The Meeting of Two Queens: The 90s Short Film Editing Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich into a Relationship

Words: Eve O’Dea

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In B. Ruby Rich’s 1992 Sight & Sound article titled New Queer Cinema, which details the movement of independent queer cinema in the late 1980’s - 1990’s, the author points to films like Edward II, Swoon, The Living End, and Poison. All relatively well known titles in a relatively unknown film movement. However Rich also mentions a film which when I first read the article at university I had never heard of, but sounded as if literally made for my own enjoyment: 

“The Meeting of Two Queens (Encuentro entre dos Reinas, 1991) reedits Dietrich and Garbo movies to construct a dream narrative: get the girls together, help them meet, let them get it on.”

Had director Cecelia Barriga read my mind? How else could she have constructed something so particular to my interests? After hunting down this elusive film in a dusty corner of the internet, I found what I can only describe as a 14-minute, 1991 version of the fan cam, the internet phenomenon not exclusive but undoubtedly integral to online queer fandom. The short film repurposes scenes poached from actresses Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo’s respective filmographies to suggest a love story between the women. Barriga creates their interactions by clever shot-reverse-shot juxtaposition, or by superimposing the face of one into the film of another, allowing them, as they never have, to occupy the same frame.
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As an outsider, I have observed two major kinds of fancams: The first, perhaps the “purer” of the two, edits together footage of a particular celebrity or fictional character with often anachronistic music to create a shareable icon of devotion. Right now, K-Pop fan accounts appear to be the dominant market for such videos. The second kind of fan cam has its roots in the internet phenomenon of “shipping”, that is, that bizarre feeling of wanting two characters (or real life people) to be in a relationship. This latter version is often utilised by queer fans to recontextualise straight characters into same-sex pairings. As long as media, in all its forms, has existed, queer audiences have searched for representation in subtext. For queer fans, glances, longing, and brushing hands are as good as “I love you”. This is especially true for films in the Hollywood Classical Era, during which the portrayal of homosexuality was outright forbidden for several decades. Through fancams, the queer fan of classical Hollywood inserts themselves into the frame and takes control of the narrative.

Greta Garbo stopped acting in 1941. Her last film, Two-Faced Woman, was a comedy meant to ride on the success of her previous film, Ninotchka, in which “Garbo Laughs” for the first time. Two-Faced Woman was a commercial and critical failure, and is blamed for sending the Face of the Century into early retirement. Or perhaps she was sick of the whole thing. In interviews, diaries, photographs, and even her onscreen persona, Garbo was constantly documented as devastatingly sullen, unimpressed by the fanfare of Hollywood, and always wanting to be alone. 

In the late 1940’s, she did a screen test for a Max Ophüls film, one that (tragically) never materialised. Her natural charm in this brief footage is evident, her unique beauty has only come into itself further with age. She is smiling, laughing, and chatting with the crew, so different from how we are used to seeing her onscreen. Aside from a few candid photographs of her in the following decades, that’s the last we see of her. She was so elusive that “Garbo-spotting” became a niche pastime of New Yorkers in the latter-half of the 20th century. Once, I had a dream that she made a secret film with Ingmar Bergman in the 1970’s, and just as I was about to watch it, I woke up. 

“Despite (or perhaps because of) their masculinity, Dietrich and Garbo women were painted as the ultimate figures of male desire.”

Garbo was, and is, compared frequently to her contemporary Marlene Dietrich. The reasons are outwardly obvious: they were both European, they both had devastatingly unique faces, they both dressed in “masculine” attire on and off screen, and they were both (probably) bisexual. Dietrich was much less hesitant about stardom, and likewise was much more open about her personal life, which included not-so-secret relationships with women. She acted well into her later life, both on screen and on stage in cabaret performances. 

Her coat-and-tails ensemble became her signature look. But when not in “men’s” clothes, Dietrich was as glamorous as they come; adorning herself with feathers, sequins, and diamonds, with razor-sharp cheekbones, pencil thin eyebrows and overlined lips. Dietrich could make the switch between the masculine and the feminine seamlessly, unphased by the concept of gender as a performance. Garbo, on the other hand, never looked at home in her femme roles -but then she never looked totally comfortable in her masc roles either. For Dietrich, gender was a playground. For Garbo, it seemed like a burden.

Despite (or perhaps because of) their masculinity, both women were painted as the ultimate figures of male desire. Gary Cooper grows attracted to Dietrich after she kisses a woman in Morocco. In Queen Christina, Garbo makes love to John Gilbert while she is dressed as man, always taking the physically dominant position. This is after she has spent the film’s first act pining for the affection of her lady-in-waiting. In The Meeting of Two Queens, their loving gazes towards their male co-stars are turned to one another. After a few chance encounters, the two women “meet” while literally dressed as queens, with Garbo as the aforementioned Queen Christina of Sweden and Dietrich as Catherine the Great. They then take their diplomatic friendship to the bedroom. They begin undressing and looking another up and down, and the scene ends. This is disappointing until I remind myself that any love scene between a man and a woman in the 1930’s would have ended with similar ambiguity. 

There is no evidence whatsoever that Garbo and Dietrich ever knew each other, let alone had a relationship. But speculation persists. Books have been written about their torrid affairs. I can imagine lesbians in the 1930’s cutting out their pictures from Photoplays and pasting them together in a scrapbook, or writing an imagined story of their meeting in a diary.

Today, someone could make an edit like The Meeting of Two Queens easily and more convincingly, erasing the rough edges and obvious seams, but it is those very seams where Barriga’s love for these two women is the most obvious. She is present when you watch the film, in every pixel, glitch, and distortion.