Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: Remade by Greta Garbo: Anna Christie

Scott Lord on the Silent Film of Greta Garbo, Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjostrom as Victor Seastrom, John Brunius, Gustaf Molander - the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film........Lost Films in Found Magazines, among them Victor Seastrom directing John Gilbert and Lon Chaney, the printed word offering clues to deteriorated celluloid, extratextual discourse illustrating how novels were adapted to the screen; the photoplay as a literature;how it was reviewed, audience reception perhaps actor to actor.

Wednesday, March 14, 2018

Remade by Greta Garbo: Anna Christie

The policy of filming on a closed set that was almost a trademark for actress Greta Garbo may have in part originated earlier. Exhibitor's Herald during 1923 ran an announcement credited to a "Special to Exhibitor's Herald" in Los Angeleas titled "Ince Signs Sweet", which read, "'Anna Christie' star has been signed by Thomas H. Ince for another big special to be made behind closed doors."

"Anna Christie" was seen as a comeback film for Blanche Sweet for many fan and trade magazines. Picture Play magazine during 1924, in a full page of photos entitled "Fulfilling the Promise" wrote, "Years ago, Blanche Sweet gave promise of being one of the screen's greatest emotional actors. Then we saw no more of her, for illness had forced her to give up her work. To her has fallen the honor of playing the title role in 'Anna Christie', one of the greatest contemporary emotional roles and the photograph at the left suggests what an interesting characterization it will be."

For readers familiar with the photographers of Greta Garbo, the above photograph was published by Clarence Sinclair Bull, who became photographer for Greta Garbo with the advent of sound film and her filming for director Clarence Brown with cameraman William Daniels and set designer-costume artist Adrian. Several photographs of Greta Garbo taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull that were scanned from the original negative and left over from the biography Greta Garbo, A Cinematic Legacy, appear in this page in the margins.
Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo

No comments:

Victor Sjostrom

Victor Seastrom Swedish Silent Film More properly the headlines should read, "Garbo Talks, Seastrom Returns Home." Victor Seastrom, who had worked in the Swedish theater before pioneering in Swedish Film, returned to Sweden with the advent of the sound film, not to direct, but to act. As in Hollywood, the exterior of the Swedish landscape that had established Sjostrom, Stiller and Molander during the golden age of Swedish Silent Film, had taken the innovation of sound back to the proscenium arc of the interior with Molander managing the transition to dialogue centered films.

Victor Sjostrom

Several of the films directed by Victor Sjostrom use artistic experiments in camera technique conducive to conveying symbolic meaning and dramatically charged images, among them being Masks of the Devil, with John Gilbert, and the earlier Kiss of Death, made in Sweden. Victor Sjostrom had begun on stage as an actor in Sweden and appears both on screen as well as from behind the camera. it is an obvious tribute to The Phantom Carriage that Ingmar Bergman includes the actor Victor Sjostrom in a symbolic scene during Wild Strawberries. In his autobiography Images, Ingmar Berman regrets that his workbook to the screenplay to Wild Strawberries had been lost, but he continues to acknowledge the influence of Sjostrom as a director while he moved "spontaneously between different planes-time-space,dream-reality....the hearse that overturns with the coffin bursting open." Silent Film Victor Sjostrom