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
Directed by Alan Crosland, starring John Barrymore and Warner Oland—notable for being the first feature-length movie with a synchronized Vitaphone sound effects and music soundtrack.
What is most important to Bo Florin, Stockholm University is the question of film style when looking at Victor Sjostrom directing in the United States as Victor Seastrom, the films an inevitable transformation from his having established the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film with director Mauritz Stiller. It might also be irresistable, Sjostrom having made two films with actress Lillian Gish, to evaluate the work Victor Sjostrom to that of D.W. Griffith, who, during 1926 was filming "The Sorrows of Satan" with Carol Dempster. Peter Cowie in fact likens Victor Sjostrom to D.W. Griffith by noting Sjostrom's admiration for Griffith with the observation thst both directors saw "the human conscience as a register of emotion". Peter Cowie, in his volume Swedish Cinema" goes so far as to write that of the films Sjostrom directed in the United States only the two films Victor Sjostrom made with Lillian Gish are of "lasting importance". Cowie explains that even Sjostrom himself felt that the films he directed after the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film would in fact be "transformations". "Everyone praised the visual beauty of the film, but many in it a decline of Sjostrom's vitality. 'Det Omringade huset' (1922) and 'Eld omboard' were disappointing, and in 1923 Sjostrom left for Hollywood on account of the lucrative offer from M.G.M and because of an urgent need within himself to find the magic for producing pictures of an international appeal." It had been Victor Sjostrom who had convinced Mauritz Stiller to depart for America in order to meet his artistic aspirations. Admittedly, the films made in the United States are transformations of genre in regard to narrative conventions and transformations of genre in regard to literarary adaptation if in a sense of transnational analysis in the use of genre by an auteur, the auteur Seastrom/Sjostrom with whom Stiller had given up filming comedies after "Erotikon" to film "particularly Scandinavian drama". Of "The Scarlet Letter" Peter Cowie writes,"Both this film and 'The Wind' are given an undeniably Scandinavian character by the intensity of Sjostrom's direction."
Actress Lillian Gish, in her autobiography The movies, Mr. Griffith and me, writes, "I found Victor's Seastrom's direction an education in itself. The Italian school of acting was one of elaboration, the Swedish was one of repression. Lars Hanson played his scenes in Swedish, I in English, neither of us understanding the other."
Paul Rotha in his volume The Film Till Now looked at Victor Sjostrom in the United States directing as Victor Seastrom, "The theme of 'The Scarlet Letter' was gloomy, but Seastrom raised its gloom to moments of great beauty....Seastrom's sweeping sense of landscape, evident in his early Swedish pictures was expanded and gave an enchanting atmosphere to the first love scenes between Miss Gish and Lars Hanson....This feeling for depth and space was common to all the Scandinavian directors in their pre-American work."
Puritanism itself can be reflected in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Samuel Sewall, Edward Taylor, Michael Wigglesworth and Cotton Mather, The Puritan Errand, the Scarlet Letter having taking place during the two decades after 1630 when most of the oldest cities near Boston, where Elizabeth Pain the inspiration for Hester Prynne, is buried, were first incorporated.Although within the historiography of silent film review and theory, Joe Franklin, author of Classics of the Silent Screen, a pictorial history, may be seen more as a proponent of silent film, a poularizer of silent film during the advent of television using publicity still to raise the public's consciousness of the heyday of the art form during the era of Paul Killiam and William K. Everson, he is correct while reviewing "The Scarlet Letter" when writing that there "were no fewer than three more versions were made before the Lillian Gish version for M.G.M. in 1926." He does not list them, but they were: "The Scarlet Letter" (one reel, Tucker, Smiley, Independent Moving Picture Company, 1911), "The Scarlett Letter" (David Miles,1913) with actress Linda Arvidson as Hester Prynne, "The Scarlet Letter" (fives reels, Carl Harbugh, 1917) for the Fox Film Corporation with Mary Martin as Hester Prynne and "The Scarlet Letter" (1922, Challis Sanderson) with Sybil Thorndike as Hester Prynne. The periodical The Moving Picture World praised the Kinemacolor version of 1913 and its direction, "He has gone to great pains to recreate the early colonial atmosphere: he has succedded , especially in his backgrounds, his settings and his costumes....Linda Griffith gives a splendid portrayal of Hester Prynne. She is the embodiment of Hawthorne's creation-the high type of woman who under a calm exterior conceals her suffering as she conceals her love.". Motion Picture World praised the 1917 adaptation as being "as authentic, as exalted, and as appealing as the immortal book from which it was taken...Mary Martin as Hester Prynne, the sufferer from the stern Puritanical judgement, is as sweet a figure as was ever crushed by justice gone wrong." When pieced together within the historiography of film reviews leading up to the Victor Sjostrom adaptation with Lillian Gish there seems a hint of the star system just beginning with the novel being a character driven narrative, the earlier versions lacking a commercial commodity that could be exploited within the audience expectations of the developing genre of historical costume drama but the story of "The Scarlet Letter" allowing for a dynamic protagonist.
