MOVIE HISTORIANS call Erich von Stroheim a realist because of his attention to authentic detail. Stroheim rehearsed actors only less thoroughly than he designed sets and selected objects for them. But the most important element of his art is visual style, for its give us a sense that the objects and spaces he shows are real. Without this sense, all the correct detail in the world would be useless.

Stroheim presents the characters and settings of each shot as directly as possible. Actors rarely overlap one another; all are fully visible; yet he saves his shots from being flat tableaux by placing his actors at different distances from the camera and by enhancing their different depths with lighting. The way he places his "realistic" objects similarly use depth. Prominent natural objects in the foreground play off objects in the background to make the space of each shot real and three-dimensional.

In a seduction scene, for example, the foreground figures are backed up by cows and by trees and mountains in the far distance. For a hiking scene in the mist--the most illusory of conditions--rock outcrops in right foreground key the shot by giving us an immediate material object. Contrasting with the figures in medium distance against the far rock-ledge, all the objects together establish real space between them. For Stroheim there is no such thing as a general form or formal similarity between different objects. Each object it its material self, nor is there one kind of object is its material self, no is there one kind of object. "His films establish a distinction between things as essences and things as symbols" (Sarris), and treat only the latter. There is not general motion; action is local and concretely tied to the actor. The only universal is light.

Blind Husbands (1918 beings as an American, his wife, and a German officer enter Cortina d'Ampezzo on vacation. The officer, noticing the husband's neglect of his wife, makes advances to her. At first, he is tolerated. The husband, becoming suspicious, proposes the ascension of the Pinnacle of the Monte Cristal, a place "where man is small and God great." The drama--to that point a series of flirtations in the village below--immediately tightens on the characters as they begin hiking to the lodge.

Lighting and composition now join the themes to establish the mountain-peak as a place of purity and to contrast it with the lower world. A sampler in the officer's bedroom reads, "In the Alps there is no sin." Though he takes it to mean "all is permitted," its meaning is that sin will be obliterated. As the officer and husband begin the ascent, a guide tells the wife they will be safe, if they only will eave their worldly attachments behind.

Shots of the two men trudging across the snow, flooded with light, are followed by shots of them inching up a rock face. When they finally reach the top, the officer collapses, exhausted. The other, picking up his coat, discovers a letter written to the officer by a woman. The husband asks him if it comes from his wife; on the officer's insolent reply, be attacks him. The entire scene atop the peak, like the preceding climbing scenes, has the characters standing on rock against an entirely white horizon. The screen has been stripped down to the men and their material surroundings; rooted on the rock, they snarl at each other as light pours down on them. The reduced situation prepares for a direct conflict between them, but at the same time puts them in a more obvious relation to their real surroundings. The purity of this dramatic situation, direct conflicts between men and men's immediate relation to the real world, is the essence of realism.

STROHEIM shows the same tension between his characters' aspiration to virtue and their weaknesses in Greed (1923). Its plot follows a young dentist and his wife as they decline from security to poverty. Stroheim, directly equating their material situation with their moral states, places them in real settings. At the same time he floods the early scenes with light, expressing in extraordinary art their wish for purity.

When the dentist's practice fails, their basic greed--attachment to material goods--begins to tun them against each other, and the film becomes darker and darker as they and their material situation decline. White, recalling their former virtuousness, is now a mockery--certainly in the scene where the dentist murders his wife next to a Christmas tree in the dark. He then flees, but he is pursued by a rival. The film ends with their meeting in Death Valley.

AGAIN the moral situation has been stripped down for a struggle between two men. Again their setting, barren and light-filled, re-establishes their fundamental tendency to good even while their link to the material work keeps them from acting virtuously, and drives them to destroy each other. Blind Husbands, Stroheim's first film, shows the consistency and depth of his conception of human existence by creating the same pure and realistic drama.