This network visualization illustrates how those who worked on Marlene Dietrich’s films collaborated with each other. The data only encompasses those films Dietrich herself worked on, not all films each collaborator has worked on individually. For the purposes of illustrating collaboration between Dietrich’s collaborators, and given that all nodes would share a connection to Dietrich, we decided to omit Dietrich herself from the visualization. The network illustrates ‘common links’ between Dietrich’s films - or her most frequent collaborators, versus films and individuals that may be more distant from the work at the core of her portfolio. 

There are a few clusters of note, with key collaborators anchoring each one. These clusters are colored according to their modularity class (how closely related nodes are). This breaks the network up into groups of films, and films where it’s clear there are no common collaborators, besides Dietrich herself. The largest cluster (purple) on the left represents mostly films and collaborators of Josef von Sternberg and the light blue cluster contains collaborators who worked with or are only one degree away from John Wayne, for example. Users can hover over nodes to explore the structure of the network.

Another view of the network shows the gender breakdown of Dietrich’s collaborators. Orange nodes represent men while green nodes represent women. Though it’s unsurprising that men dominate the network, given that Hollywood was (and arguably still is) a man-dominated business, it’s interesting to see that frequent collaborators are almost always between men. Only one node, belonging to Alison Skipworth, has collaborated with any other nodes in the network more than once. This shows that Dietrich, too, wasn’t collaborating with many women, and she wasn’t collaborating with these women more than once, for the most part. Her relationships then within the film industry were mostly with men. 

The person with the highest degree in this network (the most collaborations within the network) is Josef von Sternberg, who directed seven of Dietrich’s films (Blonde Venus, Dishonored, Morocco, Shanghai Express, The Blue Angel, The Devil Is a Woman, The Scarlet Empress). Von Sternberg and Dietrich began working together in 1930, when Dietrich was cast in von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel). She was soon signed to Paramount, where she and von Sternberg created another six films together within five years. During this time, von Sternberg carefully crafted Dietrich’s image as an “exotic femme fatale” ("Josef von Sternberg"). Following the commercial failure of The Devil is a Woman, von Sternberg was fired from Paramount, and did not work with Dietrich again. 

Interestingly, the clusters are somewhat time-bound. Dietrich tended to have common collaborators during certain periods of her life. Between 1930 and 1935, she worked frequently with von Sternberg. Between 1940 and 1942, she was frequently paired with John Wayne. As she moved through her career, she was grouped with different kinds of people. Von Sternberg ‘discovered’ her, but once she moved further into her career, and gathered more acclaim, she began to work with bigger-name American actors like James Stewart and John Wayne, for example. In other clusters, like the dark grey and green clusters, we can see relationships forming between those she worked with on international films.