Sunday Self-Portrait

Following scream4noreason's instructions, an impromptu self-portrait. One week from turning 50, I live in a basement cave surrounded by books, movies, fanzines, and music. Life ain't so bad.

The Docks of New York (1928)

'That same year, 1928, Sternberg turned out the pictorially remarkable Docks of New York, which earned the praise of George Bernard Shaw. In it George Bancroft (who had become a favorite actor of Sternberg since Underworld, appearing in four of his films) moved with the grace of a ballet dancer, despite his heavy bulk, so integrated were his movements. Out of an imagination and sense of fantasy as vivid and evocative as Thomas Burke's evocations of London's Soho and Whitechapel in Limehouse Nights (and in an instinctive echo of the ancient Greeks who ordained that "every man owes five days a year to Dionysus"?), Sternberg conjured up a section of the Hoboken waterfront in the studio, complete with dirty tramp steamer tied up to the dock, its smoke-filled saloons with their wooden staircases outside leading to the upstairs rooms of the cheap prostitutes, the steaming boiler-room in the ship's hold with the glistening bodies of the stokers manning the fire-ovens, the sweating faces of those laboring in front of red-hot coal and looking forward to shore leave, which meant cold beer and the soft, yielding arms of the saloon girls ... all rendered in photography of the richest chiaroscuro.'

--Herman G. Weinberg, Josef von Sternberg (E.P Dutton & Co, 1967)



( Many more stills in the hold )