Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: July 2024

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.

Thursday, July 25, 2024

Scott Lord Silent Film: The Mark of Zorro (Niblo, 1920)

Toward the end of 1920, Wid's Daily titled its review of Douglas Fairbanks in "The Mark of Zorro" (eight reels) directed by Fred Niblo, with "Slow Starting But 'Doug' Gets This One Over Well". In regard to the film as a whole, it wrote, "Exceedingly entertaining romance with Doug doing a dual role and his usual acrobatics." Appearing in the film with Douglas Fairbanks is actress Margueritte Del La Motte.

Author Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, described "The Mark of Zorro" as "a finely photographed swashbuckling romance".

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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Scott Lord Silent Film: Mary Pickford in The Poor Little Rich Girl (Tour...

In his volume Eighty Years of CInema, author Peter Cowie describes the film "Poor Little Rich Girl" as "the fey beauty of Mary Pickford at its most beguiling." Directed by Maurice Tourneur from a photoplay written by Frances Marion, the film stars Mary Pickford with actresses Gladys Fairbanks, Madlaine Traverse and Maxine Eliot Hicks.

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Saturday, July 20, 2024

Tuesday, July 2, 2024

Scott Lord Silent Film: Brass (Sidney Franklin, 1922)

"Brass" (nine reels), directed in 1922 by Sidney Franklin and starring actresses Marie Prevost, Rosmary Church and Lucy Baldwin was one of the several films that year photographed by cinematographer Norbert Brodine. Sidney A. Fraklin that year directed the films "East is West", "Primitive Lover" and Smilin' Through". Silent Film Silent Film Silent Film

Scott Lord Silent Film: The Primitive Lover (Sidney Franklin, 1922)

Directed by Sidney Franklin during 1922 “The Primitive Lover” (seven reels) was scripted by Frances Marion, having been adapted from the play written by Edgar Selwyn.

That year Sidney Franklin also directed "The Beautiful and the Damned”, adapted from the novel by Scott Fitzgerald by photoplay writer Olga Printzlau and starring actress Marie Provost. The significance of the presumed lost film is entirely left to historians of American Literature as the novel The Last Tycoon was only published posthumously in 1941. The director of the seven reel film is also listed as having been William Seiter. The periodical The Film Daily, during 1922,in fact, lists William A. Sieter, and that it “used F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Famous flapper story only as background”. Please not that there are also no existant copies to the film "The Great Gatsby" starring Lois Wilson, it having been directed four years later by Herbert Brennon, any insight to the content of the film in the world of Lost Films, Found Magazines being left to scripts of the photoplay where we can find the intertitles or in magazines advertisement for the first runof the film.

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Silent Film Constance Talmadge

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