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: 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, a social phenomenon; how it was reviewed, audience reception.
Scott Lord on Silent Film
Gendered spectatorship notwithstanding, in a way, the girl coming down the stairs is symbolic of the lost film itself, the unattainable She, idealized beauty antiquated (albeit it being the beginning of Modernism), with the film detective catching a glimpse of the extratextural discourse of periodicals and publicity stills concerning Lost Films, Found Magazines
Sunday, November 1, 2026
Scott Lord Silent Film: Frankenstein (J. Searle Dawley, Edison Manufactu...
Authors Dennis R Cuthcin and Dennis R. Perry in their work "The Frankenstein Complex, when the text is more than a text" view the silent film "Frankenstein" as having been inspired by several stage adaptations, specifically Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein, which, produced in 1823 by Richard Brinkley Peak, may have been remote to the Edison stufio in New Jersey, as may have been the other fifteen theatrical adaptations of "Frankenstein" produced before 1851. The University of Pennsylvania presently includes Henry M. Milner's The Demon of Switzerland (1823) and The Man and the Monster (1826) among them, but admits that several theatrical adaptations were burlesque or musical comedy.
That intertitles were at first often explanatory shows the beginning of a narrative cinema. During an early scene of the silent film "Frankenstein" (J. Searle Dawley, Edison, 1910, one-reel) there is, in between scenes, an expositiory intertitle that uses a close shot of a letter to develop plot and character within the narrative, a form of the epistolary form of the novel transferred on to the screen. A similar insert shot is used in the film "A Dash Through the Clouds" (1912).
J. Searle Dawley directed at Edison Film Manufacturing Company untill 1913, when he joined Edwin Porter at Famous Players Company, where he directed actress Marguerite Clark.
Silent Film
Silent Film Silent Horror
Friday, October 30, 2026
Scott Lord Swedish Silent Film: Haxan (Benjamin Christensen, 1922)
Author Forsyth Hardy, in his volume Scandianavian Film, chronicles the film "Haxan" (Benjamin Christensen, 1922) one of several expensive endeavors aimed at reclaiming theater audiences that may have diminished, as having had "excitedly exploited the possiblilities of the camera".
Monday, October 26, 2026
Scott Lord Silent Film: Knight of the Trail (Ince, 1915)
Frank Borzage stars with director William S. Hart and
actress Leona Hutten, in the two reeler "Knight of Trail". Borzage shortly thereafter went on to direct silent film for The Triangle Film Corporation and although copies of the 1918 film "The Gun Woman" still exist, the remaining seven films directed by Borazge during 1918, "Innocents Pogress", "The Shoes That Danced", "Society For Sale", "An Honest Man", "Who Is To Blame", "The Ghost Flower" and "The Atom" (five reels) are presumed to be lost silenr film, with no surviving copies existing, as are the remaining two silent films Frank Borzage directed for the Triangle Film Corporation during 1919, "Tonton the Apache" and "Prudence on Broadway" (five reels).
Kenneth MacGowan, in his volume Behind the Screen, explains, if not inadvertantly, genre as having the component of developing along with the audience's expecting a recognizable star exacting similar characterizations by seeing the Western as having belonged to the actors Broncho Billy Anderson, Tom Mix and W.S. Hart, Anderson having portrayed a cowboy in four hundred shorts, Mix having portrayed a cowboy in over sixty Fox features, accompanied by three of his horses to extend the genre's parameters. "At the peak of Mix's career, he was even more popular than Hart...His short films go back to 1910 with Selig, further than Hart's, but Hart's rise was swifter. Under Ince's skillful handling, Hart developed in 1915 from an actor in two reelers into one of Triangle's two most important stars." If genre theory implies repetition and reiteration, it may well be that the West, or Frontier, of primarily the second half of the nineteenth century had entered its second occurence of being mythologicized, scenarios having been "adapted from the conventions" propagated by a cornocopia of dime novels, subsequently forming an idealized cowboy ethos aimed at popular culture and its perception of itself reflected in the values of society. If as a public dimension of reception, genre becomes a discourse through repeating the element of theme, it is by its unifying elements, its tropes or subgenres, having had been being reintroduced.
In regard to genre and transnationalism involving both content and form, John L. Fell, in his volume A History of Film, chronicled, "The Westerns made for Ince by William S. Hart and others struck critics and foreign audiences, the French particularly, as remarkable for their attention to natural detail, especially the spare backgrounds on which elemental dramas played."
Silent Film
Silent Western Film
Kenneth MacGowan, in his volume Behind the Screen, explains, if not inadvertantly, genre as having the component of developing along with the audience's expecting a recognizable star exacting similar characterizations by seeing the Western as having belonged to the actors Broncho Billy Anderson, Tom Mix and W.S. Hart, Anderson having portrayed a cowboy in four hundred shorts, Mix having portrayed a cowboy in over sixty Fox features, accompanied by three of his horses to extend the genre's parameters. "At the peak of Mix's career, he was even more popular than Hart...His short films go back to 1910 with Selig, further than Hart's, but Hart's rise was swifter. Under Ince's skillful handling, Hart developed in 1915 from an actor in two reelers into one of Triangle's two most important stars." If genre theory implies repetition and reiteration, it may well be that the West, or Frontier, of primarily the second half of the nineteenth century had entered its second occurence of being mythologicized, scenarios having been "adapted from the conventions" propagated by a cornocopia of dime novels, subsequently forming an idealized cowboy ethos aimed at popular culture and its perception of itself reflected in the values of society. If as a public dimension of reception, genre becomes a discourse through repeating the element of theme, it is by its unifying elements, its tropes or subgenres, having had been being reintroduced.
In regard to genre and transnationalism involving both content and form, John L. Fell, in his volume A History of Film, chronicled, "The Westerns made for Ince by William S. Hart and others struck critics and foreign audiences, the French particularly, as remarkable for their attention to natural detail, especially the spare backgrounds on which elemental dramas played."
Silent Film
Silent Western Film
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