Table 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).

Reviews

"While Phillips's starting point and purpose may be philosophical, Sternberg and Dietrich is genuinely, and imaginatively, engaged with the films under consideration, with their maker and their star, excavating the progress and the structure of its own pleasure and fascination -- and ours. This absorbing book thinks afresh about the experience of cinematic perception, about spectacle and spectatorship, the agency of images, the auteur's voice, the aura
of stars. Phillips invites us to re-examine these ideas not in academic isolation but, to borrow his phrase, within the horizon of human interaction." --Noa Steimatsky, author of The Face on Film
"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." --Gregory Flaxman, UNC Chapel Hill