Word: lightness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...object is its material self, no is there one kind of object. "His films establish a distinction between things as essences and things as symbols" (Sarris), and treat only the latter. There is not general motion; action is local and concretely tied to the actor. The only universal is light...
Shots of the two men trudging across the snow, flooded with light, are followed by shots of them inching up a rock face. When they finally reach the top, the officer collapses, exhausted. The other, picking up his coat, discovers a letter written to the officer by a woman. The husband asks him if it comes from his wife; on the officer's insolent reply, be attacks him. The entire scene atop the peak, like the preceding climbing scenes, has the characters standing on rock against an entirely white horizon. The screen has been stripped down...
...virtue and their weaknesses in Greed (1923). Its plot follows a young dentist and his wife as they decline from security to poverty. Stroheim, directly equating their material situation with their moral states, places them in real settings. At the same time he floods the early scenes with light, expressing in extraordinary art their wish for purity...
AGAIN the moral situation has been stripped down for a struggle between two men. Again their setting, barren and light-filled, re-establishes their fundamental tendency to good even while their link to the material work keeps them from acting virtuously, and drives them to destroy each other. Blind Husbands, Stroheim's first film, shows the consistency and depth of his conception of human existence by creating the same pure and realistic drama...
...night they would watch flocks of long-legged cranes fly over the isolated valleys or the aurora borealis fill half the sky with a light show...