Some Observations on Sternberg and Dietrich

The literature concerning the films of Josef von Sternberg invariably contains the word mysterious. The task of a further discussion of Sternberg is not an attempt to answer or resolve the mystery nor to search for a key to a system of codes that will unlock the films. In Sternberg's films the mysteriousness is an absolute, unsusceptible to clarification and thus, destruction. To know a Sternberg film is not to decipher it. How these films partake of the quality of the mysterious would seem to be a more enlightening question. The determination of the qualities of a Sternberg film would not solve or finish the film, but attempt to penetrate and understand the world which opens each time a Sternberg film is projected. The concept of film as world is uniquely important to Sternberg. The diegetic events of each film form a complete and completed universe. Unlike many narrative filmmakers Sternberg makes no attempt to create a believable fiction nor to elicit audience identification. Alternatively, Sternberg's films are not anti-illusionistic. They are rather pure creation, absolute fiction-the viewer knows that the world of the film will never parallel the real world. The viewer is prohibited entry through character identification to a world that exists and is available to us only for the duration of the film's screening time. The dreamlike and hermetic quality of Sternberg's universe results from several features: the acute presence of the surface, synesthesia of sound and movement, the use of optical space and the absence of psychological interiors in the human figures. These strategies recur in each of Sternberg's films. The present discussion will deal largely with Shanghai Express, but will also allude to other films. The opening shots of Shanghai Express enact an exposition of Sternberg's methodology. A locale is established by the overbearing oriental music, the banging of the gongs, icons of Buddha, incense streaming from oriental statuary, an artisan lettering a scroll with oriental characters. It is a place that is at once China-we know this because the series of images have a connotative value which accretively means China; and, it is Not-China, a fictive world marked exotic, a landscape capable of spawning and sup

Art · Humanities · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies