Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
2626 Bancroft Way
510.642.0808
This event has passed.
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The Last Command
- When
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Sunday Jan 18, 2009 (5:30pm)
- Where
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- Price
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$9.50
- Links
An insistent, morbid, and ultimately fascinating preoccupation with degradation and utter mortification have defined the cinema of Josef von Sternberg, and his twisted masterpiece The Last Command serves as a prime example. This sizzling mockery of overgrown human ambition tells the story of a once-mighty Czarist general brought low in the wake of Imperial Russia's collapse — only to be hired by a longtime rival to re-enact the revolution that ruined him in a Hollywood film. As much an indictment of Hollywood as Czarist Russia, the drama is sharpened by the ironies revealed through a constant shift from the staged to the real, neither of which seem particularly reasonable or firm.
