Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: Scott Lord Silent Film: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1920

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, May 3, 2023

Scott Lord Silent Film: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 1920

Author Mark A Vieira, in Silent Prototypes, the first chapter of his volume Hollywood Horror, includes John Barrymore as titular Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde as being a portrayl that was the first Hollywood silent horror film, but only as an atypical exception, his crediting The Phantom of the Opera with beginning the genre outright. "No studio wanted to alienate a public satiated with adventure, melodrama and romance. Even mysteries had did not ensure a box office success." Directed by John S. Robertson, the photoplay was scripted by Clara Beranger and photographed by Roy F. Overrbaugh. Actresses Martha Mansfield and Nita Naldi star with John Barrymore in the film. Silent Film John Barrymore

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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