| |
|
|
| Josef
von Sternberg |
|
|
| Director
/ Screenwriter / Cinematographer / Producer / Editor |
| 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), John Leipold (Composer), George Bancroft (Leading Player),
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) |
| Links: [
IMDB ] [ All-Movie
Guide ] [
Film Reference ]
[ Senses
of Cinema Feature ] [ Classic
Film and Television Page ] [ Derek
Malcolm's Century of Films: The Scarlet Empress ] [ Strictly
Film School ] [
Boston Phoenix Article (2004) ] |
| Books: [
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 ] |
| DVD's:
[ Amazon
] |
| 1,000
Greatest Films: The Docks of New York (1928),
The Blue Angel
(1930), Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), The Scarlet Empress
(1934), The Devil is a Woman (1935), The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Anatahan (1953) |
|
250 Quintessential Noir Films:
The Shanghai Gesture (1941), 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
focussing 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) |
|
| |
|
|
|
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
