Word: sternberger
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Marland Billings, Rupert Emerson, Government George Kistiakowsky, Chemistry Richard Neustadt. Government Shlomo Sternberg, Mathematics
Thus the German myth's appearance in Blue Angel makes it seem an Expressionist film. But the weight of this material, the subject of the film, should not obscure our view of Sternberg's treatment of that material, for it's his treatment that is crucial to the film's meaning, especially for Jannings and Dietrich...
...SCENE'S symbolic content is perfectly accessible. Such devices as the cage and the lamp, together with Sternberg's handling of depth and sets, set up a pleasant and very restricted environment out of which Jannings' character develops. But the same symbols have a deeper meaning which, through their integration into Sternberg's dramatic and visual scheme, establishes the pattern of the entire film. In this system the attraction of light is a crucial motivation of personal behavior, and Jannings' blindness to the globe behind him appears simultaneously with a restriction of depth that expresses the limitations of his moral...
...vision becomes stronger and clearer as his life changes. Finally he is forced to play a clown in his home town while Dietrich backstage messes with a young actor. The ringmaster steps on stage, but Jannings refuses to come from behind the gauze curtain which partly obscures him. Sternberg cuts to high-angle shots of the rowdy audience, instead of stage-level shots which would show Jannings on the same moral plane, and then as Jannings on the same moral plane, and then as Jannings comes on stage to a terrifying long shot of the stage, rectangle of light, surrounded...
...time in close-up. As she sees his humiliation her cynicism takes on a new depth echoed in the final images of her singing. Jannings charges offstage to kill her; her flight is shot in high-angle, expressing the degree of freedom in even Jannings' most desperate action. Indeed, Sternberg cuts away to a doorway rather than showing Jannings being strait-jacketed. Later released, he returns to his old school desk to die the death of all Expressionist heroes. But Sternberg ends the film with shots of Dietrich, the burning Romantic figure and object, so that even in the person...