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 Ford, and then drive them through a storm-lashed New Jersey coast road to a Hoboken express office to make certain that the films would reach their destination in 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