Josef von Sternberg: Eros and Abstraction

1/15/09 to 2/22/09

“Hollywood's master craftsman, Sternberg . . . could out-light, out-design, and out-fetishize any director on the lot” (Village Voice). Our series celebrates Sternberg before, during, and after his famed collaboration with Marlene Dietrich.

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  • Underworld, January 15

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Past Films

  • Underworld

    Thursday, January 15 7:30 pm
    Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Sternberg's silent gangster epic, based on a treatment by Ben Hecht. “The fusion of Hecht's hardboiled guys and molls and Sternberg's otherworldly atmospherics makes this gangland tale of competing loyalties wonderfully entertaining.”-New Yorker
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  • The Last Command

    Sunday, January 18 5:30 pm
    Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Emil Jannings stars in “one of the strangest, greatest, and cruelest films about Hollywood during the silent era.”-Janet Bergstrom
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  • Children of Divorce

    Tuesday, January 20 7:30 pm
    Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Clara Bow and Gary Cooper in a rarely screened melodrama. With documentary D'un silence à l'autre: Josef von Sternberg.
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  • The Docks of New York

    Saturday, January 24 6:30 pm
    Judith Rosenberg on Piano. “A complex waterfront melodrama of moral rebirth and one of the photographic glories of American silent cinema.”-Village Voice
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  • Thunderbolt

    Saturday, January 31 4:00 pm
    Sternberg's first talkie is “less a gangster film than a gangster fantasy.”-Andrew Sarris
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  • The Blue Angel

    Sunday, February 1 2:00 pm
    Prim professor Emil Jannings is destroyed by his obsession with cabaret singer Marlene Dietrich in the film that launched Dietrich's screen career. With Dietrich's screen test and The World of Josef von Sternberg.
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  • Morocco

    Friday, February 6 6:30 pm
    Dietrich wears the pants in her first American film, costarring Gary Cooper and Adolphe Menjou.
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  • An American Tragedy

    Saturday, February 7 6:30 pm
    Sternberg's adaptation of Dreiser's novel is “a vastly underrated, rarely screened film . . . the understated opposite of A Place in the Sun.”-Janet Bergstrom
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  • Dishonored

    Saturday, February 7 8:30 pm
    Dietrich is a prostitute turned Austrian spy in “Sternberg's most outrageous examination of the feminine mystique.”-Village Voice
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  • The Salvation Hunters

    Sunday, February 8 2:00 pm
    Illustrated Lecture by Janet Bergstrom. Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Sternberg's starkly poetic first feature.
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  • Shanghai Express

    Thursday, February 12 6:30 pm
    Dietrich as the notorious Shanghai Lily in “a triumphant fusion of sin, glamour, shamelessness, art, and, perhaps, a furtive sense of humor.”-Pauline Kael
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  • Blonde Venus

    Thursday, February 12 8:15 pm
    Dietrich singing “Hot Voodoo” in a gorilla suit is just one of the strange pleasures of Sternberg's trip across Depression America.
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  • The Scarlet Empress

    Saturday, February 14 6:30 pm
    Dietrich as Catherine the Great in Sternberg's extravagant fantasy of Russia.
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  • The Devil Is a Woman

    Friday, February 20 6:30 pm
    Set in Spain, Sternberg's last film with Dietrich is a moody and outlandish meditation on the femme fatale. With short The Fashion Side of Hollywood.
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  • Crime and Punishment

    Friday, February 20 8:30 pm
    Peter Lorre as the sulking, skulking protagonist of Dostoyevsky's stark tale. With short The Town.
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  • The Saga of Anatahan

    Sunday, February 22 6:30 pm
    This late work made in Japan is “a masterpiece, to rank with the Dietrich films.”-David Thomson
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