The Merry Widow (von Stroheim, 1925)
My Fall Movies # 17
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«Lubitsch shows you first the king on the throne, then as he is in the bedroom. I show you the king in the bedroom so you’ll you know just what he is when you see him on his throne.» Erich von Stroheim’s seemingly straightforward account of the difference between his films and those of Ernst Lubitsch tells us much about what is peculiar and remarkable in his work. The essence of this difference is less a question of sequential order than an outcome of a remarkable attention to the psychological and physical realities of characters anchored within their environments. His work is full of scenes in which characters take time to inhabit a particular space or situation. Thus, the much commented upon realism of Stroheim’s films often comes down to both the attention that is paid to details of mise en scène as well as the time his films take to lead up to what would, in most other films, be the primary point of focus. Stroheim’s films have a tendency to keep things up in the air, to stretch moments of time to breaking points of dissolution and entropy (within the context of Hollywood narrative cinema). As Gilles Deleuze has noted: «We might say of Stroheim what Thibaudet said of Flaubert: for him, duration is less that which forms itself (se fait) than that which undoes itself (se défait), and accelerates in undoing itself. It is therefore inseparable from an entropy, a degradation.»
A comparison between Lubitsch’s sparkling, all-singing and all-talking 1934 version of Franz Lehar’s operetta and Stroheim’s baroque vision of what is mostly its «back-story», tells us much about the director’s approach to exposition, character and the cinematic representation of time and space. Whereas Lubitsch’s film commences with the title character as already a widow, and initially not so «merry», it is not until about two-thirds of the way into Stroheim’s version that her degenerate, foot-fetishist husband drops dead (quite literally on merely kissing her shoulder). Not unlike the way in which Scorsese expands the moments of encounter which usher in New York, New York (1977) – to the point where we think they may never end – Stroheim’s The Merry Widow takes considerable time and care to introduce its central characters, and this is largely where its realism or naturalism lies. This process of introduction, elongation and elaboration grants Stroheim’s films a curious tonality. Following in many respects the work of D. W. Griffith – with whom Stroheim worked – Stroheim’s films are populated with caricatures, typologies and conventionally exaggerated or melodramatic modes of performance. Like Griffith, Stroheim’s films are often memorable for the ways in which they isolate faces, expressions and parts of bodies, with the grimace, wild laugh or piercing stare (a John Gilbert specialty) of a character often standing in for a more complex range of emotions and psychological insights. (More here.)
