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Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle explores the philosophical questions broached by the films Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich made together at Paramount in the early 1930s. These are films that rethink faith, appearance, the image of women, the treatment of history and the sense of the world.
List of contents
- Introduction: Dietrich's Face and the Talking Picture
- 1. Shanghai Express: Making Room for Faith in Appearances
- 2. Blonde Venus: A Sale of Two Bodies
- 3. The Scarlet Empress: History as Farce
- 4. The Devil Is a Woman: Against the Off-Screen
- Conclusion: Towards an Ethics of the Moving Image
- Notes
- Index
About the author
James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He has published numerous articles on film, philosophy, and literature. He is also the author of Heidegger's Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (2005) and The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (2007) and the editor of Cinematic Thinking (2008).
Summary
Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle explores the philosophical questions broached by the films Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich made together at Paramount in the early 1930s. These are films that rethink faith, appearance, the image of women, the treatment of history and the sense of the world.
Additional text
There can be no debating that Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomoneology of Spectacle constitutes a superb study of the seven films that the German pair made together between 1930 and 1935-but this hardly begins to convey the book's achievement. Whether he's writing about the eponymous collaborators, the function of the close-up, the liabilities of the off-screen, the nature of cinematic spectacle, Kant's account of beauty, or Levinasian ethics, Phillips remains inexhaustibly insightful, abidingly rigorous, and mercifully clear. Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomoneology of Spectacle is not a book to be missed.
