A Film Canon

This "winter ballad in five acts" elaborates a landscape that is already black-and-white - a giant ice field, frozen over the ocean, periodically juxtaposed with a pinnacle that renders it continuous with the sky - imbuing the narrative with the grand simplicity of a silhouette, and culminating with a funeral procession from the land to the surreal spectacle of an ice- bound ship. That said, as with The Outlaw And His Wife, the most sublime moment comes from a concatenation of elements, in this case from the burning of an isolated mansion - or, alternatively, the fusion of fire and ice into the silver that the perpetrators steal - as well as from the stark alternation between deep blue and bright orange tinting that precedes it and which, in its aftermath, is replaced by a more moderate brown-pink. To the same end, Stiller favours long takes, rich compositions and minimal intertitles, as well as a wealth of superimpositions that both abstracts the ice field to a cerebral space, replete with lingering dreams, visions and hallucinations, and produces an ethereal continuity between its inhabitants, precluding any straightforward pattern of identification and characterisation.