The Devil Is a Woman

Abstract

This chapter relies on The Devil Is a Woman (1935), the last film Sternberg and Dietrich made together, to develop an account of Sternberg’s antagonistic relation to the off-screen. More than most directors, he is a maker of self-sufficient images: this informs his understanding of narrative. In the face of the positive treatment of the off-screen in film studies over recent decades, the chapter defends Sternberg against the criticisms leveled at cinemas of mere spectacle. The carnival atmosphere and unreliable narrator of The Devil Is a Woman are prompts for investigating and contesting the fictional world by which a viewer frames the individual shots of a film. The eccentric architectural space of The Blue Angel (1930) is treated as a reason for attributing to Sternberg a longer-term interest in disentangling cinema from the viewer’s cognitive practice of elaborating, with the help of the off-screen, a world around the shots of which a film is composed.