Joseph von Sternberg

Of Jewish origin and a humble family, he emigrated to New York at the age of seven, where he would carry out multiple trades until he finished his studies in Philosophy, earning his doctorate in Vienna. However, he would leave the Letters for the Seventh Art; first as an actor, screenwriter and assistant director, then as author of the experimental film The Salvation Hunters (1925).

His work shows various influences: German Expressionism and Kammerspiel, the Gallic Impressionist school, and the aesthetics of his contemporary Erich von Stroheim . This would be evident mainly in his first two masterpieces, Underworld Law (1927) and The New York Docks (1928), in which he portrays a certain US status at the time and which opened the North American gangster genre. . In these films his personal style would already materialize: a taste for misty and charged atmospheres, romantic baroque style, refined plastic composition, artistic expressiveness based on sensation, care for objects and their scenographic integration with the characters, leisurely rhythm and strange beauty.

Considered, therefore, as a great master of the image, during the 1930s he helped to train famous operators: Lee Garmes , Bert Glennon , Harold Rosson and Gregg Toland ( Citizen Kane ). He had written about it: “The artist who works in the cinema must learn to choose and create not with the camera, but with the eye… The journey of the rays of light represents the adventure and drama of light. The history of light is the history of life.

But his international fame came with the discovery of the “vamp” Marlene Dietrich , erotic myth and “femme fatale” that he launched in Germany with The Blue Angel (1930), a masterful adaptation of Heinrich Mann ‘s novel . Back in the United States, both formed an artistic-sentimental tandem, with Morocco , Fatality , The Shanghai Express , The Blonde Venus , Imperial Whim and The Devil is a Woman , which would compete at the box office with the films of the “Divine” Greta panache .

However, his personal career would decline when the producers passed his “star” to other directors. Von Sternberg stated: “Seeing how human beings oppose the best intentions of a filmmaker, I am about to hesitate in using cinema, a means of expression that uses people and not the colors used by the painter of the canvas; the director’s materials are sometimes not malleable, but often even rebellious. I come from a totally different world from that of films: that of literature and the plastic arts, which I have tried to transfer to my work”.

For this reason, his later and subsequent works, starring new “stars” who did not work alongside him ( Gene Tierney , Janet Leigh , Jane Russell ), concluded with a production on a historical theme in Japan: The Saga of Anatahan ( 1953). Later, after his unfinished Yo Claudio , in London, and the previous production of Duel in the Sun ( King Vidor , 1952), he dedicated himself to teaching Film Aesthetics at the University of Los Angeles.

Passionate about Anthropology and Oriental Art, the Sternbergian universe also shows a series of constants and symbols: the lyricism of the sea and the birds, the frustration of desire and the hope in the redemption of fallen beings, magic and fatality, or a certain fascination with decadence… All this, expressed with a style that has come to be called “fantastic realism”, since he almost always shot in a studio. He had also stated: “I don’t care in the least about history; only as it is photographed and presented”.