Lecture 1 - Greed

A. Narrative

A1. Background

• Adapted from Frank Norris’ novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899)
• Butchered masterpiece
  • Original version: over than 9 hrs
  • Director’s cut: 5 hrs
  • Stroheim’s friend, Rex Ingram, cut it to 4 hrs
  • Studio’s cut: 2 1/4 hrs (the rest of footage has never been recovered)
  • Recently restored version: 4hrs (newly discovered stills added; contains stills of Mac’s father; Maria and Zerkow subplot etc.)

A2. Prologue

• Original prologue cut from 2.5 h to 7 min
• Contained important scenes of McTeague’s background, especially his father
• Mac’s father exemplifies idea of Man as a degraded, beast-like being

A3. Subplot 1

• Degraded relationship between Maria and Zerkow
  • Maria: Cleaning lady who sells lottery ticket to Trina
  • Zerkow: Her husband
  • Intended to foreshadow how McTeague and Trina’s marriage will end up in destruction

• Surreal shot of hands playing with gilded objects
  • Actually belong to the Maria and Zerkow subplot, re-edited to apply to Trina
  • Part of Zerkow’s dreams where he lusts for gilded ojects
  • Guant/malformed/elongated arms: degradation in the pursuit of wealth
  • Bar-like shadows: cage/prison cell motif => contrast with hands grasping at gold
  • Zerkow/Maria ironically trapped by their own greed
  • Inner person undergoing corruption
  • Spiritual death/deformity in the pursuit of material wealth, even if successful

A4. Subplot 2

• Shy relationship between Mr Grannis and Miss Baker that blossoms into romance
• A contrast to Mac and Trina’s declining marriage

B. Von Stroheim’s Artistic Manifesto

B1. Emphasis on Realism

• In terms of the authenticity of props and settings
• In terms of seeing reality as it is, and rejecting a romanticized or idealized reality (associated with mainstream cinema, even in Stroheim’s time)

"I intended to show men and women . . . with their good and bad qualities, their noble and idealistic sides and their jealous, vicious, mean, greedy sides"
- Von Stroheim

• Stroheim’s characters: mixture of good and bad, yet dark side ultimately prevails
• MacTeague may have tender, compassionate, even artistic side, yet darker brutish self triumphs

B2. Philosophy of Naturalism

B2-i. A positive view of Man

• Being guided by reason and able to make rational choices
• Being free to choose and able to make moral choices
• Being free to determine one’s life trajectory
• Potential for self-realization

B2-ii. A negative (NATURALIST) view of Man

"a primitive brute governed by his instincts and limited by his heredity and environment" (Finler 23)

Stroheim’s film seeks not just to exemplify realism, but the Philosophy of Naturalism

1. Philosophical View of Man: What is Man?
2. Philosophy of Naturalism, as exemplified by Greed

• School of thought developed by French and American writers at the end of the 19th century
• Emerged partly out of the influence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory in the 19th-century: man evolves from ape
• Thus associates man closely with nature, specifically animals and biological beings
• Man is animal-like, brutish, and predominantly nothing more than a biological being

  E.g. Mac and Marcus clawing and tearing at each other like wild animals in the last scene
  

Quick Summary of Greed’s naturalism

Presents the view that Man is an animal-like being controlled and determined by [1]instinct, [2]heredity and [3]environment

The film’s naturalism results in an overall general sense of how there are **[4]constantly larger forces or a larger fate that **controls, dooms and destroys the characters**.

There is an overall recurring sense of entrapment and doom.

[1] Governed by Instinct

• Characters as biological beings strongly controlled by instincts that are destructive of others and themselves
• Not just emotions but compulsive instincts
• Mac
  • [+] Compassionate and kind at times [-] but a larger brutish violence lurks within him.
  • [+] May rise to become a civilized middle-class dentist [-] but brutish instincts will more fundamentally control him
  • His fundamental self is his primitive, violent self
• Marcus
  • [+] Altruistic at times [-] but instincts of envy and lust for money get the better of him
  • Irrationally and self-destructively pursues Mac into the heart of Death Valley
  • He irrationally ignores the sheriff’s advice and instinctively pursues Mac
• Trina
  • [+] A loving wife at times [-] but larger (pathological) forces of miserliness ultimately control her
    Intertitle: “a veritable mental disease”

[2] Governed by Heredity

• McTeague’s father (added by Stroheim) and how McTeague cannot escape from qualities genetically transmitted by his father
• McTeague cannot escape inheriting his father’s weaknesses and degeneracy

  Intertitle: “Below the fine fabric bred of his mother ran the foul stream of hereditary evil… The taint of generations given through his father…”
  

• When McTeague succumbs to alcohol, we observe the ghost of his father exerting its influence on the present

[3] Limited by Environment

• Animals are often confined to their own environment while man can shape the environment to his will
• In the film though, characters are instead confined, trapped or even destroyed by their physical environment
• These characters are animal-like, have a weak relation to their environment
  • Death Valley
  • Mac and Trina’s living space:
    Trina’s greed keeps them living in the cramped space above the dentist’s office despite them being able to afford a house of their own

[4] Larger forces

• Literal or symbolic/abstract

  Intertitle: "...mysterious instincts, as ungovernable as the winds of heaven, were knitting their lives together"
  
