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Von Sternberg is a painter in the narrowest and broadest senses of the word.

—Max Reinhardt¹

VON STERNBERG’S LIFE IN Vienna ended in 1908 when Moses, who became a U.S. citizen in 1906, decided that the family should rejoin him in the United States. He’d found steady work in the clothing business. His naturalization application lists his profession as “furrier,” and the 1910 census as “lace worker.” To signify his commitment to his adoptive home, Moses changed his name to Morris. On their arrival in the United States, Serafin became Serafina, Heinrich was renamed Henry, Hermine became Minna, and Siegfried was known as Fred. Jonas assumed the more common Josef but never liked the diminutive Joe. He always signed himself “Jo,” a reminder of the original. Since Moses was naturalized, the entire family automatically acquired U.S. citizenship.

A million immigrants passed through Ellis Island in 1908, many squeezing into the tenements of New York’s five boroughs. The Sternbergs lived at various addresses around Brooklyn before settling in Nassau County at 57 Lloyd Avenue, Lynbrook, where Morris remained for the rest of his life. Josef enrolled in Jamaica High School in Queens. He lasted there only a year before an aunt found him a $4 a week job sweeping up in a millinery shop—one source of the later rumor that he began working life as “a pants-presser from Brooklyn.”² From there, he moved to a lace warehouse on Fifth Avenue, probably the one where Morris worked. The 1910 census lists him as “errand boy.” His work gave him an intimacy with fabric and lace, but also a contempt for working-class Americans. His colleagues spent their time boasting of whores they had visited, commiserating about their doses of the clap, and indulging in pranks, such as waylaying Josef after work, getting him drunk—for the first and last time in his life, he claims—and pulling down his pants to decorate his behind with the company’s date stamp.

Morris’s bad temper didn’t mellow with age, and he frequently took it out on his family. “He and my father didn’t get along,” confirms von Sternberg’s son Nicholas, “due to my grandfather’s rough handling of my father when he was young.”³ It was particularly galling that, after each beating, he required the children to kiss his hand. Eventually Josef stood up to his father when he tried to beat young Fred, a courageous gesture for someone who had stopped growing at five feet five inches tall. Morris never struck his sons again but continued to inflict his ill temper on Serafina, who left him to live with relatives in the Bronx. The 1910 census shows Morris Sternberg as a single parent living in Brooklyn with his five children. The three youngest later moved in with their mother. Seventeen-year-old Josef preferred independence and left home. For the next year he shoveled snow, drove a team of horses to deliver rolls of paper, and sold costume jewelry door to door for a man named Kamanetzky, whom he disliked sufficiently to parody 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.