The Scarlet Empress · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the veil. Before Catherine is empress, before she is even unhappy, Sternberg gives us Marlene Dietrich's face floating behind a hanging net, a candle doing the rest — a luminous mask suspended in a darkness that has no floor and no walls. You lean in to see her. That leaning-in is the whole film. The Scarlet Empress obstructs your sightline on purpose, layering lace, smoke, fur, and candle flame between the camera and the woman, so that looking becomes an act of desire rather than a free gift.

Deleuze, who wrote about Sternberg by name, would call this lyrical abstraction, and the distinction he draws is exact and useful here. Expressionism — the German tradition Sternberg plainly inherits — works the gradient between light and shadow, charging objects with a non-organic, menacing life. You can see that inheritance everywhere in the court: the writhing wooden saints, the screaming-idol thrones, the gargoyles leaning over the banquet table. These are direct descendants of the built, distorted décor of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the frieze-statuary of Die Nibelungen, the shaft-light-through-smoke of Murnau's Faust. But Deleuze's claim is that Sternberg does something else with the apparatus. His subject is not shadow but the relation of light to white — the veil, the net, the refraction, the face caught as a glowing surface. Where expressionism sinks figures into darkness, Sternberg floats Dietrich in a screen of textures and lets the light catch in the gauze. The grotesque set is expressionist; the way it is lit is not. That's worth saying plainly because it rescues the film from being filed as mere horror-decor: the décor is the inherited body, the light is Sternberg's own invention.

And that mask of a face does a particular job. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up — a feeling registered before it discharges into action — and its purest form is the qualisign, an immobile reflecting face expressing a single quality. Dietrich gives us exactly that arc: she enters as a wide-eyed girl whose face still reacts, and she hardens, glance by glance, into a sovereign whose face only reflects. By the end she is not emoting; she is a quality — poise, calculation, command — held perfectly still and lit. Sternberg directs her as an object of light first and a psychology second, and the miracle is that the transformation reads anyway. The stillness is the story.

Underneath the lyricism, though, the court is a pit. The dossier's word is the right one: appetite. A princess is delivered to a monstrous household, married to a giggling near-imbecile, and schooled in cruelty and desire. This is Deleuze's impulse-image — the world of naked drives erupting beneath the social surface — and the film stages it as he describes naturalism: a derived milieu (the 18th-century Russian court, with its protocols and titles) that turns out to be the thin skin over an originary world of pure compulsion, where power means appetite and appetite means power. It is no accident that Stroheim's Foolish Wives, all decadent European-court excess, sits in this film's ancestry; Deleuze reads Stroheim as the great naturalist of the impulse-image, and Sternberg extends the same instinct — the studio built as a total environment of drives.

Notice what this does to story. Causality goes loose and elliptical. The long wedding, the banquet under the gargoyles — these are held tableaux, not steps in an argument, and between them history is compressed into near-abstract flurries of bells, riders, and instruments of torture. The film does not advance so much as accumulate pressure inside the closed set (Deleuze's cadre): dense, information-saturated frames where foreground objects occlude the action and the human figure is dwarfed by furniture that screams. When resolution finally comes, it comes as an image, not a deed. Catherine rides a white horse up the palace stairs into the coup. That is not action in the ordinary sense — it is the Figure, the reflection-image, where the act is transposed into emblem and spectacle. Sternberg figures power rather than dramatizing it. The pageant is the politics.

This is where to place the film against the grain of its own century. The realist contract that Bazin would later make doctrine — cinema as a window, the image trusted because it records the world — finds its perfect adversary in Sternberg. He insists the image is made, not found; that the court was never out there to be photographed but was arranged, light by reflection by veil, as an end in itself. Few Hollywood films of the period commit so totally to surface. His own phrase, "a relentless excursion into style," is for once just description.

That is the significance, and it is large. Sternberg proved that mise-en-scène — arranged light, texture, the occluded glance — could carry the entire content of a film, that you could subordinate narrative almost to vanishing and lose nothing essential. He made the case, decades before the cult of mise-en-scène named it, that a director's signature lives in how the world is shown, not what happens in it. Watch The Scarlet Empress again and try to follow only the light: where it is veiled, where it is let through, whose face it chooses. The plot will fall away, and the film will be more itself, not less. Sternberg hands you that pair of eyes. Lean in.