Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film

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, February 1, 2025

Scott Lord Silent Film: Rudolph Valentino in Son of the Sheik (Fitzmauri...

While noting that "The Son of the Shiek" (seven reels) was Rudolph Valentino's last film, author William K. Everson opines that it was his best. "It was lush, genuinely erotic and direct in key confrontations- but by 1926 there had been such a change in movie morals that nobody was offended by it, and in any event, its tasteful tongue-in-cheek approach disarmed any serious criticism." It may also be that by now the film is only the material of fanstasy to modern audiences analyzing its diegetic images for keys to female spectatorship and the look.

Actress Vilma Banky had appeared with Rudolph Valentino during 1925 in the film "The Eagle" (Clarence Brown).

Silent Film

Silent Film Rudolph Valentino

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Scott Lord Silent Film: King of Kings (De Mille,1927)

"I have always made pictures with a message and a moral. True, I have dressed up these in elaborate trappings, principally because I wanted people to see my pictures. Messages without an audience aren't worth very much." Photoplay Magazine during 1927 featured an interview with silent film director Cecil B. De Mille titled "How Christ Came to Pictures" in which he briefly explained his father had been a lay reader who preached in an Episcopal church in Pompton, New Jersey before quickly continuing to his earlier marriage comedy films made before 1920. De Mille ended the interview with "'The King of Kings' has the ring of sincerity. We did it with complete sincerity." Photoplay Magazine during 1927 reviwed "King of Kings" as being an authentic depiction of the events in the Holy Bible, "De Mille has followed the New Testament literally and with fidelity. He has taken no liberties. Frequently, in his groupings, he has followed famous Biblical paintings...Mr. Warner meets the accepted ideas of Christ and gives a very well sustained performance."

Harvard Buisness Reports, describing "The King of Kings" as a film about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, reported in 1930 that the film cost $ 2,000,000 to produce.

silent film Noah's Arc Jesus

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