"The dream of the poor is to be rich.” The dialectical gold rush of alchemists—seeking freedom of spirit and universal self-consciousness—is most commonly pursued through material wealth. In a ruthless world dominated by greed, social ladders shape and fracture our shared existence into hierarchical relations of transaction. Forged by struggles over capital, lottery remains the sole beacon of hope for ascent and salvation. This is the fortune of Trina Sieppe, a migrant who arrives in San Francisco with a toothache, and with whom John McTeague, the amateur dentist who treats her, immediately falls in love. Two distinct paths, seemingly irreconcilable, arise simultaneously: that of being and that of having.

Tired of cinematic “chocolate éclairs” and an “overdose of saccharine films,” Erich von Stroheim stated that the public was ready for “cinematic realism” and opened the door to the harsh dimensions of the streets. Filmed entirely on location, the camera follows the arduous journey of souls on the battlefield of lives trapped in a system ruled by profit. “I knew that everything could be done with film, the only medium with which you could reproduce life as it really was. Everything that man could dream up, I could and would reproduce in my films.” Although the producers cut the director’s original nine-hour version down to two and a half hours of film, Greed remains a prodigious and deeply sensitive study of gestures and symbols, magnifying the slow and tragic decline of a spirit lost in destiny, through a lens that explores the human condition and is a testimony to cinema’s potential to reveal it. — Marta Mateus