Shared Top Border

They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

  WebTSPDT

[ Home ] [ Directors A-L ] [ Directors M-Z ] [ 1,000 Greatest Films ] [ 21st Century ] [ Film Noir ] [ Ain't Nobody's Blues ] [ Recommended Viewing ] [ About ] [ Links ]
 
         
 
Josef von Sternberg
Director / Screenwriter / Editor / Producer
1894 - 1969 
Born May 29, Vienna, Austria
Key Production Country: USA 
Key Genres: Drama, Melodrama, Romance, Crime, Crime Drama
Key Collaborators: Hans Dreier (Production Designer), Marlene Dietrich (Leading Player), Jules Furthman (Screenwriter), Bert Glennon (Cinematographer), Lee Garmes (Cinematographer), S.K. Winston (Editor), George Bancroft (Leading Player), Adolph Zukor (Producer), Gustav von Seyffertitz (Leading Character Player), Karl Hajos (Composer)

Highly Recommended: Morocco (1930)*, The Scarlet Empress (1934)*
Recommended: Underworld (1927), The Docks of New York (1928)*, The Last Command (1928), The Blue Angel (1930)*, Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932)*, The Shanghai Gesture (1941)*#, Macao (1952)#, Anatahan (1953)*
Worth a Look: The Salvation Hunters (1925), Thunderbolt (1929), An American Tragedy (1931), Blonde Venus (1932), The Devil is a Woman (1935)*
* Listed in TSPDT's 1,000 Greatest Films section; # Listed in TSPDT's 250 Quintessential Noir Films section.

 
 
 
Links: [ Amazon ] [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Film Reference ] [ Wikipedia ] [ Classic Film and Television Page ] [ Derek Malcolm's Century of Films: The Scarlet Empress ] [ Strictly Film School ] [ Boston Phoenix Article (2004) ] [ Senses of Cinema Article (2002) ] [ The Criterion Collection: Three Silent Classics ]
Books: [ Von Sternberg ] [ Josef von Sternberg: The Case of Lena Smith In the Realm of Pleasure: von Sternberg, Dietrich and the Masochistic Aesthetic ] [ Josef von Sternberg ] [ The Idea of the Image: Josef von Sternberg's Dietrich Films ]
 
The Scarlet Empress (1934)Morocco (1930)The Docks of New York (1928)Macao (1952)
 
     
  "There is a sense in which Josef von Sternberg never grew up. In his personality, the twin urges of the disturbed adolescent towards self-advertisement and self-effacement fuse with a brilliant visual imagination to create an artistic vision unparalleled in the cinema... His films reflect a schoolboy's fascination with sensuality and heroics. That they are sublime visual adventures from an artist who contributed substantially to the sum of cinema technique is one paradox to add to the stock that make up his career." - John Baxter (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)  
     
  "Best known for the exotic, ironic melodramas he made with Marlene Dietrich, Jonas Sternberg was one of the most personal, ambitious and imaginative of early film-makers. Uninterested in naturalism, and fascinated by film's visual potential, he repeatedly revealed his cynical, detached attitude to the world by focusing attention on male-female obsession, humiliation and cruel, casual betrayal, often by a contemptuous femme fatale." - Geoff Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)  
     
  "In a sense, Sternberg entered the cinema through the camera rather than the cutting room, and thus became a lyricist of light and shadow rather than a master of montage. The control he achieved over his studio surroundings encouraged him to concentrate on the spatial integrity of his images rather than on their metaphorical juxtaposition. Sternberg's cinema, for better or worse, represents a distinctively Germanic camera movement  - from Murnau and Lang - in contrast to Eisenstein's fashionably Marxist montage." - Andrew Sarris (The American Cinema, 1968)  
     
  "His films build dream worlds around the edges of society, and then they shatter the illusion. He fills his work with expressive lighting which illuminates the actors and with lush imagery. Von Sternberg could make the most unbelievable plots seem plausible." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
 
Please note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director that we haven't seen include Crime and Punishment (1935), The King Steps Out (1936), Sergeant Madden (1939), and Jet Pilot (1957).
 8
 

"Born in Vienna, raised and educated in both Austria and the United States, Josef von Sternberg was one of several contract directors who brought a distinctly European inflection to Paramount’s house style. In Sternberg’s case the accent was notably Germanic. He fashioned a unique Hollywood expressionism, with its play of light and shadow, sensuous images and exotic production design, sexual symbology and frank eroticism. Sternberg’s best films—all made for Paramount between 1930 and 1935—often were set in foreign locales and were populated by cynical, dissolute outcasts; they generally were weak on plot but remarkably strong on style and characterization. And they all starred Marlene Dietrich, whose rapid rise in Hollywood coincided with Sternberg’s, and whose screen persona was perhaps the most essential component of his inimitable style." - Thomas Schatz, Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

 
 
Top 250 Directors
Pantheon Director
100 Essential Directors (Pop Matters)
Jean-Pierre Melville's 64 Favourite Pre-War American Filmmakers (Cahiers du Cinema, October 1961)
● The Wild Bunch... 50 of the Movies' Maddest Visionaries
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers
 
See Also
Frank Borzage
Frank Capra
E.A. Dupont
George Fitzmaurice (External Link)
Edmund Goulding
Rowland V. Lee
Rouben Mamoulian
F.W. Murnau
Max Ophüls
G.W. Pabst
Mauritz Stiller
Erich von Stroheim
 
 
 
         
         

 

[ Home ] [ Directors A-L ] [ Directors M-Z ] [ 1,000 Greatest Films ] [ 21st Century ] [ Film Noir ] [ Ain't Nobody's Blues ] [ Recommended Viewing ] [ About ] [ Links ]
[ Recommended Reading Archives ] [ The Shooting Gallery ]
 
Contact Us: bill@theyshootpictures.com.
©2002-2011 They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?