Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: Scott Lord Silent Film: Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1927)

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.

Friday, September 6, 2024

Scott Lord Silent Film: Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1927)

The periodical Photoplay during 1927 looked at the film "Hotel Imperial", "Here is a new Pola Negri in a film story at once absorbing and splendidly directed...Hotel Imperial places Mauritz Stiller at the forefront of our imported directors." Moving Picture World of that year listed it under "romantic drama" and under "love drama" as well.

Under its Drawing Power subheading Motion Picture News in 1927 wrote,"Suitable for first run and all types of houses.TItle and star should draw them." and under its EXploitation Angles subheading it wrote,"PLay up Pola's best American film. Tease the title."

Pola Negri during 1929 had starred in "The Secret Hour" (eight reels) directed by Roland V. Lee. The film is presumed to be lost with no surviving copies. Mauritz Stiller

Scandinavian Silent Film Mauritz Stiller

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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