Josef von Sternberg

1 - 30 December

Introduction by John Baxter

There was something of Lawrence of Arabia about Josef von Sternberg; the short man's strut, the delusion of grandeur, the taste for exotic places and their costumes, the uncertain sexuality, but also the vision, and the will to impose it on the world. 'The dreamers of the day are dangerous men,' he warned, 'for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.'

Jo Sternberg was such a dreamer. Though never having visited China, Africa, Russia or Spain, he created his own versions of these places, and convinced audiences of their reality. To do so demanded the imposition on Hollywood's rigid system of his own idiosyncratic rules. Deciding it was absurd to create coloured sets and costumes for the black-and-white The Devil Is a Woman, he ordered them made in monochrome. Actors on The Scarlet Empress were given screenplays without capital letters or punctuation; 'I want them to learn the words,' he explained. 'I will tell them how to say them.'

Most provocatively, he discarded the convention of a credible story. 'The best source for a film,' he said, 'is an anecdote.' 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. Max Reinhardt rightly called him 'a painter, in the narrowest and broadest senses of the word.'

Gorgeous absurdities, his films are orchids of cinema, cultivated by a man who perversely relished smashing the greenhouse. The industry on which he lavished such contempt responded with ostracism. He ended his career in almost metaphoric isolation, directing, writing, photographing and narrating The Saga of Anatahan, with Japanese actors who obeyed him without question.

A few people saw beyond Jo's defences to the lonely aesthete who made the elegaic The Docks of New York and the operatic Shanghai Express. One was Marlene Dietrich. After the first screening of Morocco, she slipped a note into his pocket. 'You - Only you - the Master - the Giver - Reason for my existence - the Teacher - the Love my heart and brain must follow.' Yes.