Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: 2024-01-28

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, February 2, 2024

Scott Lord on Film: A Lady To Love (Victor Seastrom, 1930)

Scholar Bo Florin gives us a point of departure when seeking to analyze the ten reel film “Lady to Love” and the transition from silent to sound film by placing director Victor Sjsotrom as part of the M.G.M. Studio, adding that Sjostrom had ushered in the beginning of the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film with his adapation of Ibsen’s poem Terje Vigen and effected the transition which would be carried through the merger of Swedish film companies that had changed Svenska Bio to Svenska Filmindustri, and in doing so it is important to Florin that both transitions were from quantity to quality when involving Victor Sjostrom.

Bo Florin sees the transition of silent to sound film as one that depicts both off screen and onscreen space through the use of diegetic sound. Florin sees the film "Lady to Love" as important when analysizing "the intersection of different cultures" and "the consequences of the transition to sound for an individual director who was frequently using visual 'sound effects' in his films during the silent era."

Actress Vilma Banky had in 1928 starred in the film "The Awakening" (Victor Fleming (nine reels), a film presently presumed to be lost with no surviving copies.
Victor Sjostrom

Victor Seastrom playlist Victor Sjostrom

Thursday, February 1, 2024

Scott Lord Silent Film: Ben Hur (Olcott, 1907)

Sidney OLcott directed the one reel "Ben Hur" (The Chariot Race) with Frank Oak Rose during 1907 for the Kalem Film Manufacturing Company. The photoplay was scripted by Gene Gauthier, who appears in the film with actor William S. Hart. Silent Film Silent Film

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Scott Lord Silent Film: Cabiria (Pastrone, 1914)

Silent Film Silent Film

Scott Lord Silent Film: Helen Holmes in The Wild Engine (1915)

Silent Film

Monday, January 29, 2024

Scott Lord Silent Film: Silent Film Studio Tour (M.G.M, 1925)

Silent Film

The 1925 Studio Tour of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, true to the extratextual discourse of its magazine advertisements that boasted of a firmament full of stars, featured a dozen of the studios directors that were then present on the backlot filming that year, inluding Victor Sjostrom, Dimitri Buchowerski, Monta Bell, Rupert Holmes, Eric von Stroheim, Fred Niblo, King Vidor, Joseph von Sternberg, Christy Cabanne, Tod Browning, William A. Wellman, Jack Conway, Edmund Goulding and Marcel de Sarno. Actors and actresses featured in the studio tour included Zazu Pitts, Roman Novarro, Aileen Pringle, Gertrude Olmstead, Norma Shearer, Mae Murray, Lew Cody, Estelle Clark, Conrad Nagel, and Lon Chaney

Silent Film

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