In this primer for this fall’s Sirens and Spitfires: Liberated Ladies of Pre-Code Cinema series, co-curator Michaela Owens explains why you shouldn’t sleep on this fierce line-up. What does pre-Code mean? To keep it brief, in the 1920s, Hollywood had so many scandals that, to avoid repercussions from political and religious groups, the major movie… Read more »
“So, Von Sternberg’s movies had to have plots even though they already had them inherent in the images. What he did was make movies naturally — he lived in a visual world. The explanation plots he made up out of some logic having nothing to do with the visuals of his films. His expression was… Read more »
Between 1930 and 1935, Josef von Sternberg directed seven movies starring the German actress Marlene Dietrich. This extended collaboration represents one of the most fruitful and dazzling creative partnerships in film history, a director-actor pairing that rivals Yasujirō Ozu & Setsuko Hara or John Ford & John Wayne. The films they made together (one in… Read more »
Born in Austria but raised in New York, director Josef von Sternberg is best known for a series of movies he made with Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s. Through films like Blonde Venus (1932) and Shanghai Express (1932), Sternberg established a reputation for glamour, but also for pretension. He added the “von” to his name for… Read more »