Josef Von Sternberg

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1894 of working-class Jewish parents, Jonas Stern’s downtrodden young life did not hold the slightest indication that, as Josef von Sternberg, he would become one of the greatest visual stylists in the history of Hollywood filmmaking. His family settled permanently in the United States in 1908. After he finished school, he worked repairing film sprockets. During World War I, he enlisted in the Signal Corps to make training films, an experience that helped him get a minor foothold in the East Coast movie industry after the war. He flirted with building a career in Europe, but returned to the United States and moved to Hollywood. His first feature was The Salvation Hunters (1925), shot outdoors near the port of San Pedro and independently financed. It drew the attention of Charles Chaplin, who became the producer of von Sternberg’s next film, The Sea Gull, which ended in disaster—destroyed as a tax write-off. He was asked by Paramount to finish Children of Divorce (1927) when its director quit, which he did, marking his first work with this studio. He is credited with creating the first modern gangster film with his next assignment, Underworld (1927). Other important films followed at Paramount, but the thing that von Sternberg is best remembered for and, indeed, which was emphasized in his obituaries in 1969, was that he “discovered” Marlene Dietrich and cast her in The Blue Angel (1930), a Paramount/Ufa coproduction shot in Germany. Their six subsequent films together at Paramount in the early 1930s were not always popular or critically praised, but their visual beauty was indisputable, and they shaped the image of Dietrich as a star persona. Fired from Paramount in 1935 as a director because his difficult personality made him as unpopular with actors and technical talent as his films had become with audiences, von Sternberg was forced to go from studio to studio, and ultimately from country to country, to find work, until there was none for him. Yet, even at the time when he was regarded as a “has-been” by Hollywood, appreciation for his talents was nursed by experimental filmmakers and surrealists who praised him as a film stylist capable of creating stunning cinematic worlds with no equivalent in reality. In the 1960s he was elevated by a generation of auteur critics who regarded him as an exemplar of a filmmaker who imprints his work with his personality. In the 1970s, interest by scholars like Robin Wood and Laura Mulvey sparked a reconsideration of the erotic and ideological complexity of von Sternberg’s films, especially those starring Dietrich. Subsequently, writers focusing on cultural history and film theory have reframed the director’s films within considerations of gender, nation, race, and class, even as interest in narrative complexity, performance, and visual style is asserted in critical discourse.