“Hollywood's master craftsman, Josef von Sternberg . . . could out-light, out-design, and out-fetishize any director on the lot.”-J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Born to an impoverished Jewish family, raised in Vienna and New York, Jonas Sternberg was a high-school dropout who happened into a job in the movies. The cinema elevated him not only to faux aristocracy-a producer added the “von” to his name-but to “the highest pantheon of twentieth-century art” (Tag Gallagher, Senses of Cinema). Sternberg (1894–1969) transformed the nether realms of human experience into worlds of picturesque poetry, where decor stands in for society, costume is character, and emotions are phenomena of pattern and light. Pacing and plot are irrelevant to a transcendent glamour, defined by the director as “a play of fluid values, of imponderables artfully arranged in a spiritual space, a visual stimulant achieved by flummery.”
The most famous product of Sternbergian flummery is still Marlene Dietrich, who played Galatea to his Pygmalion in seven films that straddle the boundary between collaboration and obsession. But there was much more to Sternberg than Dietrich. This retrospective unveils the director's work in all its strange and intricate richness. As scholar Janet Bergstrom-our guest on February 8-has written, “Sternberg's films cannot be appreciated-not really-unless they are projected onto the big screen. . . . [They] move you toward an unexpected, imaginary world built up through detail, with orchestrated light and shadow, movements in and out of visibility . . . making you want to see more.”