Anna Karenina

A fevered danse macabre unfurls inside a snow-globe St-Petersburg where Irén Varsányi’s Anna, porcelain yet incandescent, pirouettes between chandeliers and shame; her eyelashes catch the wax of a loveless marriage while a crimson spotlight—borrowed from the opera house that frames half the film—bleeds across her cheekbones, foreshadowing the blood she will later spill on railway steel. Count Vronsky, here a sleek silhouette rather than a fleshy paramour, materialises as a flicker of epaulettes in her boudoir mirror, their courtship staged in a stroboscopic montage of gloved hands, opera glasses and silk trains that hiss across parquet like restless serpents. The camera, drunk on German-expressionist angles, tilts until the aristocratic salon becomes a funhouse; servants freeze into busts, wallpaper blooms with locomotive steam, and Anna’s veil transmutes into a shroud. Cuckolded Karenin, played by Adolf Sieder with the rigidity of a Tsarist paper-doll, is lit from below so that his beard carves gothic shadows across the iconostasis; when he tears up Anna’s love letter, each shred flutters upward like a penitential soul, superimposed over the smoking stack of the very train that will, in the coda, pulp her fractured dreams beneath iron wheels. The child, little Seryozha, is filmed through a fish-eye lens: his cherubic face balloons, distorting into an accusatory putto while Tchaikovskian strings saw at the viewer’s nerves. Intertitles, handwritten in trembling cyrillic, confess Anna’s mortal sin yet refuse absolution; the final shot reverse-motion resurrects her corpse onto the platform only to collapse again—an infinite loop of desire and doom that predates Vertigo’s obsession by four decades.