The Scarlet Empress

Josef von Sternberg - 1934
von Sternberg uses some really high and low angles here. There is a lot of white, and this has to be the most ornate film of his I've seen, the sets the grandest (twenty people pushing a door), the most fiddly. There are those eerie huge statues, and other features, that certainly mean our attention is not so focussed on humans as perhaps before, and that means Dietrich.
She is lit from above as before; the light isn't moving around. Early on, her blonde hair and some pale make-up make her look younger than before, a real naif. Only as the film progresses does she really turn into Marlene Dietrich as I have seen her before, with the face framed and pronounded by costumes and so on. This passage of Dietrich, trying out costumes before finding herself, is of course the film's plot (told with extensive titles here), and a recurring move in the von Sternberg- Dietrich films.
There is also an excellent use of sound here; rythmic pulses, loud and pretty high-pitched (usually bells) that play across several scenes, linking up in that wondefully smooth von Sternberg manner, an aural version of his lap dissolves, as well as a powerful sense of fate about the piece (he also likes to cut, across his work, quickly to a shot of the bells).