Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: 2025-01-05

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, January 9, 2025

Scott Lord Silent Film: Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three (Tod Browning, 1925)

Picture Play Magazine of 1925 featured an article entitled The Troubles of an Actress in which Dorothy Manners interviewed actress Mae Busch. "On Stage No. 1 of the Mtero-Goldwyn-Mayer emporium, 'The Unholy Three' unit was winding up the first day's production. The first scenes - that is the first scenes in the studio- are set against the background of a freak museum. Hence the bearded lady, the sword swallower and the midgets. 'The Unholy Three' is a wonderful box office title. It is also a crook opera of amazing plot."

silent film

Tod Browning

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

Scott Lord on Silent Film

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Scott Lord Silent Film: Lon Chaney in The Unholy Three (Tod Browning, 1925)

Scott Lord on Swedish Silent Film, Victor Sjostrom and Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo, Victor Seastrom