Style
The film is notable for its attentive lighting and the expressionist art design von Sternberg creates for the Russian palace. In film critic Robin Wood's words:
- a hyperrealist atmosphere of nightmare with its gargoyles, its grotesque figures twisted into agonized contortions, its enormous doors that require a half-dozen women to close or open, its dark spaces and ominous shadows created by the flickerings of innumerable candles, its skeleton presiding over the royal wedding banquet table.
Read more about this topic: The Scarlet Empress
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes—countrysides and figures, movements and gestures—how could he have a style, that is originality?”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)