Word: stroheim
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
MOVIE HISTORIANS call Erich von Stroheim a realist because of his attention to authentic detail. Stroheim rehearsed actors only less thoroughly than he designed sets and selected objects for them. But the most important element of his art is visual style, for its give us a sense that the objects and spaces he shows are real. Without this sense, all the correct detail in the world would be useless...
...Stroheim presents the characters and settings of each shot as directly as possible. Actors rarely overlap one another; all are fully visible; yet he saves his shots from being flat tableaux by placing his actors at different distances from the camera and by enhancing their different depths with lighting. The way he places his "realistic" objects similarly use depth. Prominent natural objects in the foreground play off objects in the background to make the space of each shot real and three-dimensional...
...hiking scene in the mist--the most illusory of conditions--rock outcrops in right foreground key the shot by giving us an immediate material object. Contrasting with the figures in medium distance against the far rock-ledge, all the objects together establish real space between them. For Stroheim there is no such thing as a general form or formal similarity between different objects. Each object it its material self, nor is there one kind of 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...
...STROHEIM shows the same tension between his characters' aspiration to 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...
...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...