silver nitrate notes

The Blue Angel and the Two Cuts of Der Blaue Engel

5 feb 2013

Josef von Sternberg (1894-1969) directed The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, 1930) at UFA with Emil Jannings in the lead and Marlene Dietrich, then an unknown twenty-eight-year-old cabaret performer, in the role of Lola. The film was shot twice, once in German and once in English, on the same sets with the same cinematographer (Günther Rittau, whom we have met on Metropolis) and most of the same cast. The two versions are not identical. The German cut is longer, darker, and in the judgement of most critics, better. The English cut exists because UFA wanted access to the American and British markets in the dawn of sound cinema and believed, correctly, that dubbing was not yet commercially acceptable.

The plot is a morality tale. Professor Rath (Jannings), a stuffy high-school teacher, falls in love with Lola, a cabaret singer. He marries her. She destroys him. He ends the film degraded, reduced to performing as a clown in her cabaret, crowing like a rooster while members of the audience throw food at him. Rath's disintegration is the film's subject. Lola is not malicious; she is, as Brooks's Lulu had been the year before, simply a force the Professor is not equipped to survive.

Rittau's photography established what would become Sternberg's signature visual vocabulary: heavy shadow, partial silhouette, cigarette smoke photographed for its texture as much as its meaning. The cabaret sequences are shot with smoke in every frame, lit from above and behind the performers, so that the air itself becomes a visual element. Dietrich in the early scenes is photographed through veils, through smoke, through architectural barriers; Sternberg is training the audience to look at her as an object that resists clear viewing.

Dietrich went to Hollywood with Sternberg after the shoot wrapped and did not return to Germany. They would make six more films together at Paramount. None of them is better than The Blue Angel. Some are more extravagant; some are more polished. None is as direct.

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sources
[1] Baxter, Peter. Just Watch! Sternberg, Paramount, and America. BFI, 1993.
[2] Riva, Maria. Marlene Dietrich. Knopf, 1993.
[3] von Sternberg, Josef. Fun in a Chinese Laundry. Macmillan, 1965.
[4] Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen. University of California Press, 1969.