Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Greed
1924 · Erich von Stroheim · Greed on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for objects tinted gold in an otherwise gray film. (light)
Stroheim had his crew hand-tint gold objects frame by frame, the tooth-shaped dental sign, a canary, coins, so that gold alone glints through the otherwise black-and-white image.
Payoff: The one thing allowed to shine is the one thing that ends up ruining everyone who reaches for it. In the reading: affective color. Deleuze calls a single color that organizes a whole image's feeling a colour-image, and here gold is the only color permitted to exist.
Watch the wedding for what passes by the window. (staging)
McTeague and Trina's wedding is staged so that a funeral procession is visible through the window behind them during the ceremony, marriage and death framed in a single shot.
Payoff: The world comments on the marriage without a single title card having to explain it.
Notice how sharp the background stays behind the actors. (camera)
The deep, detailed compositions keep foreground action and background environment simultaneously legible, giving the real San Francisco locations an almost documentary, ethnographic specificity.
Payoff: The city around these characters is rendered specifically enough to feel like a real, lived place.
Watch Trina's hands whenever money is near her. (performance)
ZaSu Pitts, previously known mainly for comedy, plays Trina's small physical habits around her coins with mounting attention, a shy bride's caution slowly turning into something more possessive.
Payoff: You can watch her relationship to money change through gesture alone, well before anyone says a word about it.
Once you have seen it
Watch Trina bathe in the coins she has hoarded. (performance)
By the film's later stretch, Trina is fondling and bathing in her hoarded gold, her face curdling into something feral, an act that reads less like a choice than a compulsion taking over.
Payoff: Her body is doing what a drive wants, not what a character with a plan would decide. In the reading: symptom. Deleuze calls a visible act that is really the surface of an unchosen drive a symptom, and her bathing is exactly that.
Watch the Death Valley finale for what nobody can carry. (setting)
McTeague and Marcus end up manacled together in the desert beside the gold and a dead mule, neither one able to actually leave with the fortune that destroyed them both.
Payoff: The whole social world of the story finally strips away to reveal what was underneath it all along. In the reading: originary-world. Deleuze calls the savage world beneath ordinary life the originary world; Death Valley is that world with every social surface gone.
Watch for how abruptly late scenes seem to skip forward. (structure)
The surviving release version compresses Stroheim's original structure so heavily that motivations get foreshortened and studio-inserted intertitles have to bridge the gaps left by the missing footage.
Payoff: You are watching a slow ruin edited down into something closer to a series of jolts.
Carry this in: Watch what color the film allows to shine. Everyone who reaches for it ends up in the dark.