Although there are other achievements for which to salute film director (and screenwriter, producer, and occasional cinematographer) Josef von Sternberg, his reputation has come to rest indissolubly on his most famous creation, Marlene Dietrich. After...

Josef von Sternberg aka Jonas Sternberg (29 May 1894, Vienna, Austria – 22 December 1969, Los Angeles, California) was an Austrian-American film director. He is one of the earliest examples of auteur filmmakers, and performed many other duties on...

Josef von Sternberg Through October 8 Museum of the Moving Image The Great Escapes Erotic obsession and cold, cruel truths about unrequited love Like its summer season of Frank Borzage films, the Moving Image's current retrospective celebrates the work...

The Weimar Republic, as many scholars have noted, suffered from a crisis of both national and masculine identity. (1) The Versailles Treaty mandated, among other things, the loss of German colonies, which were a point of pride, a way of acting out German...

Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, will be revived for the first time in decades at Film Forum for two weeks from Jan. 18 through Jan. 31 in a new 35mm Scope print. It was Resnais’ second feature-length...

The Good, the Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, by Eli Wallach. Harcourt, 320 pages, $25.It never mattered whether the part was big or small, whether the movie was wonderful or execrable, Eli Wallach always approached acting like Albert Finney approached eating in Tom Jones:...

Between the lines of [Sternberg's autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry,] and behind the images of the films, one may detect the constant contention of discipline versus indulgence; intellect versus faith or the inexplicable; civilisation versus the savage or exotic; and the tendency to conceal versus the tendency to reveal. Finally, there is the role of Sternberg as artist: 'scientist' versus 'vamp'. These roles are paralleled in the projections of himself in his charac...

There are no scabrous passages ever in Sternberg, not because he is a moralist—although he is that, in its most salutary sense, without any a priori moral judgments, like a psychologist or psychoanalyst—but because it would be a waste of film footage, every foot of which is precious to a director with so much to say, with so many comments to make. His characters hardly ever even kiss and on the rare occasions when they do it is usually hidden behind a fan, a cloak, a back, or in a half-light. ...

Von Sternberg's movies had to have plots even tho they already had them inherent in the images. What he did was make movies naturally—he lived in a visual world. The explanations plots he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films. The explanations were his bragging, his genius pose,—the bad stories of his movies. Having nothing to do with what he did, (& did well) the visuals of his films…. I don't think V. S. knew that words were in ...