What to expect
Even in its drastically shortened release form, von Stroheim’s film makes objects, rooms, teeth, food, money, and heat accumulate into a material history of obsession. Its mutilated production history has become inseparable from its power.
How to ease in
The surviving film is already a reduction of a much larger design. Follow the changing meaning of money and notice how domestic details become more severe as the characters’ world contracts.
Heads-up
A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes domestic abuse, murder, animal harm, alcoholism, poverty, dental imagery, severe heat, and a bleak treatment of greed and marriage.
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Coins begin as a promise and end as dead weight. I feel the tragedy in the way every object grows more important while the people holding it become less able to see one another.
— Momo
Credits & versions
Version map
Sources for the facts
Where to go next
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