A FACE TO WAKE UP TO.

LEARN TO LOVE YOUR SCREEN SAVER

When a relationship ends, souvenirs are, depending on circumstances, either laid sentimentally to rest in a cupboard or consigned willy-nilly to the trash.

No such rule stipulates that, when one changes computers, one also adopts a new screen saver, but with me that's been so. The victim in this case is the face to which I've woken each morning for the last ten years. Not that it matters, but it belongs to Marlene Dietrich, a woman I never met. The photograph dates from 1932 and was taken to promote the film Shanghai Express.

Why should this image of a dreaming face, nestled into an absurd fur collar, convey such a sense of calm and peace, but at the same time suggest…

…..but I don't know the word, at least not in English, for that additional sense with which it's permeated; a hint of some other reality to which I will forever be denied entry. "Traumerei" has been suggested, and "stimmung", but perhaps no such word exists. As with many great images, there is a frontier beyond which language simply doesn't function.

I've expended an absurd amount of time and effort on attempting to define that sense. After hearing me expound at length to an American college class on how and why Shanghai Express was made, a student enquired, reasonably, "Were you on the set on the film?"

Sometimes it felt as if I had been. I knew Travis Banton designed the coat and Dorothy Ponedell created her make-up: could even parse its constituents - the line of white greasepaint down the bridge of her nose, the burned match-heads crushed in oil used to create the shadows of her cheeks.  I'd stood, awed, in the very room where the photograph was taken, and even met the man who took it - though if I hoped for elucidation from Josef von Sternberg, Dietrich's director and lover, and the man who lit the image in question, disappointment awaited me.

He came to Australia in 1967, a guest of the Sydney Film Festival, and we had lunch at the city's oldest and most venerable hotel, which, to Sternberg's satisfaction, had been officially opened by Sarah Bernhardt.

In the course of an excruciatingly uncomfortable meal, this stooped, bearded little man answered each of my tentative questions with an evasion or a lie. But perhaps my awed diffidence touched what passed for his heart since, lunch over, he said unexpectedly "I have some papers in my room that may interest you."

An ancient elevator, lined in varnished linen-fold paneling, took us to the top floor. Leading me along meandering corridors, he unlocked the door of his suite - and we stepped into jungle madness. Von Sternberg, I learned, has spent his spare time buying out Sydney's purveyors of New Guinean tribal art (but providently also acquiring their duplicates for re-sale back in Los Angeles.)

Human skulls as yellow as old ivory grinned from the corners of the room. Idols yawned, their torsos gashed with marks of the stone axes that shaped them. Leaning against overstuffed Victorian armchairs were clubs embedded with sharks' teeth. A throne of black wood, topped with another skull, sat empty, its seat polished and hollowed by generations of chiefly backsides.

It was impossible not to be reminded of Hot Voodoo, the sequence from Blonde Venus, made thirty-five years earlier. A gorilla lumbers onto a nightclub stage, led by a chorus line of beautiful black women, each carrying a shield decorated with a fanged and gaping mouth that evoked the most extreme of male terrors, the vagina dentata - the vagina that bites. The ape draws off one hairy paw to reveal a slim white hand. As Dietrich emerges, dreamily swaying, a nymph shrugging off its chrysalis, she subdues her disordered hair under a glittering blonde wig . (Her coiffeur ground up a gold coin each morning and sprinkled it as dust through her curls.)

No tool as blunt as question-and-answer was likely to crack this particular nut, and I gave up trying, eventually putting all my questions and some of the discovered answers into a biography of this infuriatingly gifted man. The mystery of his imagery remained - something of which I've daily been reminded as I open my computer.

But that's the past; time for something (and some body) new - of whom more in another posting. But meanwhile…..