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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 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. “Whereas a painter uses his brushes, canvas and colors, following only the bent of his imagination,” he complained, “the film director has to consider other men and human material.” He didn’t hesitate to step on the toes of technicians. On Shanghai Express he climbed on top of a locomotive to paint in shadows that the director of photography had failed to provide, and on Crime and Punishment he not only dabbed paint on sets but also physically moved equipment. Nor did his practice of scrawling graffiti across mirrors and walls or plastering sets with posters endear him to art directors. Although the exclusive American Society of Cinematographers honored him with the first membership ever conferred on a director, and many lighting cameramen acknowledged him as an equal, if not their master, just as many resented him. He was to learn that “human material” could harbor a grudge for a dismayingly long time.