The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel)

This comprehensive study reconstructs the production history of The Blue Angel (1930), showing how director Josef von Sternberg's virtuoso visual style was amply supported by an immensely talented team of actors and technicians. It also analyzes the film's aesthetics, and shows how the grave political situation in Germany reverberated in its seemingly airtight world. One of the most famous images in cinema is to be found in the film The Blue Angel (1930). Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich), in revealing black suspenders, sits on a beer-barrel clasping an upraised knee with both hands while she leans slightly back. Though not Germany's first sound film, it was at the time the most prestigious and expensive by far. Sternberg had been lured back from Hollywood and, together with acting star Emil Jannings and producer Erich Pommer, he set about making an adaptation of Heinrich Mann's novel Professor Unrat. The result is a subtly claustrophobic study of a man's downfall which is a milestone in European cinema.

Auteur

S. S. PRAWER was Taylor Professor Emeritus of German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. He was the author of the BFI Film Classic on The Blue Angel (2002) and Karl Marx and World Literature (1976; 2011), which was awarded the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1977.

Contenu

Acknowledgments
Prologue

1. Why is the Angel Blue?
2. Transformations
3. 'Svengali Jo' Assembles His Team
4. Artificial Gardens, Real Toads
5. 'Tending Towards Music': Contrast and Counterpoint
6. 'Der Blaue Engel': Sternberg's German Film
   Epilogue
   Appendix: A Note on the English Versions
   Notes
   Credits
   Select Bibliography