Strogheim. Buried alive by cinema In the history of world cinema, there are directors who are more famous not for what they created, but for what they failed to do. Their ambitions were too great for their time, their technical capabilities had not yet reached the proper level of development, and most importantly, the public, and the entire film production system, were not ready to accept their titanic talent. The most pronounced and absolutely unique representative of these non-creative creators is Count Erich Oswald Hans Karl Maria von Stroheim and Nordenwall, a revolutionary of cinema, a non-conformist and one of the greatest silent film directors, who profoundly influenced the development of cinema. Now he, like the vast majority of directors of that time, is forgotten, buried and actually destroyed. Someone else remembers the names Griffith, Lang or Pabst. Strogheim's name is hardly pronounced. No reason.
The uniqueness of this director’s work can be traced in a number of factors concerning both the form and content of his films. Strogheim was a radical perfectionist, ready to shoot a hundred takes for the required emotional entourage, harassing the actors with three-hour repetitions of a thirty-second scene. The working day on the site with this “film monster” began at eight in the morning, and usually ended at the third o’clock in the morning. From the walls of the pavilion, the same chilling blood echoed with a roaring echo, the fatal phrase: “We will shoot as much as necessary.” But even with such a busy schedule, he always exceeded the planned shooting period by two or three times. However, this is not surprising, because the timing of his paintings averaged about ... eight hours. What mediated such a gigantic duration, which even today, in the era of all kinds of experiments, almost no one dares? The fact is that Stroheim dreamed of a film product of a completely new form, which would be between a standard movie and a (not yet existing) series. The main aspect of the film for the director were details, such as the absolute reliability of the entourage, habits and manners of the characters, detailed study of costumes. Therefore, the exposure and immersion in the world of the characters could last about four hours, so that the viewer fully felt his involvement in what is happening.
The style and manner of shooting this director can be talked about for a very long time, while it should be limited to pointing out the innovation of the narrative schemes introduced by him. It was Stroheim who was the first to “exploit” in his work the base themes of sexuality, greed and other dark sides of human nature, inflaming them to an unprecedented intensity for his time. However, its greatness lies, of course, not in this, but in the fact that it does not just dryly document (in the manner of Noe, Brass, etc.), but aesthetically formalizes and scourges the evil of sinful and fallen humanity. All his films are equipped with the moral charge of thermonuclear force. At the same time, in most cases, he himself represents the substance of evil that he overcomes. Strogheim is much better known as an excellent actor, who ingeniously expresses the very essence of vice in the images of seductive crooks, clever and ingenious scammers, pseudo-courageous officers and charismatic ladies' pleasures. It is amazing how these two poles - the artist's hidden moral message and the stunningly open artistic "perversion" combined in the personality of Strogheim, and alas were noticed by so few. In the history of world cinema, an exceptional combination of this kind was found in such core proportions only by Orson Welles, who naturally shared the fate of his colleague in the workshop.
“Blind Husbands” is the directorial debut of the already elderly thirty-three-year-old Stroheim, who has established himself as an impeccable artist and a talented actor at the Universal Studio, for which he received the go-ahead from the bosses to stage his own picture. For the most part, the film is a precursor to the director’s unique style. It is so far devoid of titanic pretensions, and technically it is mostly a typical product of its time. However, it is impossible not to notice the outlines of the original discursive and stylistic orientation of the picture, which later will become purely Strogheim’s. At first glance, the plot is nothing more than a romantically instructive story with a fair share of moral pathos.
Married couple Armstrongs from America, not the first year married, comes to rest on the slopes of the Alpine mountains. A happy pastime is hindered by the insidious seducer Eric Steuben, who, taking advantage of the fact that Mr. Armstrong pays so little attention to his still blossoming wife, tries to persuade the latter to intimacy. Soon, excited by a thirst for rivalry, the “enlightened” husband rushes to save his disintegrating marriage, which ends with the happy reunion of the couple and the death (presented in the form of fatal retribution of fate) of the vicious (sic!) lieutenant.
The extravagance of the film lies in several points. First, the native European Strogheim, in the image of Armstrongs, paints a most scathing satire on the American institution of marriage, supported by the ideology of consumer relations, this is what the director himself said on this topic: “You will find the most selfish spouses in the world in the city of New York.” Selfish involuntarily. They spend an enormous amount of energy earning money to buy their wife expensive gifts. The irony of fate is that a wife would give all her jewels for the sake of her husband treating her sincerely and honestly! (Stroheim is a holy innocence, never lived in our age!) Against the background of a rather ambiguous picture of family discord, an ambiguous figure of the lieutenant appears. Strogheim put into his role all conceivable negative qualities, but his hero still in some ways remains close to the viewer. In fact, the lieutenant is no more sinful than the others. Yes, he is narcissistic, selfish, lustful and daring, but it cannot be said that for his character he deserved death in the form of a completely symbolic fall from the mountain (his own vanity). His accidental death today brings dissonance to the emotional fabric of the picture, but at the beginning of the twentieth century the public simply applauded the death of a scumbag who, in addition, was also an officer of the enemy army. The film collected a giant box office and brought Stroheim into the category of directors of class A. Subsequently, the director will often use his past success, again and again playing on the selfishness of producers and squeezing money out of them for his a priori unrealizable opuses. But so far, no one has particularly noticed anything crazy in the director himself or in his work, and therefore Stroheim reaped short-lived fruits of fame and success.
Overall, the film is worth watching. It is filled with symbolic connotations (white pigeons as a feature of innocence, the self-sufficient substance of the mountain (the film should actually be called "Peak") as a spiritual location, etc.), adheres to a clear compositional symmetry (for example, in the beginning the doctor pulls the climber up, and in the end, the lieutenant, thanks to the "efforts" of the doctor, falls into the same abyssss, the triangle of the Armtrongs and Steuben is similar to the relationship of the latter with the maidresses in love with him) and is not even deprived of surrealistic (for example, this is a typical symbol of the heroine, which is a phant). All thanks to Erich von Strogheim. The forgotten father of cinema.