undeserved oblivion...confirm[ing] Chaplin’s observation that the silent movies learned their craft just about the time they went out of business.” Museum of Modern Art film curator Charles Silver ranked The Docks of New York as “probably the last genuinely great silent film made in Hollywood [rivaling] Chaplin’s masterpieces of the 1930s.” With respect to Sternberg's oeuvre, The Docks of New York was “the first in which his prodigious pictorial genius was fully realized.” A “deceptively simple” and ‘emotionally affecting film”, Sternberg combined spectacle and emotion, where "his characters gain in clarity what they lose in complexity." The Docks of New York was added to the Criterion Collection as part of the “Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg” series. Themes Despite the lurid mise-en-scène that provides the canvas for Sternberg's imagination, the film is neither "a crime thriller, nor a hardboiled noir...The Docks of New York is an elegant and elegiac love story [and] the most emotionally affecting film" of Sternberg's career. A standard melodrama with a "deceptively simple" plot, Sternberg does not dwell upon the social conditions of the working class figures; he is "not concerned with the class consciousness of the characters." Rather than striving to be realistic, Sternberg's photography served to "give visual experience feelings more than facts." Through the combination of camera movement (as opposed to montage) and his mise-en-scène compositions "that closely resemble German expressionist cinema", Sternberg conveys a "deeply felt emotional maturity and raw passion not previously seen on the American screen." Film critic William Blick reserves special mention for the film's wedding scene: Critic Andrew Sarris considers the "sewing" scene, with its use of "subjective camera" the key psychological moment of the film: Accolades In 1999, The Docks of New York was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and recommended for preservation. References Sources Baxter, John. 1971. The Cinema of Josef von Sternberg. The International Film Guide Series. A.S Barners & Company, New York. Blick, William. 2012. The Docks of New York The Senses of Cinema: CINÉMATHÈQUE ANNOTATIONS ON FILM. Retrieved April 26, 2018. http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/cteq/the-docks-of-new-york/ Muller, Eddie. 2012. The Docks of New York: San Francisco Silent Film Festival, 2012. Retrieved April 26, 2018. http://www.silentfilm.org/archive/the-docks-of-new-york Sarris, Andrew. 1966. The Films of Josef von Sternberg. Museum of Modern Art/Doubleday. New York, New York. Silver,