarity and intervention from her fellow students, and thus to critique the Prussian education system, in favor of the more liberal systems of the Weimar Republic. But it is as a lesbian classic and more broadly as a feminist film, that Mädchen in Uniform has been praised since the 1970s.

The elements that make Mädchen in Uniform a lesbian classic are not the titillating images implied by the title which was in any case chosen by producer Fröhlich--girls holding hands, dressing and undressing, and so on--but rather Sagan's sensitive and sophisticated direction of talented actors, the avowedly feminist Hertha Thiele as the student Manuela, and the more subtle contribution of Dorothea Wieck as the teacher Fräulein von Bernberg. Manuela develops a crush on Fräulein von Bernberg, and the film shows the budding attraction in shots and reverse shots of the central characters without any explicit statement. Manuela confesses her love publicly only after she plays the eponymous hero of Friedrich Schiller's classic play Don Carlos, a historical tragedy in which the young prince falls in love with his stepmother while also struggling to prepare for his role as monarch. While WInsloe originally chose a Hungarian romance, Der RItter Nérestan, as the play within her play, Sagan's substitution of Don Carlos gave Thiele a script that allowed Manuela's declaration to criticize authoritarian rule and, by extension, the repressive school regime, as well as to declare love to her teacher. The headmistress forbids Fräulein von Bernburg to see or speak to Manuela again but, when Manuela attempts suicide, the other girls rally around her and save her life, while the headmistress marginalized and pushed out of the frame..

While Mädchen in Uniform may have been one of the first films to portray lesbian intimacy with seriousness and sensitivity, it played to audiences who would have seen many films with women in masculine dress or, in German Hosenrollen, from Elisabeth Bergner to Marlene Dietrich. Mädchen in Uniform's success in 1931 was due in large part to its celebration by avowed lesbian magazines such as Die Freundin and Der Skorpion and their readers but also to the broader support for feminist and independent working women in Weimar-era Germany. The Nazis suppressed these magazines and the clubs and other institutions that supported them but did not, contrary to claims, ban the film. Even after 1933, when the Nazified German Film Chamber, still run by Fröhlich, stripped the film of references to Jewish contributors, including Sagan and many of the young women playing the students, Mädchen in Uniform circulated in Nazi Germany with advertising favoring Wieck, who disavowed any lesbian content and continued to work in Nazi Germany, after Sagan, Thiele, and others had to flee the country. Although it was threatened with censorship in the U.S. and in Britain, it had enough impact on British audiences to prompt a revival on stage, directed by Sagan first in London and later in South Africa in 1933, in which revival Sagan played the role of Fräulein von Bernberg. In Germany, having been edited by the Nazi Film Chamber to erase any lesbian or Jewish elements, Sagan's original film was eclipsed after World War II by the sentimental remake Mädchen in Uniform by Geza von Radvanyi, starring Romy Schneider. The original was rediscovered and shown at women’s film festivals only from the 1970s but its rediscovery sparked renewed interest in Sagan and her contribution to German and world cinema. The restored version with full credits and English subtitles was released in videotape and later DVD format in the US in 1994 and in the UK in 2000.

Men of Tomorrow (1934), which Sagan directed for London Film Productions under British-Hungarian producer Alexander Korda, was inspired by Sagan's observation of student rivalries between athletes and aesthetes among Oxford University men; as the title suggests, Sagan hoped to shift the emphasis from the earlier drama between women of Yesterday and Today to Men of Tomorrow. Made under more prudish British conditions than Weimar Germany, its treatment of same-sex attachments among Oxford "aesthetes" was more subdued and, according to Sagan's account of the plot, the central leader of the aesthetes, ends up marrying a young woman from one of the few women's colleges at the University. Korda likely had some influence on this conventional heterosexual ending, and his distributors treated the film as a "quota quickie." Quota quickies were a low-budget films made in Britain with British cast and crew to enable international producers and distributors such as Korda to fulfill a quota of local films so as to reap far greater profits from British releases of U.S. films. Although it may be confused with a later film called Men of Tomorrow (1945), a different film about the Boy Scouts, Sagan's film has this film, like many quota quickies, has since vanished, as noted in the List of lost films. The Library of Congress once included a flyer from The Film Daily advertising the film in 1934 but that too has disappeared.

Autobiographies

Sagan kept notes on her aspirations and career from her adolescence in Johannesburg through her theatrical training in Vienna, and her theatre and film direction in Germany, Britain, South Africa, and Australia, and her brief "joyride" in Hollywood. After her death, her niece Helga Kaye gave the manuscripts, newspaper clippings, and photographs to the HIstorical Papers archive at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg. Sagan wrote two versions of her autobiography: the German-language manuscript appears to have been written earlier, and covers her work in Austria and Germany in greater detail, while the English-language one is much longer and includes her post-war work in Britain and across the British Commonwealth as well as in South Africa.

Both published versions of this autobiographical material blend the English and the German material to cover Sagan's life and work over six decades and four continents:

• Loren Kruger, ed. Lights and Shadows: The Autobiography of Leontine Sagan, Wits University Press, Johannesburg 1996; ISBN 978-1868-142880
• Michael Eckardt (ed.): Leontine Sagan. Licht und Schatten. Schauspielerin und Regisseurin auf vier Kontinenten. Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-941450-12-7.

See also

• List of female film and television directors
• List of LGBT-related films directed by women

References

• Acker, A. (1991). Reel women: Pioneers of the cinema, 1896 to the present (pp. 320–322). New York: Continuum.
• Bernard Sachs. South African Personalities and Places. Kayor Publishers, Johannesburg, 1959. Excerpt
• Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey (1995), Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary, Greenwood Press, p. 322, ISBN 0-313-28972-7.
• Foster, G. (1998). Women filmmakers & their films (pp. 361–362). Detroit: St. James Press.
• lespress.de "vermutlich lesbische Regisseurin" (Eng.: "possibly lesbian director")
• Mädchen in Uniform. (n.d.). Retrieved May 2, 2015, from http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Le-Ma/M-dchen-in-Uniform.html

External links

• Leontine Sagan at IMDb
• Literature on Leontine Sagan