  -  McTeague and Trina’s lives as controlled by larger forces
  

  • Giant hand grasping the 2 struggling figures
  • Funeral procession
    • In the background while the wedding is taking place in the foreground
    • Juxtaposition that the marriage will result in the death of the characters
    • The wedding is not a wedding, but a funeral
  • Lottery official
    • Literal force: figure of fate bestowing fortune
    • Abstract force: A fortune that turns out to be fate working destructively in Trina’s marriage and life
  • Some of these forces are “symbolic”
• Determinism in Naturalist philosophy: characters’ lives are determined by given forces
• Could Mac, Marcus or Trina have behaved differently to forestall the tragedy that their lives became?
  If yes, this would detract from the film’s strong sense of determinism

C. Film-making in Greed

C1. Diegesis

Refers to the world of the film’s story

• Diegetic element: Includes events that are presumed to have occurred but are not shown on screen

  E.g. Marcus’ act of writing to the dental authorities
  

• Nondiegetic element: Not part of the film’s world

  E.g. Most film scores
  

Are the surreal shots of the hands diegetic or nondiegetic?

• Diagetic: They are part of the dreams/ they are Trina’s hands
• Nondiagetic: They are abstract/symbolic

C2. Mise-en-scene

All the objects and other elements placed in front of the camera to be photographed

• Includes props, setting, costumes, make-up, lighting, figure behavior ``` E.g. Marcus’ figure behavior when he crawls up to Mac in Death Valley
  • Represents his regression into primal animalistic nature ```
• Includes composition of elements of mise-en-scene
  • Stroheim’s penchant for compositions in depth (using deep space settings)
  • Use of Multiplane Composition

Multiplane composition

Composition using foreground, middle ground and background

E.g.
Mac and Marcus at Cliff House
Wedding/Funeral scene

C2-i. Use of Mise-en-scene to reflect Naturalism

The meaning and impact of Greed is achieved through the use of mise-en-scene.

• Emphasis on authenticity
• Painstakingly detailed, film rewards a viewer who is attentive to mise-en-scene details

Excerpt 1: Mac returns home after losing his job at the factory

1. Giant Tooth

   • Once displayed proudly outside Mac’s dental clinic
   • Now relegated to a table in the apartment

2. Bird Cage reflected in Mirror

   • Symbolic commentary on the marriage, became like a cage for the couple
   • Irony:
     • Bird cage was a wedding gift
     • Current placement is a counterpoint to the current state of marriage
     • Callback to happier times

3. Wedding photo placed between the couple in frame

   • Used to sit in grandly furnished studio, now sits in a squalid place (the apartment)
   • Trying to hold the marriage together while it’s falling apart

Excerpt 2: Mac and Trina go on a date

1. Deep space setting

   • Background far away, sense of a vast space
   • Foregrounds characters are contained within an environment inhospitable to them
   • Storm forces them out of the open space into a confined shelter space
2. Dead rat, a death motif

3. Mac’s accordion

   • Artistic, musical positive side to him

4. Beer bottle ad in shelter

   • Foreshadows Mac’s alcoholism
5. End of scene
   • Mac triumphant
   • However, next shot shows him going towards the train with cage bar-like pillars in the foreground

C3. Props and costumes

Prop: any object that plays a part in the dramatic action

E.g. Truck in Landscape in the Mist

• Provides commentary on the action
• At times, an ironic counterpoint to the action
• Foreshadows what is to come

Examples

• Birdcage and the bird
• Christmas decorations
• Toy houses
• Mousetrap (in the restored version only)
• Dead rat
• Beer advertisement
• Trina’s wedding gown
• Costume and figure behaviour

Stroheim tends to use props ironically

E.g. Scene where Mac murders Trina
- Background: cheerful Christmas decor
- Foreground: Husband returning to terrorize his wife

Example of Stroheim’s use of costume:

E.g. Trina's wedding gown makes her look ghostly -> instance of the death motif

C4. Motifs

an element in a film that is repeated in a significant way (not confined to props)

E.g. An abstract visual motif, like the forward, penetrating camera movement in Citizen Kane
E.g. Musical motifs

• A prop becomes a motif if it is repeated in the film

  E.g. The wedding photograph and the birdcage become motifs through repetition.
  

• Creates patterns within the film
  • Pattern of parallels or pattern of contrast
  • Functions as a commentary on the action

Motifs in Greed

1. Death images

   • Dead rat, the funeral hearse, the coffin, the skull of goats, the carcasses of animals, even Trina’s wedding gown, Death Valley
   • Reminds us of the doom that awaits the characters, even during a happy occasion like the wedding

2. Hands

   • Used for irony

3. The bird

C5. Setting

1. Rural, Urban then back to Rural (Death Valley)
2. McTeague and Trina’s home
   • Changes in their home situation parallel their deterioration
   • Reinforces the idea of humans in a degraded state

C5-i. Deep Space

An arrangement of mise-en-scene so that there is a considerable distance between the plane closest to the camera and the one farthest away. Any or all of these planes may be in focus.

E.g. Death Valley

Often used with multiplane composition.

E.g. Mac and Marcus, cliff house scene

C5-ii. Shallow Space

Opposite of Deep Space.