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: 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, a social phenomenon; how it was reviewed, audience reception.
Scott Lord on Silent Film
Gendered spectatorship notwithstanding, in a way, the girl coming down the stairs is symbolic of the lost film itself, the unattainable She, idealized beauty antiquated (albeit it being the beginning of Modernism), with the film detective catching a glimpse of the extratextural discourse of periodicals and publicity stills concerning Lost Films, Found Magazines
Showing posts with label Eric Von Stroheim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Eric Von Stroheim. Show all posts
Eric von Stroheim costarred with actresses Miss Dupont, Dale Fuller and Maude George during 1922 in the film "Foolish Wives" (fourteen reels), which he directed and co-scripted with Marion Ainslee and Walter Anthony. In between the two films, Eric von Stroheim had addressesed the developing genre of modern romance and modern marriage with the film "The Devil's Passkey (seven reels, 1920), cowritten with Baroness de Meyer and starring actresses Una Trevlyn, Maude George, Ruth King and Mae Busch.
Author William K Everrson sees the film's plot as "vitrually an extension" of Von Strohiem's earlier film "Blind Husbands"
Author William K. Everson, in his volume Amwrican Silent Film writes, "Stroheim's understanding of film technique was so thorough that 'The Wedding March' (eleven reels, 1927) is structured around the editing process. Everson notes that when the two romantic characters meet they never appear in the same frame together, their habing been editied as apart from each other. It was Everson's impression that "while Griffith would use film technique (rather than plotting or acting)
to tell his stories, often calling attention to that technique in the process, Stroheim put all the emphasis on the story itself and on players (for the most part actors rather than stars) to hide his technique.." Von Stroheim appears in the film with acresses Fay Wray and Zazu Pitts. Motion Picture Magazine, in a page on camera angles from 1927, pointed out Von Stroheim's use of a shot filmed conversely to the top shot, a "worm's impression" which photographed the soles of the soldier's shoes by being filmed from underneath them in a glass topped pit. The periodical Close Up claimed that at the time of publication that Von Stroheim had completed the filming of "The Wedding March" but but was still cutting the film, which in its original form was a monolithic fifty reels in length. Film detectives are searching for the entire eleven reels of "The Honeymoon" directed by Eric von Stroheim starring Fay Wray and ZaSu Pitts during 1928 which,according to the Library of Congress, is presumed lost- is is in fact the second part of "The Wedding March" as a diptych intended by Strohiem, several editors having cut the film according to its storyline. John H. Fell, in his volume A History of Film, corroborates that "Stroheim had never completed shooting" and that although the sequel was sporadically released in Europe, "Stroheim's plot conventions have become depressingly obvious".
