"Fun in a Chinese Laundry", Josef von Sternberg

“His characters generally make their entrance at a moment in their lives when there is no tomorrow. Knowingly or unknowingly, they have reached the end or the bottom, but they will struggle a short time longer, about ninety minutes of screen time, to discover the truth about themselves and those they love.” The words are from The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris in its entry dedicated to Josef von Sternberg, and they correctly (and quite beautifully) resume the romantic side of the films directed by the Austrian-American filmmaker. 

Sternberg (born Jonas Sternberg) began to work in a millinery shop that gave him knowledge of different ornate textiles that he would embody in his mise en scène. In his films, men are attracted to mysterious women in exotic and sometimes turbulent settings (revolutionary China, Imperial Russia, Word War I Austria) in which love, lust, humiliation, sado-masochistic jealousy and sacrifice are all displayed in pictorial compositions with strong games of lights and shadows. 

Although he is mostly remembered for his 7 films with Marlene Dietrich [The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), Blonde Venus (1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Devil is a Woman (1935)], able to combine female mystique with stoic grace, his silent films show equally a careful artist with a unique sense of composition and ability to explore the cinematographic medium more through the camera than montage, filling negative space with fog, smoke, rain, steam and dust. Underworld (1927) – considered to be the first gangster film, The Last Command (1928) and The Docks of New York (1928) make together a trio of masterpieces that should be given equal attention as anything he made with Dietrich. And then there is his last great film (which Sternberg saw as his best one), The Saga of Anatahan, that shows the disintegration of military discipline and civilized male behavior through the allegorical story of a group of Japanese soldiers isolated in a forgotten island with a native woman, during WWII.

Fun in a Chinese Laundry is his autobiography, and more than a recount of his life in an uncompromised and acerbic (but sometimes humoristic) way, it provides his opinions on art, film directing, actors, cinematography, and the Hollywood machine. And his chapter dedicated to Marlene Dietrich is indeed, as David Thomson put it, “a major contribution to film literature, and a great, mordant love story.”

Excerpts:

“Lest this observation be so misleading that it gives rise to the suspicion that I envy the applause an actor receives, this not so. The painter does not resent the praise received by the colors on his canvas. ‘This spot of red is wonderful,’ cannot displease the artist who placed the red in his design. However, there is a slight difference: the spot of red, having been praised, does not vilify the artist.”

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“To photograph a human being properly, all that surround him must definitely add to him, or it will do nothing but substract.”

“[On Marlene Dietrich] I was told that during the many films made after my ‘fiasco’ [The Devil is a Woman] with her she would often go through a scene and finish it by whispering through the microphone, ‘Where are you, Jo?’ Well I’m right here, and should she be angry once more, when she reads this, she might recall that she was often angry with me, and for no good reason.”

“Monstrously enlarged as it is on the screen, the human face should be treated like a landscape. It is to be viewed as if the eyes were lakes, the nose a hill, the cheeks broad meadows, the mouth a flower patch, the forehead sky, and the hair clouds."

Link to the complete book in PDF:

https://mega.nz/#!0bwFRKAQ!UcIEIx4sCNkL6ay4Zcc0nE2ZOhYaqb8fFF6ERvlYTFo