Victor Seastrom "It was Hawthorne's first sustained effort and of all his works, we still read first the supreme romance of the Puritan conscience in self-torment, 'The Scarlet Letter', with its climax of penance and demoniac triumph at Dimmesdale's shame." The book below, printed by Metro Goldwyn Mayer, was only sold in theaters where the film was being shown as a souvenier program.
Victor Sjostrom
One quote that can be excerpted explains that although Victor Sjostrom's directing depicted man's relationship to the enviornment, his personification of landscape itself into a character dynamicly delineating the protagonist as the story unfolded, his directing in the United States, after having left Sweden took a turn toward relecting the psychological interior of the character. "With the production of 'The Scarlet Letter', Sjostrom becomes known as the first director to experiment with and successfully accomplish the strange feat of photographing thoughts--putting on the screen what goes on inside man's mind." When advertizing 'The Scarlet Letter' along with its many other productions soon to be featured on the marquee, the M.G.M. studio proclaimed that the film was of "legitimate attraction size.".
The souvenier program points out that during six years as an actor at Swedish Biograph,Lars Hanson had worked with both Sjostroms, with the director Victor Sjostrom in the film "Jerusalem", and with Mrs. Victor Sjostrom (Edythe Erastoff) in "Song of the Blood Red Flower", prior to that his having portrayed the titular role in Auguste Strindberg's Gustav the Third. During 1927, actress Lillian Gish was assigned director Fred Niblo, who directed her in the film "The Enemy", photographed by Oliver Marsh, the photoplay having been written by Agnes Christine Johnston and adapted from play described by author Gary Cary as a "virulently anti-war play" in his volume Lost Films. The film was at the time of the 1970 publication of Cary's volume a Lost Silent Film. Eight of the films nine reels have been since found.
Perhaps it makes it easier when thinking in terms of Lost Film, Found Magazines to speculate on what the missing footage of "The Enemy" looked like on screen due to the missing reel having been the last reel of the film and it requiring us to find out about how the ending was written. H.A. Potamkin described the on screen acting of Lillian Gish in the periodical Close Up, "If, on rare moments, Lillian Gish seems to have achieved genuine condensation of power, that is simply because her habitiual mincing acting has coincided with the necessities of those moments...her clipped movements, timed to the surimpression of the soldier's march, appear to explode with compressed anquish." Victor Sjostrom
SILENT FILM
The book Pictorial Beauty on the Screen, written by Victor Oscar Freeburg in 1923, was dedicated to James Cruze, director of the silent film 'The Covered Wagon' (ten reels). The introduction to the volume was written by silent film director Rex Ingram. Ingram notes that the silent film "must be composed of certain pictorial qualifications such as form, composition and a proper distribution of light and shade." Film poetry began with the silent film, despite any rennaisance in the nineteen seventies.
John L. Fell, in his volume A History of Film chronicles, "'THe Covered Wagon', directed by James Cruze in 1923, proved even more successful than 'The Iron Horse'. It was epic in conception, weak in plot, and impressively photographed." The cinematographer to the film had been Karl Brown. Allan Eyles notes that "The Covered Wagon" (Cruze, 1923), made in the United States at a time when film criticism was giving more than a cursoy glance to the work of Swedish silent film director Victor Seastrom who had only just then arrived in America with Mauritz Stiller to bring a close to the Golden Age of Swedish Silent, was remarkable for its depicting the relationships of the characters within narrative to the enviornment in which the story takes place, its plotline built around the interaction of its three primary characters.
After mentioning "The Covered Wagon" as having been a western differing in genre from the comedies directed by James Cruze, author Gary Carey, Museum of Modern Art, in his volume Lost Films, as early as 1970, writes of the comedy "Beggar on Horseback", directed by Cruze during 1925 having been once considered lost before copies of it had resurfaced. Gary Carey includes the comedy 'Merton of the Movies" (eight reels), which featured the cameos of fifty silent film actors and actresses, directed by Cruze during 1923 as having been a Lost Silent Film during 1970 while overlooking a second satire on tinseltown titled "Hollywood" (eight reels), also presently considered lost, starring Viola Dana and directed by James Cruze during 1923. The film "Ruggles of Red Gap" (eight reels), directed by James Cruze in 1923 and starring actress Lois Wilson, is also presently considered a lost silent film. James Cruze had again used cinematographer Karl Brown to film while directing the films "Hollywood", "Merton of the Movies" and "Ruggles of Red Gap". Silent FilmSilent Film
