in The Shanghai Gesture as the glowering casino appraiser, peering suspiciously through a loupe at items offered in trade. Rather than returning to live with Morris when he was out of work, Josef slept in parks or Bowery flophouses and, he claimed, carried a bone in his pocket to gnaw on, like a dog.
Once the New York Public Library opened in 1911, he spent most of his spare time there. A classic autodidact, he read almost entirely to inform himself. Fiction didn’t figure in his curriculum, which favored philosophy, history, and particularly art. On February 17, 1913, an International Exhibition of Modern Art opened in the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory on New York’s Lexington Avenue. Mounted by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, it aimed to demonstrate that local artists deserved comparison with the best in Europe. Many of the 300 artists who contributed 1,250 paintings and sculptures to the Armory Show, as it became known, were U.S.-based, including George Bellows, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, Edward Hopper, and James McNeill Whistler. Others were Europeans exhibiting in the United States for the first time. They included Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, and Marcel Duchamp, whose Nude Descending a Staircase fascinated artists but aroused derision in the papers.
Four thousand people attended on the first day, and von Sternberg was among them. “That was an enormous influence on him,” said Meri von Sternberg, his third wife, “and [he] often talked about what he saw there.”4 He returned frequently, indifferent to the furor. He was already developing a taste that would lead him to sketch and paint—not very successfully—and experiment with still photographs. Later, he amassed one of Hollywood’s finest collections of modern art and commissioned new works, including portraits of himself by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rudolf Belling, and Boris Deutsch. Jesse Lasky Jr. wrote that “he was always saving himself from oblivion with the immortalising attentions of sculptors and painters. One could frequently find him posing in his office while developing one of his scripts.”5 This is an exaggeration, although he did allow Siqueiros to observe him at work to create some preliminary sketches for his portrait.
Von Sternberg’s first discovery about the cinema was also his most important: there was little new in the movies. Painters had long since solved any visual problems. This insight shaped his attitude about motion pictures. Aeneas Mackenzie wrote in a 1936 essay, “Leonardo of the Lenses,” that “the screen is his medium—not the cinema.”6 “His purpose is to reveal the emotional significance of a subject by a series of magnificent canvases.”7 Von Sternberg agreed. “I don’t make movies. I make motion pictures.” He regarded the cinematic image as a painter sees a canvas. “A frame is made to contain the performer,” he wrote of his technique; “a background is evoked, every ray of light aids or detracts; foreground is interposed; the very air becomes part of the effect.” He defined art as “the compression of infinite spiritual power into a confined space,” and his particular skill as bringing his subjects into “a dramatic encounter with light.”
He scorned narrative. The need for screenwriters always irked him, and he clashed with them repeatedly. Asked what importance he attached to scripts, he snapped, “None.” Where other filmmakers emphasized a point with dialogue or a close-up, von Sternberg moved the character from darkness into light. One can imagine him formulating this technique while walking the city streets, watching how light from a street lamp fell on people moving toward and then away from it, or how shadows textured the face of a person who stepped close to a curtain.
He communicated in images, not words, and his medium was light. He moved characters and objects in and out of it, dipping them in silver, dissolving them into a flow of smoke, veils, nets, feathers, fog. “Shadow is mystery and light is clarity,” he said. “Shadow conceals—light reveals. To know what to reveal and what to conceal, and in what degrees to do this, is all there is to art.” Documentary filmmaker John Grierson dismissed von Sternberg’s work with the glib accusation that “when a director dies, he becomes a photographer,”8 but the gibe backfired, since von Sternberg agreed with him: virtuosity with the camera was indeed a “prime requisite” of a director.
The World, the Flesh, and William A. Brady
Motion pictures are just a fad.
—William A. Brady to Adolph Zukor
UNTIL THE MID-1920S, the East Coast film industry, particularly the studios in Astoria, Queens, and Fort Lee, New Jersey, rivaled that of the West. Most cinemas were in the large eastern cities, and in addition to providing a pool of actors, artists, and technicians, New York housed the banks that funded production.
Jules Brulatour dominated Fort Lee. He wasn’t French but had been born in New Orleans. As well as monopolizing the supply of Eastman raw film stock, Brulatour processed it and warehoused the completed motion pictures. The studios he built at Fort Lee attracted both American producers and French film companies such as Éclair and Pathé, which made films for both markets. With the outbreak of war in 1914, the French halted U.S. production. Local companies faltered as well, no longer able to rely on European sales. Fort Lee was rescued by Lewis J. Selznick. Raising money on Wall Street and enlisting Brulatour as an ally, he formed the World Film Company by combining a number of independents, including Brulatour’s Peerless, William A. Brady’s Paragon, and Arthur Spiegel’s Equitable. He also recruited the unemployed French filmmakers.
William Aloysius Brady emerged as the driving force of World, his importance signaled by the company’s slogan, “World Pictures— Brady-made.” Beginning as a street newsboy, he had been an actor, playwright, producer, theater builder, and fight promoter. With his brusque manner and clothes dusted with cigar ash, Brady brought a sense of the barroom and the boxing ring to the movies he financed and circulated, which numbered about twenty a year between 1914 and 1917. To service his prints, he acquired a small company whose owner had developed a system for cleaning and repair. Among its employees was Josef von Sternberg.
Von Sternberg dated his own discovery of the cinema to around 1910 and his days of “sleeping rough,” when a nickel or dime would buy a few hours off the streets in a warm if smelly and noisy nickelodeon. But the film Fun in a Chinese Laundry, whose title he borrowed for his autobiography (it was two films, in fact, since both Lubin and Edison used the name), was made in 1901, suggesting an earlier acquaintance.
In the summer of 1911, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, he took shelter under a footbridge during an electrical storm. Two girls joined him, one of whom fainted when lightning struck a nearby tree. After the storm the girls took him to meet a friend, who showed off the machine his father had constructed in his basement for repairing films. By the time Josef left, he had a job cleaning and patching films and mending torn sprocket holes. He also ferried prints by motorcycle between the city’s cinemas—the most important part of his work, since his employer appears to have indulged in the lucrative practice of “bicycling.” After cleaning a print, he would rent it illegally for a day or two before returning it to the film exchange that collected fees on behalf of producers.
World’s purchase of the film repair company transformed von Sternberg’s life. For a while he continued to service prints, but Fort Lee offered many opportunities. “Shortly after graduation from the bench where sprocket holes were mended,” he wrote,
I was made head of the shipping department centered in a film laboratory, and entrusted with the task of seeing to it that the theatres promptly received their copies. As films are usually completed barely in time to reach a theatre, this meant that not only had I to watch the films being hauled out of the developing tanks to be dried on giant drums but I also had to mount them swiftly on metal reels, pile them into an old battered
