time.
From shipping he graduated to editing. Von Sternberg told his son that he won a promotion when his boss was fired for graft—perhaps a consequence of the earlier “bicycling” scam—but his memoirs contain a more glamorous version. He was viewing a film to check the print quality when its director, Harley Knoles, asked his opinion. Von Sternberg questioned the use of “Adirondacks” in an intertitle. “Why not just say ‘mountains’? Nobody knows where the Adirondacks are anyway.” A few days later, Brady arrived unannounced in the office, planted his backside on von Sternberg’s desk, and offered him “all the money in the world” to take over cutting, editing, and writing intertitles. The promised fortune was only a $5 raise to $35 a week, but he was glad to get it. Over the next two years he cut, he estimated, a hundred productions. He also “doctored” failures, reediting them and inventing intertitles to cover lapses in continuity. Although he later described himself as Brady’s “assistant,” his 1917 draft card gives his profession as “lab expert,” a much lowlier role. However, his speedy rise in the company is unquestioned.
Not that it was a difficult industry in which to flourish. Most films of the time were either knockabout comedies or stagy melodramas created by people who treated these “galloping tintypes” as a source of quick cash. The French filmmakers absorbed by World took a different view, and it was they who most influenced the young von Sternberg. Directors Maurice Tourneur, George Archainbaud, Émile Chautard, and Albert Capellani; cameramen René Guissart, Lucien Andriot, and Jacques Bizeul; and designer Ben Carré operated as a separate unit, even speaking French on the set. In von Sternberg’s three years at World, they taught him the elements of lighting and the camera. He worked with Tourneur, Carre, and Chautard on Tourneur’s 1917 A Girl’s Folly, a behind-the-scenes comedy about two actors who fall in love while making a western, but didn’t, as it was rumored, appear in the film.
His first teacher was Tourneur, whose technique favored small, precisely directed lights rather than the system of wall-to-wall illumination preferred by directors trained in the theater. The dapper Chautard, an ex-actor, was the most approachable of the group, but as he spoke little English and von Sternberg no French, the bilingual Bizeul translated. Von Sternberg became Chautard’s protégé, a favor he returned by giving Chautard small acting jobs in Morocco, Shanghai Express, and Blonde Venus.
Chautard demonstrated the unwritten rules by which text becomes a motion picture. Many of these involved objects and the way they appear on screen. A prop, once introduced, assumes a significance out of all proportion to its place in the story. If the audience sees a telephone or a door, they expect the first to ring and the second to open—an illustration of the principle laid down by Anton Chekhov and known as “Chekhov’s gun”: “One must not put a loaded rifle on stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” Von Sternberg went further, however, realizing that objects and actions offer richer opportunities for communication than words do. A woman taking a man’s cap and placing it on her own head, or sewing up a torn pocket on his shirt, can define their relationship more subtly than dialogue.
Ernst Lubitsch would exploit this insight with the so-called Lubitsch Touch. In The Love Parade, Maurice Chevalier confiscates a pistol from the jealous mistress who is about to shoot him and tosses it into a drawer with half a dozen others. The king in The Merry Widow emerges from the queen’s boudoir buckling on a sword, only to realize that the belt belongs to a much slimmer man—her lover (Chevalier again), who slipped in as he left. Von Sternberg employs this device in Morocco. Legionnaire Tom Brown, visiting singer Amy Jolly in her dressing room for the first time, reaches, without looking, for a fan, which he’s surprised to find is not in the usual place. But von Sternberg’s use of the technique extends well beyond sight gags. Props become elements in a subliminal language. As Siegfried Kracauer says of The Blue Angel, “There is a promiscuous mingling of architectural fragments, characters and nondescript objects. Lola-Lola sings her famous song on a miniature stage so overstuffed with props that she herself seems part of the décor…. The persistent interference of mute objects reveals the whole milieu as a scene of loosened instincts.”1
Carnivals, masks, streamers, balloons, hats, puppets, statues, dolls, and toys run through his work, generally with some sexual connotation. His films often contain the phallic image of a pole topped with a bulbous knob, a hat, a skull, or a large shell. But von Sternberg reserved a special affection for feathers and birds. They are so ubiquitous in his films that it’s impossible to assign a single “meaning” to their use. The first shot of his first film as director, The Salvation Hunters, is of a seagull perched on a piece of flotsam. Birds permeate his subsequent work: Rath’s dead canary in The Blue Angel; the feathers of Lola-Lola’s postcard portrait; the aigrettes of “Feathers” McCoy in Underworld and “Ritzy” in Thunderbolt and the feathered caps of “The Magpie” in The Drag Net; doves cooing to Helen Faraday in Blonde Venus; imperial eagles in The Last Command, Dishonored, The Scarlet Empress, and I, Claudius; birdsong in Concha’s house in The Devil Is a Woman, plaster storks in her cabaret, and the silly duck she carries when trying to pass for a peasant; and most potent of all, the black plumes of Shanghai Lily’s hats in Shanghai Express. Even in his last film, The Saga of Anatahan, Keiko waves like a trapped bird to the waiting ship, and the castaways carve toy boats that will carry them away, in the words of von Sternberg’s commentary, “on the wings of their longing.”
When he brought Marlene Dietrich from Berlin in 1930, he gave her daughter a crimson and blue macaw. He also ordered Paramount studio carpenters to build an aviary in her garden and stocked it with exotic species. Even six-year-old daughter Heidede intuited that her mother’s newest friend “must have a thing about birds.”2 However, the captives in the aviary, chosen for their looks rather than compatibility, pecked one another to death, suggesting that von Sternberg’s interest was not ornithological but extended only to birds’ decorative qualities. As Raymond Durgnat wrote of these and other details in von Sternberg’s films, “They are not so much symbols (i.e., a code for something else) as carriers of atmosphere.”3 Further obscuring their significance, von Sternberg didn’t keep birds as pets, preferring dogs; nor did he write about them with any special enthusiasm.
We can only guess at the connection he intends us to see between the pigeons that flap away from the windowsill when Olga Baclanova shoots her unfaithful husband in The Docks of New York and the stone eagle Gustav von Seyffertitz eyes in the courtyard where X-27 has just gone to her death in Dishonored. Perhaps some sense of freedom attained or denied, responsibility accepted or flouted, love won or lost—and always the reminder that love, freedom, even life can disappear in a batting of wings, leaving no souvenir more substantial than the scrap of a plume, a hint of infinite possibility, that drifts down to “Rolls Royce” in Underworld as “Feathers” descends into his squalid life. In the manipulation of such materials, von Sternberg has no peer. “He can convey sensuality in a manner which baffles the censors,” wrote one admiring journalist. “They cannot put their finger on it.”4
In the emerging industrialized Hollywood, von Sternberg’s expertise in cinematography, design, and editing represented both strength and weakness. Sergei Eisenstein believed that having risen through the ranks from editing exacerbated von Sternberg’s sense of inferiority. Some colleagues even perceived his skill in lighting as a demeaning inclination to perform tasks not the province of the director, who, it was felt, should concentrate on performances and leave technical matters to cinematographers and set designers. Directors trained in Germany often wore white gloves on the set, signifying a refusal to soil their hands with anything physical, even the moving of a chair. This separation of skills irritated von Sternberg. Long before the ideologues of the nouvelle vague asked, “If film is an art, who is the artist?” and decided that the answer was usually “the director,” he had reached the same conclusion.
