Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Scarlet Empress
1934 · Josef von Sternberg · The Scarlet Empress on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 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 Dietrich's face appear through lace, smoke, or candle flame. (light)
Sternberg repeatedly veils the camera's view of her with hanging nets, fur, or flame, so you are always looking at her through something rather than directly at her.
Payoff: The obstruction makes looking itself feel like desire; you lean in because the film will not simply hand her to you. In the reading: lyrical abstraction. Deleuze calls Sternberg's light-through-veil technique lyrical abstraction, working the relation of light to white rather than shadow.
Notice the carved gargoyles and screaming idol thrones in the court. (setting)
The Russian court is built from grotesque wooden statuary, skeletal figures flanking the dining table, doors so heavy they need several women to push them.
Payoff: The furniture itself looks hostile; you are watching a household designed to dwarf and threaten anyone inside it.
Watch Dietrich's face for the moment her eyes stop reacting. (performance)
She begins as a wide-eyed, naive girl whose expressions shift instantly, then gradually hardens into poise and calculated stillness as the film goes on.
Payoff: You can track her whole transformation just by watching how much her face still moves.
Notice objects placed between the camera and the actors. (camera)
Foreground furniture, statuary, and drapery repeatedly partly block the shot, so the camera seems to be peering into the court rather than placed inside it.
Payoff: That obstruction is a statement about looking; you are always a step removed from what you are watching. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). Deleuze calls a frame this saturated with detail a cadre, a closed set built to be inventoried rather than glanced through.
Listen for the nineteenth century orchestral music under every scene. (sound)
The score leans on Romantic-era classical adaptations rather than naturalistic sound, pushing the film toward a pageant-like, nearly operatic register.
Payoff: Dietrich's sparse, controlled voice becomes just one more instrument inside a mostly visual and musical design.
Once you have seen it
Watch Catherine ride a white horse up the palace stairs. (staging)
The coup that ends the film is staged as a single emblematic image rather than a sequence of tactics, fusing costume, horse, and architecture into one gesture of triumph.
Payoff: Power here arrives as a picture, not a plan; Sternberg resolves the plot as spectacle instead of action. In the reading: the Figure (reflection-image). Deleuze calls a resolved act transposed into a single image like this the Figure, a reflection-image standing in for the deed.
Watch the film speed up into near-abstract bursts between scenes. (cutting)
History and violence get compressed into rapid flurries of bells, riders, and instruments of torture, in sharp contrast to the long, held ceremonial sequences around them.
Payoff: The alternation between stillness and frenzy is how the film paces a story it otherwise treats as raw material for images.
Carry this in: Watch what stands between the camera and Dietrich's face. Sternberg wants you to lean in.