A Film Canon

Ostensibly a moralistic marriage-divorce manual along the lines of Don't Change Your Husband, Blind Husbands actually contains very little analysis of the central marriage, thereby construing the liasion that disrupts it on its own terms - as a sheer index of the sex appeal of its instigator, Colonel von Sturben (von Stroheim), who represents the most sexually charged presence in silent cinema to date. This is partly because his sexuality is paired with a pervasive realism, rather than subsumed into a more general, melodramatic hysteria, as evinced in the naturalistic acting (particularly clear in the case of his body language), preoccupation with shooting on location (in the Dolomites, artfully deflecting the presence of God into the surrounding landscape) and rudimentary use of deep-focus. The result is an astonishing iconoclasm, encapsulated in the recurrent proximity of sexuality and crucifix - or, alternatively, extrapolation of the phallic potential of the crucifix (and crucifixes abound) - as well as the more subsidiary transformation of military garb, mannerisms and codes into an explicitly fetishistic object. Not even the German Romantic heritage upon which von Stroheim draws - and, more specifically, the sublime alpine landscapes that he attempts to recreate cinematically - are exempt from this heterodoxy, as evinced in von Sturben's mockery of a sign asserting that "In the Alps, there is no sin."