Shanghai Express

The chapter focuses on Shanghai Express (1932) and analyzes its handling of the themes of prostitution, faith, and appearance. Sternberg’s film turns on the demand of Shanghai Lily (Dietrich) to be trusted without supporting evidence and shifts the object of faith from that which lies behind appearances to appearance itself. A redefinition of spectacle follows from this: it is not a mere given of the senses but involves a comportment and agency on the spectator’s part. Playing with the appearance of prostitution, the film toys with the moral guidelines of the Production Code. The chapter argues that it thereby not only sees how far it can go, but it also makes a philosophical question out of appearance itself, examining how the trust in love differs from knowledge. The make-believe and Orientalism of its reconstructed China are of a piece with its problematization of the difference between appearance and reality.

The Devil Is a Woman

This chapter relies on The Devil Is a Woman (1935), the last film Sternberg and Dietrich made together, to develop an account of Sternberg’s antagonistic relation to the off-screen. More than most directors, he is a maker of self-sufficient images: this informs his understanding of narrative. In the face of the positive treatment of the off-screen in film studies over recent decades, the chapter defends Sternberg against the criticisms leveled at cinemas of mere spectacle. The carnival atmosphere and unreliable narrator of The Devil Is a Woman are prompts for investigating and contesting the fictional world by which a viewer frames the individual shots of a film. The eccentric architectural space of The Blue Angel (1930) is treated as a reason for attributing to Sternberg a longer-term interest in disentangling cinema from the viewer’s cognitive practice of elaborating, with the help of the off-screen, a world around the shots of which a film is composed.

The Scarlet Empress

The Scarlet Empress (1934) redeploys costume drama as farce and as a critique of despotism. The chapter analyzes how Marlene Dietrich does not so much play the role of Catherine the Great as replace the historical figure with her own Hollywood star persona. The power structures of despotism and the lawlessness of the sovereign are thereby parodied: promiscuity becomes the bond Dietrich’s Catherine has with her subjects and the studio-enhanced beauty of her appearance is substituted for the separateness of the royal person. With its spectacular yet rickety film sets, The Scarlet Empress is not an apologist’s chocolate-box rendition of European monarchical government but instead conveys its émigré makers’ sense of its pomposity. Rather than exposing what lies behind the spectacle of power, the film considers what becomes of power when it is nothing but spectacle and appearance.

Conclusion

The conclusion examines Sternberg’s films without Dietrich and gives a clearer idea of both what he brought to their collaboration and what Dietrich alone helped him realize. An ethics of the moving image is expounded in relation to fictional characters, direct audience address (in The Shanghai Gesture), and the contribution of the profilmic to cinematic fictions. Levinas’s iconoclasm is argued not to take into account the specificity of the human image in fictional cinema, as these images are the sum of the person they depict and hence do not exhibit the reductiveness for which Levinas censures images. Cinematic images of fictional characters, because they involve the profilmic in the actors’ physical distance and independence from the camera, are special cases of looking, different from both the look of the painter whose raw materials are not themselves figurative and the documentary filmmaker. Dietrich’s autonomy is in the image rather than from it.

Blonde Venus

This chapter examines Blonde Venus (1932), Sternberg and Dietrich’s characteristically atypical take on the fallen woman film genre. Dietrich’s character is as much liberated as cast out from the family home when she resumes her earlier career in show business and is condemned by her husband for prostitution. Yet the downward trajectory of the fallen woman genre never really exerts its grip on Dietrich, for she remains a mythical being. The chapter interprets the film as a critique of the patriarchal institution of marriage in which standards are expected of the woman that are not expected of the man: Dietrich’s character’s husband shuns her for selling her body, even though he attempts to sell his own (to a medical researcher). The question of the film that the chapter explores is the reconcilability of fairy-tale romance and everyday marriage: Blonde Venus does not take for granted the transition from the one to the other.

Introduction

Sternberg’s films are famous for their close-ups of the female face. This Introduction discusses the way in which Dietrich’s face functions in his early sound films. Whereas silent cinema charged the human face with carrying the plot or at least with taking up the narrative slack between intertitles, sound film with its additional resources for expounding the narrative opens a space for a face that is inscrutable. Sternberg’s films release the face for spectacle without thereby surrendering it to the gaze of the moviegoer: in its independence of the enclosed world of a narrative, Dietrich’s face is in a position to look out and back at the spectator. Contrasting Morocco with An American Tragedy (in which Dietrich does not appear), the Introduction argues that there is thus an image of autonomy that Sternberg and Dietrich construct and that contributes an (often overlooked) ethical dimension to their cinema of spectacle.