O Anjo Azul: do fim do Expressionismo à influência da Paramount – um filme de Josef von Sternberg

“The success of the film will depend on the naked thighs of Miss Dietrich”. This was the answer that Heinrich Mann gave to Emil Jannings, when he asked the novelist if he had liked his performance. Made in 1930 and directed by Josef von Sternberg, The Blue Angel will always be remembered in the history of cinema as the movie in which the myth of Marlene Dietrich was born. However, its merits go well beyond this fact. The Blue Angel is the prototype of a hybrid film, made in Germany by an Austrian settled in America since he was a young boy, having been influenced not only by the American studio production, but also by the German Expressionism, through Max Reinhardt. A director whose cinema Nöel Simsolo compares to tapestry, in which all the elements are always necessary and important, with the supremacy of the décor because everything that appears on the screen becomes it. More than a motion picture that marks the end of an era, that of the German silent cinema, or the German Expressionism, more than a ‘foreign’ production of Paramount, The Blue Angel is above all a film by Josef von Sternberg, a point of arrival and a point of departure for all the marvels to come.

Chapter 7

In 1932, Cary Grant had his first major role in a high profile film, working with the famed star-director team Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932). Chapter 7 explores the making of this classic film, and Cary Grant’s discomfort working alongside these two very temperamental personalities. It considers the crucial element that von Sternberg brought to Cary Grant’s image: his razor sharp hair parting. It also offers accounts of the making of Hot Saturday (1932) and Madame Butterfly (1932), and, in the process, the slow but steady improvement in Grant’s acting and on-screen presence.

Estudo das funções narrativas e estilísticas de sombras e sons nos filmes de influência expressionista O anjo azul e M – o vampiro de Düsseldorf

In the cinematography of German Expressionism, the lighting forms dark atmospheres inhabited by sinister characters whose distorted and enlarged shadows represent their negative burden. The contrast between light and shadow is crucial in the mise-en-scène of the films “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari” and “Nosferatu”, in which the narrative and stylistic functions of the shadow are evidenced in the composition of the scenes. Also in the transition of the so-called “silent cinema” to the sound cinema, the expressionist influence directors Josef von Sternberg and Fritz Lang, in works such as The Blue Angel and M – the vampire of Düsseldorf, have conferred dramatic value on the sound elements through the use of synchronous and asynchronous sound. In these works, the sound elements contribute to the creation of frightening atmospheres that replace the shadows or that, adding to them, increase the dramatic tension of the scenes. Subsequently, this junction of the shadows and the sound elements for the purpose of creating dramatic effects will be widely explored by sound cinema, especially in the genres of suspense and terror.

“The world’s greatest center of … propaganda”

The years 1934-37, during which Dos Passos undertook three film projects, were critical in Dos Passos’s literary career and political thought. He believed that capitalism was another of the monolithic forces of the machine age, like the military, that could eradicate individual self-determination. But he saw increasing danger in Stalin’s repressive regime and what he considered American Communists’ subordination of workers’ interests to Party ideology. His nascent political ambivalence emerges in the first two volumes of U.S.A., The 42nd Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932). By 1934, when he accepted a short-term contract as screenwriter for Paramount, he was engaged in work on the third volume, The Big Money (1936), and his experiences while working on a film vehicle for Marlene Dietrich, The Devil Is a Woman (1935, dir. Josef von Sternberg), solidified his conviction of the complicity between the Hollywood “dreamfactory” and capitalism to stoke American consumer culture. While the manuscript of the Paramount film shows signs of Dos Passos’s aesthetics, it is The Big Money’s film-inflected narrative representation of the corruption of the industry that articulates the impact of both the formal and the cultural dynamics of film on his work.

Sternberg and Dietrich

James Phillips’s Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle reappraises the cinematic collaboration between the Austrian-American filmmaker Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) and the German-American actor Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992). Considered by his contemporaries to be one of the most significant directors of Golden-Age Hollywood, Sternberg made seven films with Dietrich that helped establish her as a style icon and star and entrenched his own reputation for extravagance and aesthetic spectacle. These films enriched the technical repertoire of the industry, challenged the sexual mores of the times, and notoriously tried the patience of management at Paramount Studios. Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle demonstrates how under Sternberg’s direction Paramount’s sound stages became laboratories for novel thought experiments. Analyzing in depth the last four films on which Sternberg and Dietrich worked together, Phillips reconstructs the “cinematic philosophy” that Sternberg claimed for himself in his autobiography and for whose fullest expression Dietrich was indispensable. This book makes a case for the originality and perceptiveness with which these films treat such issues as the nature of trust, the status of appearance, the standing of women, the ethics and politics of the image, and the relationship between cinema and the world. Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle reveals that more is at stake in these films than the showcasing of a new star and the confectionery of glamor: Dietrich emerges here as a woman at ease in the world without being at home in it, as both an image of autonomy and the autonomy of the image.

Von Sternberg, Josef (1894–1969)

Born in Vienna as Jonas Sternberg to impoverished Orthodox Jewish parents, Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969) migrated to New York in his teens; there he changed his name and endured the hardships of immigrant life. After working on a succession of film jobs, he eventually became a director. The experience gained on the various skills involved in the movie-making process would serve him to claim an absolute, almost craft-like control over his films, often dismissing the work of his collaborators. Self-proclaimed "a Hollywood’s messiah of film art," von Sternberg consciously sought an anti-realistic approach to the cinema. His skillful lighting, often combining strokes of light and shade in sharp chiaroscuro, and his expert use of décor, costumes, props, and actors yielded compositions that conferred a poetic and abstract dimension upon his films, often at the expense of dialogue and narrative coherence.

Un destino ejemplar: von Sternberg, Borges y Puig

Resumen: Borges y Puig no sólo comparten la pasión por el cine como fuente de inspiración formal para la narración sino también el culto por el director austríaco Josef von Sternberg. El cine de von Sternberg, sin embargo, más que señalar algún punto de contacto entre ambas literaturas permite definir las diferencias con más nitidez que cualquier consideración de intertextualidad propiamente literaria.Palabras-llave: Puig; Borges; Sternberg; literatura latino-americana; cinema.Abstract: Borges and Puig were not only insipired by cinema as a new source of literary innovation but also by Austrian director Josef von Sternberg. More than a reference of possible points of contact between Borges and Puig’s works, though, von Sternberg cinema can help identify important distinctions.Keywords: Puig; Borges; Sternberg; Latin American literature; cinema.

All Too Easy

Takes up the modernist house as it appears in films like A Star is Born (George Cukor, 1954), House (Charles and Ray Eames, 1955), and more recent films and moving image media such as The Anniversary Party (Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh, 2001), A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009), and Stephen Prina’sThe Way He Always Wanted It, II (2008). The chapter also considers a strange site of coincidence between modernist architecture and the movies: the house designed by Richard Neutra for the director Josef von Sternberg that then passed into the hands of Ayn Rand, who was also working in the film industry.