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In this magisterial autobiography, Josef von Sternberg reflects about his personal career, film and its history and art.
Von Sternberg will always be remembered for one of the most impressive movies of all times Der blaue Engel, but his career covers the sound and silent movie period.

It is a very revealing book, not about his personal life, but about his professional viewpoints and struggles.

His actors direction was based on a penetrating insight into the real human nature. First, he considered that the guinea pig of the artist is his own self and secondly, that the average human being lives behind an impenetrable veil and will disclose his deep emotions only in a crisis which robs him of control.
His professional life was an enduring fight with
(1) the film studios and its producers. He knew their blatant commercialism: If a snail were to offer a contribution of value to Hollywood, it would be located instantly.
(2) his actors (an E. Jannings or a C. Laughton behaved like bad children on the set. A notable exception was his miraculous actress Marlene Dietrich.)
(3) his rivals within the directors guild.
and ultimately when the movie was produced (4) the moral establishment and its servile movie critics.

Von Sternberg understood the profound impact of the film medium, which revealed the real world where wealth and poverty live side by side, and where cruelty and indifference can no longer be ignored. The medium has an amoral basis: the strongest appeal to the masses was the simplest one: the formula always revolves around sex and its biological associate, violence. One bond that links all audiences is the animal in man.

He also gives us a penetrating portrait of some of the greatest masters of cinema: D.W. Griffith (remove these 10000 horses a trifle to the right), C. Chaplin (the comic side of humiliation) or E. von Stroheim (the intensity of his actors direction).

His ultimate goal was to create art, for it is easier to kill than to create.
The overall picture shows us von Sternberg as a noble, passionate, honest, craftful and extremely intelligent movie director.
This autobiography is part thriller, part melo, part drama, part psychoanalysis.
It is an essential read, not only for the film historian.