"Todos mis filmes son abstractos"
SCARLET EMPRESS
Capricho Imperial
Josef von Sternberg
1934
Scarlet Empress Josef von Sternberg 1934
Click Josef von Sternberg Senses of Cinema
Filmo Sternberg DXC
FICHA TÉCNICA Y ARTÍSTICA
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Productor: Adolph Zukor
Guión: Manuel Komroff sobre el "Diario de Catalina de Rusia"
Fotografía: Bert Glennon
Dirección Arte: Hans Dreier, Peter Balbush y Richard Kollorsz
Música: Fragmentos de Tchaikowski y Mendelshon
Montaje: Sam Winston
Vestuario: Travis Banton
Efectos Especiales: Gordon Jennings
Color: B&N
País: EE.UU
Estudios: Paramount
REPARTO
Marlene Dietrich... Princesa Sophia Frederica/Catherine II
John Lodge... Conde Alexei
Sam Jaffe... Gran Duque Pedro
Louise Dresser... Emperatriz Elizabeth Petrovna
C. Aubrey Smith... Príncipe August
Ruthelma Stevens... Condesa Elizabeth
Olive Tell... Princess Johanna
Gavin Gordon... Gregory Orloff
Jane Darwell... Mlle. Cardell
Harry Woods... Doctor
Davison Clark... Simeon Todorsky
DVD
Edición: Criterion Collection
Lanzamiento: May 8th, 2001
Zona: 1
Video: NTSC
Audio: English Dolby Digital Mono
Aspect Ratio: 1'33:1
Subtitles: Englis (hearing impaired)
Anamorphic: No
Extras: Luminous new digital transfer, with restored image and sound. The 20-minute BBC documentary The World of Josef von Sternberg. Production stills and lobby cards. Von Sternberg tribute by underground filmmaker Jack Smith. Optimal image quality: RSDL dual-layer edition. Essays by Robin Wood and Jack Smith.
Bit Rate:
Criterion Collection
DVDBeaver
CARÁTULASCARLET EMPRESS
Capricho Imperial
Josef von Sternberg
1934
Scarlet Empress Josef von Sternberg 1934
Click Josef von Sternberg Senses of Cinema
Filmo Sternberg DXC
FICHA TÉCNICA Y ARTÍSTICA
Director: Josef von Sternberg
Productor: Adolph Zukor
Guión: Manuel Komroff sobre el "Diario de Catalina de Rusia"
Fotografía: Bert Glennon
Dirección Arte: Hans Dreier, Peter Balbush y Richard Kollorsz
Música: Fragmentos de Tchaikowski y Mendelshon
Montaje: Sam Winston
Vestuario: Travis Banton
Efectos Especiales: Gordon Jennings
Color: B&N
País: EE.UU
Estudios: Paramount
REPARTO
Marlene Dietrich... Princesa Sophia Frederica/Catherine II
John Lodge... Conde Alexei
Sam Jaffe... Gran Duque Pedro
Louise Dresser... Emperatriz Elizabeth Petrovna
C. Aubrey Smith... Príncipe August
Ruthelma Stevens... Condesa Elizabeth
Olive Tell... Princess Johanna
Gavin Gordon... Gregory Orloff
Jane Darwell... Mlle. Cardell
Harry Woods... Doctor
Davison Clark... Simeon Todorsky
DVD
Edición: Criterion Collection
Lanzamiento: May 8th, 2001
Zona: 1
Video: NTSC
Audio: English Dolby Digital Mono
Aspect Ratio: 1'33:1
Subtitles: Englis (hearing impaired)
Anamorphic: No
Extras: Luminous new digital transfer, with restored image and sound. The 20-minute BBC documentary The World of Josef von Sternberg. Production stills and lobby cards. Von Sternberg tribute by underground filmmaker Jack Smith. Optimal image quality: RSDL dual-layer edition. Essays by Robin Wood and Jack Smith.
