Josef von Sternberg. They are confections for voyeurs and connoisseurs of high art in the cinema alike. He fashioned a unique Hollywood expressionism, with its play of light and shadow, sensuous images and exotic production design, sexual symbology and frank eroticism.
In his personality, the twin urges of the disturbed adolescent towards self-advertisement and self-effacement fuse with a brilliant visual imagination to create an artistic vision unparalleled in the cinema His films reflect a schoolboy's fascination with sensuality and heroics. That they are sublime visual adventures from an artist who contributed substantially to the sum of cinema technique is one paradox to add to the stock that make up his career.
James Film Directors Encyclopedia, The Scarlet Empress Uninterested in naturalism, and fascinated by film's visual potential, he repeatedly revealed his cynical, detached attitude to the world by focusing attention on male-female obsession, humiliation and cruel, casual betrayal, often by a contemptuous femme fatale. The control he achieved over his studio surroundings encouraged him to concentrate on the spatial integrity of his images rather than on their metaphorical juxtaposition.
Sternberg's cinema, for better or worse, represents a distinctively Germanic camera movement - from Murnau and Lang - in contrast to Eisenstein's fashionably Marxist montage. He fills his work with expressive lighting which illuminates the actors and with lush imagery.
Von Sternberg could make the most unbelievable plots seem plausible. Meyer The Film Buff's Catalog, Selected Filmography. See Also Frank Borzage , E. Lee , Rouben Mamoulian , F. Pabst , Mauritz Stiller , Erich von Stroheim.
