Erich von Stroheim’s Spectacular Art Is Back

Key Highlights

• The film, the last in Stroheim’s history-making ten-year run of silents, has become one of cinema’s most famous unfinished works, seen—when seen at all—in rival incomplete versions.
• The release of a new reconstruction and restoration by Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, of Milestone Films, (opening at Film Forum on January 16th) is, therefore, a major event.
• Doros (who produced a previous restoration of the film in 1985) and Heller have found additional unseen footage and used Stroheim’s original script to give a sense of what the film’s dénouement might have looked like had shooting been completed. The new version provides the fullest view yet of what might have been, of the mighty vision destined to remain stranded in its script, and it suggests a whole lost future of movies that Stroheim never got to make.
• It’s also a reminder that he is one of the great first-person filmmakers—the peer of Buster Keaton and Orson Welles, to name two other greats whose careers were similarly stifled by industry meddling and rejection.
• Stroheim’s direction, writing, and performances constitute a unity of exalted individuality, in style, form, and substance.