Bit Rate:
Criterion Collection
DVDBeaver
COMENTARIO
Web referencia
Cinema's great pictorialist's "relentless excursion into style"
in an allegedly restored transfer
BY GARY MORRIS
<p align="justify">The failed dreams of 1930s America that attended the great depression also emerged in a soothing, if specious, escape route via the movies. Audiences that saw a problematic present and a doubtful future could at least look to the big screen for exotic, transporting locales, everything from a fog-drenched, monster-plagued London in Dracula (1931) to the sensual jungles of "Indo-China" in Red Dust (1932).
Of course, even audiences desperate for escape had their limits, and judging from its critical and commercial failure at the time, Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) hit those limits and kept on going. It wasn’t until the arrival of camp on the cultural scene of the 1960s that this stylized masterpiece came into its own as one of the cinema’s most dazzling achievements. The camp rubric is fine as far as it goes, but ultimately there’s much more to this perverse bildungsroman.The sixth of von Sternberg’s seven collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, The Scarlet Empress is a highly unorthodox biopic of Sophia Fredericka, the naif who is brought from the provinces to the Russian court to marry Peter III and produce a male heir. Hints that this is no ordinary history come early in a startling montage of Tsarist Russia. Von Sternberg’s fetishism is in full flower here as he catalogs a shadowy array of blatantly sadomasochistic tableaux: bodies spilling out of iron maidens; nude women being burnt at the stake; a man strapped to a whirling wheel; and the piece de resistance, a bound, upside-down man used as a clapper in a gigantic bell. Typical of the film’s internal resonances, this image is echoed throughout, most powerfully when Sophia, renamed Catherine by the Dowager Empress, rings the bell to show her successful ousting of Peter and appropriation of the Russian throne.
The stylistic extremes in this montage are fleshed out in the architecture of the Russian court. Von Sternberg is not noted for his warmth and empathy in luring audiences to identify with his exotic characters, but contemporary audiences must have been as slack-jawed as Sophia at the sight of 20-foot-high carved doors that take six people to open; giant, gnarled statues that hold a single candle; and bewigged functionaries mincing around in vast, ornate gowns and carrying huge muffs. (Thank art directors Hans Dreier, Peter Ballbusch, and Richard Kollorsz for wonderfully fleshing out von Sternberg’s vision in this regard.)
The film’s bizarrerie extends to the characters. The present empress (Louise Dresser), Peter’s aunt, is a bitchy, rapacious harridan systematically screwing her way through the royal guard. (The film was released just prior to the enforcement of the Hays Code and thus escaped censorship despite a veritable tsunami of erotic images and motifs.) Peter himself (Sam Jaffe) is a grinning imbecile — "the royal half-wit" the empress calls him — who plays with toy soldiers and wants to kill his new wife. Count Alexei (John Lodge) is a sneering stud who courts Catherine while he’s making it with the empress. There are endless secret passageways, multiple amours, and traitors in every corner. Stock Sternberg characters add sardonic color: a thieving chancellor, a sarcastic priest, and a queenly hairdresser who prances up and down the halls in a mysterious state of disgust.Von Sternberg delights in deflating the pomposities of the court, in the process arguably poking fun of his own atmospheric excesses. In one scene, the empress reaches for her scepter and is inadvertently handed a turkey leg. When he isn’t playing with his soldiers, Peter uses a gigantic hand-drill to poke spy-holes in various walls. This occasions one of the film’s numerous startling images: Catherine looking up dazed as a drill bit twists its way through the eye of the subject of a huge painting. The dialogue adds another dimension of sarcasm. When Chaterine objects to Count Alexei’s adulterous moves, he lectures her on the stupidity of morality: "Those ideas are old-fashioned. This is the 18th century!" Von Sternberg also gets mileage out of the legend of Catherine’s strange death in scenes with a sardonically smiling Catherine and her horse.
In spite of its gorgeous insularity, The Scarlet Empress also shows political savvy. Catherine succeeds in deposing Peter by winning over the two forces that have traditionally ruled empires: the church and the army. She secures the church’s loyalty by stripping off her jewels and handing them to the priest for the poor; she captivates the army by flirting with and bedding them, in the tradition of her predecessor.
