Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: Scott Lord Silent Film: Sally of the Sawdust (D.W. Griffith, 1925)

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.

Saturday, August 2, 2025

Scott Lord Silent Film: Sally of the Sawdust (D.W. Griffith, 1925)

Edward Wagenkneckt, in his volume The Films of D.W. Griffith, points out that ten reel film "Sally of the Sawdust" (1925) ,photographed by Harry Fischback and Hal Sintzernich and starring W.C. FIelds and actress Carol Dempster , was made by D.W. Griffith at Paramount but , at Griffith's behest, released through United Artists. Wagerneckt notes that the film features several sight gags involving W.C. Fields that are worth watching. That year D.W. Griffith directed both W.C. Fields and Carol Dempster in a second ten reel film entitled "That Royle Girl", which is presumed lost, with surviving copies existing.

D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith

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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