The Scarlet Empress · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The Scarlet Empress is perhaps the purest sustained example of the affection-image in classical Hollywood: the film exists almost entirely as a series of close-up studies of Marlene Dietrich's face, which cinematographer Bert Glennon—under Sternberg's iron guidance—isolates as a luminous mask within darkness, glimpsed through lace, smoke, and candleflame, feeling crystallized before it can harden into action. Where other biopics organize themselves around events, Sternberg organizes around expressions: the young Sophia Frederica's wonder curdling into irony, desire calcifying into calculation. That face is inseparable from its setting, which makes the film equally a supreme instance of mise-en-scène as total environment: the half-mad Russian court with its grotesque statuary, hanging gauze, and guttering candles is not backdrop but active agent, décor pressing in on bodies and sculpting their significance—a principle Sternberg inherits directly from Murnau's Faust (1926), whose chiaroscuro modeling of figures through smoke and directional shaft-light is the precise grammar that Sternberg and Glennon push to baroque extremity on Dietrich's features. Beneath the surface beauty, the court operates as what Deleuze would call an impulse-image: a degraded 'originary world' ruled by raw drive—appetite, cruelty, erotic conquest—where civilized motive dissolves into pure compulsion. Catherine's education is her initiation into this world's ruthless logic, the discovery that survival means not merely enduring desire and power but weaponizing them. The film is finally less a historical drama than a treatise on theatricality: to rule this court one must become its supreme performer, and Sternberg's camera, always half-veiling, records the precise moment the innocent princess disappears inside the mask.