Discover Top Posts Tagged with #aviatrix

Aviatrix Elinor Smith piloted her plane under the Manhattan Bridge on her way to flying under all four East River bridges, October 20, 1928. Her plane is circled in red.

Photo: Nick Petersen for the NY Daily News via the NY Post

#vintage New York #1920s #Nick Petersen #Elinor Smith #early aviation #aviatrix #October 20 #20 October #Oct 20 #20 Oct #aviator #aviation pioneers

Deanie Parish. WASP pilot. In front of her Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. 1940′s

#Deana Parish #WASP #Aviatrix #Republic #P-47 #Thunderbolt #WWII

commission for @maxine-tarnow!

#drawings #aviatrix #tvrpg #the goldfinch.......

“Paramount, which signed her [Marlene Dietrich] in a tizzy after viewing a rough cut of The Blue Angel, was the only studio that actually liked weird directors; von Sternberg was the champ of weird. Stop the projector during a medium shot in any of his films and you’ll see a crammed picture, every piece in it doing something. Graffiti, toys, masks, light fixtures, bowls of things: the sets are alive.”

/ From Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood by Ethan Mordden, 1983 /

If visionary director Josef von Sternberg (Jonas Sternberg, 29 May 1894 - 22 December 1969 – who died on this day) was the Leonardo da Vinci of cinema, then German glamourpuss leading lady Marlene Dietrich was his Mona Lisa. The seven films the duo made together between 1930 and 1935 were dark, erotic, witty and sublime fleurs du mal in which they honed Dietrich's complex, sultry and feline persona and brought a whiff of genuine Continental decadence to mainstream Hollywood. Once Dietrich and Sternberg’s personal and professional relationship imploded his career went into a steep decline (Sternberg’s “artistic temperament” burnt a lot of bridges!) but I love his later post-Dietrich films The Shanghai Gesture (1941), Macao (1952) and Anatahan (1953). (I’m the first to admit, I haven’t seen any of his earlier silent movies). The intense and fruitful creative union between auteur Sternberg and muse Dietrich arguably created a template for the likes of Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Hanna Schygulla, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Pedro Almodovar and Carmen Maura (or Penelope Cruz) – and John Waters and Divine! Pictured: Sternberg and Dietrich (in butch leather aviatrix mode!) during production of Dishonoured (1931).