The Scarlet Empress is a masterpiece of romantic moments, played against grand swelling musical motifs and brilliantly visualized — Catherine holding a gauze net over her face as Count Alexei bends down to kiss her; a breathless encounter with the Count in a haystack, with Catherine repeatedly putting bits of straw in her mouth as mock-protection against his lust; an impromptu rendezvous in a glittering dark forest with a soldier who doesn’t know who she is. Some of the mise-en-scene has a suffocating beauty, as in the bravura marriage sequence where the screen is clogged to the breaking point with images — a strategy that shows to perfection Catherine’s entrapment in a realm where she’s been stripped of her name, her religion, and any romantic ideals she had. There are also quietly evocative moments, such as when Catherine seduces a soldier through a shimmering veil, a combination of the abstract and the sensual that confirms critical views of von Sternberg as the most painterly of directors.
Sobre el DVD, uno de los más cuestionados de las ediciones Criterion:<p align="justify">Criterion's DVD version is hyped on the case as "luminous" and "restored" but does not appear to be either. It's hard to know where to assign blame — Universal handing Criterion the first print it found, Criterion's (or Universal's) ignorance of the existence of a gorgeous 35mm nitrate print at UCLA, a confused restoration team — but blame is in order. The sheer amount of grain (I can live with the occasional jumps and other age-related problems) throughout seriously compromises von Sternberg's singular vision. (Some viewers will also find the audio disappointing). Criterion's credibility comes into question when they portray such second-rate transfers as pristine. (I will add that I've seen the UCLA print and it is simply stunning; I've also seen 16mm prints that were in much better shape than this.)
There are a few intriguing extras, less than one might wish for but more than many discs contain. A gallery of production stills and lobby cards show von Sternberg’s lighting and composition genius in a still-life context. Robin Wood’s provocative feminist reading of the film is included on the printed insert, along with a hommage by the late underground filmmaker Jack Smith, whose impressionistic writing style captures much of the lure of The Scarlet Empress. Most informative is a 20-minute BBC documentary, The World of Josef von Sternberg (1967). The director is shown demonstrating his meticulous lighting and camera techniques to a group of suitably reverent, if slightly befuddled students, while interviewer Kevin Brownlow elicits typical von Sternberg insights about everything from actors ("They’re used as marionettes … as bits of color on the canvas … objects") to his sources of inspiration (painters only, "I have no traceable influences to motion pictures"). There’s also a welcome paean — surprisingly garrulous for von Sternberg — to Dietrich, whose commanding position at the center of The Scarlet Empress accounts for much of its charm: "She was quite a gal!"
Cita
Capricho imperial es una película extraordinaria y, junto con Fatalidad,la mejor de las rodadas por el tándem Sternberg-Dietrich. En ella,el director desarrolla con tanta energía como brillantez lo que había apuntado ya en Marruecos: su desinterés por el cine considerado como vehículo narrativo. Probablemente Sternberg no estaba interesado en contar la vida de la zarina Catalina II, sino más bien en organizar una serie de "tableaux" cargados de sentimientos contradictorios y poblados de monstruos y monstruosidades. Desde luego sería inútil (y erróneo), ver Capricho imperial con ojos de lector de fascículos de Historia: si von Sternberg nunca fue un realizador didáctico ni naturalista, en Capricho imperial todo es una construcción, una interpretación hecha desde su
punto de vista personal y bajo el signo de lo que consideraba la principal característica del cine: el movimiento. Este movimiento convierte a Capricho imperial en una excelente película, y entiéndase por movimiento
no únicamente al movimiento de cámara y personajes sino también a su movilidad moral, a su dinámica interna, a sus contradicciones,
a sus sentimientos cambiantes. Capricho imperial es sobre todo una lección de cine para aprender a "mirar" y "ver". No basta con repetir hasta la saciedad que sus películas son barrocas, sino que es preciso comprender el sentido artístico de ese barroquismo (término del que por cierto habría mucho que hablar), su motivación, su fundamento, para entonces comprender que lo que parece difícil de mirar (acumulación de personajes y objetos en cada encuadre) sólo lo es para quienes son más partidarios de la pasividad o del discurso que de la participación o la reflexión.
SCARLET EMPRESS Josef von Sternberg, 1934, DVDrip VOSE
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Un saludo
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