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: Gold is the only color allowed to shine, and the film keeps pulling your eye to 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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what color the film allows to shine, and notice who reaches for it.