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Erich von Stroheim's life as the "Man You Love to Hate" has been chronicled in various biographies and exhibitions, and yet this very public figure, whose public persona was a highly crafted myth, maintained a vast personal trove of documents and photographs that reveal many truths about the man. Only now have these materials become available to scholars and the public through the recent placement of these papers in the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library. Until recently, they were stored in a barn in France where von Stroheim passed the final years of his life. The Academy's new gallery exhibition, "Erich von Stroheim: A Life Discovered," explores the life of the young Erich, using family photographs, early handwritten documents and correspondence to demonstrate the fantasies, fictions and obsessions that would later play out in von Stroheim's films. An additional treasure that this collection contains are extensive still photographs from all of his films as a director, including several that are lost or were never completed. Additional materials document von Stroheim's career as an actor in films shot in the U.S. and Europe.
In addition to extensive biographical areas, which span his life, major sections of the exhibition are devoted to films from the teens and '20s, including Blind Husbands, Foolish Wives, The Merry Widow, Merry-Go-Round, The Wedding March and perhaps the greatest film of the silent era, Greed. Video clips from von Stroheim's films augment the installation, which also features reconstructed sequences from The Honeymoon, Walking Down Broadway, Queen Kelly (with his later Sunset Blvd. co-star Gloria Swanson) and other rare still photographs from his directorial efforts. These sequences have been produced by Rick Schmidlin, who in 1999 was responsible for the reconstruction of Greed, and who served as guest curator for this exhibition.
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