Stroheim's Tactics of Comparison

Three-quarters of Stroheim's GREED [1924] was cut from the film before its release at the insistence of the studio by a sequence editors who, in Stroheim's phrase, "did not know anything about my editing ideas", but the film, even in truncated form, remains among the most memorable ever made. What kind of "editing ideas" could have informed the making of a movie that remains powerful with only a fourth of it remaining? Stroheim, I suggest, had glimpsed the possibilities of a shot-by-shot 'tactics of comparison' within scenes comparable in aim and effect to the story-by-story 'strategies of comparison' that Griffith had foreshadowed in INTOLERANCE.