Shanghai Express X Delayed Rays of a Star

03.11.2023 / 20:00 – 22:30
With Amanda Lee Koe

At a chance encounter at a Berlin soirée in 1928, the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captures three very different women together in one frame: then up-and-coming German actress Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, the world’s first Chinese American star, and Leni Riefenstahl, whose work as a director of propaganda art films would first make her famous—then, infamous.

This is the starting point of Amanda Lee Koe’s debut novel, Delayed Rays of A Star. The trajectories of these women’s lives wind The trajectories of these women’s lives, and their complex legacies, wind from Weimar Berlin to Hollywood, and the different settings they inhabit are as richly textured as the roles they play: siren, victim, predator, or lover, each one a carefully calibrated performance.

By 1932, four years after the Eisenstaedt photograph was taken, Dietrich had catapulted to superstar status in America, as the muse and lover of auteur Josef von Sternberg. Shanghai Express is the fourth of seven films that Dietrich collaborated on with von Sternberg for Paramount Pictures, co-starring Anna May Wong. 

The film’s production and reception was richly researched and reimagined by Lee Koe for Delayed Rays of A Star, in a chapter where von Sternberg’s obsessive and unforgiving process as a film director is unpacked, and the professional tensions between two brilliant actresses are examined, alongside the intricate personal dynamics surrounding the rumors that Dietrich and Wong had been involved in a lesbian affair.

Watching this pre-Code film vis-à-vis readings from Delayed Rays of A Star, the audience is invited to consider the intricacies and pressures of power and performance, both on set and behind the scenes. 

Screening Shanghai Express (80 min., 35 mm, OV)
Followed by a reading and conversation with Amanda Lee Koe and Lara Sielmann (in English)

Tickets here

SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
Lindower Str. 20/22/Haus C
13347 Berlin