Victor Sjostrom As Seastrom- Greta Garbo, Mauritz Stiller

12/21/19, 1107 PM Page 1 of 1 Wednesday, December 18, 2019 Lillian Gish Victor Sjostrom as Seastrom- Greta Garbo, Mauritz Stiller "The Image Makers see their images emerge out of the story. And then suddenly: darkness."- Per Olov Enquist in Bildmakarna, a fictional account of Victor Sjostrom, Julius Jaenzon, Tora Teje and Selma Lagerlof "The stylistic changes brought about by Sjostrom's moving to Hollywood may not have been as definite as film history would have it according to the paradigm. Still the story of Sjostrom was transformed by his transition to Seastrom"- Bo Florin An actres tells a film director, with whom she is having a brief affair, that he is not the author of the film he is making, "Hon menar att det ar hennes bok Victor. Inte din. Du mekar bara."/ "She means that it is her book Victor. Not yours. You are just tinkering with it."- Lynn R Wilkinson on the The daughter of Sweden’s greatest director of Silent Film Silent Film, Victor Seastrom, has passed away during the beginning of 2019. Guge Lagerwall, Mary Pickford actress and wife of Swedish actor Sture Lagerwall, had celebrated her one hundredth birthday during January of 2018 before having died two weeks before turning one hundred and one years old. Lagerwall was the daughter of director and actress Edith Erastoff and, according to Victor Sjostrom one of the reasons why he returned from the United States to Sweden. Author Tommy Gustafsson is more than correct when he reluctantantly admits a canonization of Swedish Silent Film hinging on the names Victor Sjostrom, Mauritz Stiller and Selma Lagerloff. Mauritz Stiller had given Greta Garbo a lead role while in Sweden in adaptation of one of Lagerwall’s novels, an adaptation that did not go unnoticed by Lagerwall, while Victor Sjostrom had given Greta Garbo the leading role in a film version of the life of actress Sarah Bernhardt after she has arrived in America with Stiller. Although Gustafsson omits placing directors George af Klerker, Gustaf Molander and John Bruinius in a chronological relation to the Silent Film forming of Svenska Filmindustri, he marks their movie absence in cannon that has been widely familiarized, including the discourse of what he Scott Lord Mystery: Raymond Masse… notes Bordwell and Thompson see as a “dependence” upon landscape in Swedish film that distinguished Stiller and Sjostrom as filmmakers concerned with artistically articulating man’s place in the universe through personifying the emotion inherent in Scandinavian exterior shots and through heightening the interest in human action when confronting the elements. In his book Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema, Tommy Gustafsson looks toward the viewpoints of Leif Furhammar to see competing foreign markets as a reason for the Swedish Art Film, markets that would not only compete for the attention of Silent Film Greta Garbo rivetted audiences, but for the directors of Greta Garbo Greta Garbo Sweden and Europe themselves. In an attempt to delineate Victor Sjostrom as a Swedish auteur, as Greta Garbo a pioneering father of Swedish Cinema that propagated a nationalistic style, Bo Florin also asks us to keep in mind the influence of American Film on the global market, perhaps an influence that was competing with popular Danish films. Florin notes that an economic crisis that was weighing heavily upon Charles Magnusson caused the formation of a subsidiary company, AB Filminspelning, that included directors Victor Sjostrom ,Mauritz Stiller and John Brunius, a Scott Lord on Silent Film company that was unsuccessful in preventing the departure of Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller Silent Film to America and a Hollywood which comprised 90% of all silent film being manufactured, easily and Scott Lord Swedish readily drawing the two monolithic directors away Silent Film: The from Sweden after they had established the Golden Phantom Carriage Age of Swedish Silent Film where stylistically, (Korkarlen,Victor often the character is analyzed against the Sjostrom, 1920) backdrop of his enviornment to deepen the film With the subtitles Sweden thematically. Strikes a Lyrical Note, In their article Film Studies In Sweden, The Garbo is Lost and Found, Past, The Present and The Future, authors Goran and Sweden Studio is Re- Bolan and Michael Forsmann add an interesting Born, in 1947 author perspective when crediting producer Charles Leslie Wood, in ... Magnusson as a proponent of Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom. They note that despite his success,that “in spite of taking up established and well-reputed plays and literary classics, the public reception was negative”, especially with the cultural elite, which coalesced into the first publications on Swedish Film, particularly those of author Frans Hallgren. Interestingly, student Jesper Larsson, in a recent undergraduate paper for Lund University Isabelle and Therese circulated on academia.org titled Tora Teje Teje, Reception and Swedishness wrote, “The Golden Age Scott Lord Erotic Film: Essy Persson … of Swedish Silent Film started with ’A Man There Was’ (Terge Vogel, Victor Sjostrom, 1917) reached its climax with ‘The Phantom Carriage’ (Korkarlen, Victor Sjostrom, 1921), and ended with ‘The Saga of Gosta Berling’ (Mauritz Stiller, 1924), whereas all these films served as a distillation of a distinctive national style. These films, often set in historical times or in rural Sweden, did not allow actresses to be glamorous in a contemporary sense and thus did not reproduce the idea of a consumerist culture.” To these, Jespersen might have added the Greta Garbo Greta Garbo historical dramas of Director John Brunius. Greta Garbo Greta Garbo Jespersen’s claim that Swedish Silenent Film expressed a nationalism in its nostalgic, or Victor Sjostrom rural,subject matter and a resultant camera technique to fit the exigencies of exterior Scott Lord:Under the Red Robe(Victo… location style is apparent in advertising and motion pictures both sought to reflect a visual culture with an intense interest in modernity receptive to the avaunt guarde, as is reflected not onlyin the paper Films That Sell: Motion Pictures and Advertising by Patrick Vondreau of Stockholm University but in the emergence of the relationship between advertising and Imagist poetry and Dadaist poetry. America had gone to France and created The Flapper, leaving us the view that not only were the film directors of the Swedish Golden Age tottering on seeming archaic, Victor Seastrom Swedish but that director D.W. Griffith might also have a Silent Film More properly Morality not suited to the quickening pace of the the headlines should read, New Modern Woman, almost indicative in Lillian "Garbo Talks, Seastrom Gish having left to find Lars Hanson and Victor Returns Home." Victor Seastrom, who had worked Sjostromas though both cinemas were to compete in the Swedish theater with a short-lived German Expressionism and before pioneering in French Poeticism. To keep the topic within a Swedish Film, returned to peer-reviewed frame, author Bo Florin dileneates Sweden with the advent of the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film as 1917- the sound film, not to 1923. While reviewing Bo Florin’s volume direct, but to act. As in Transition and Transformation, Victor Sjostrom in Hollywood, the exterior of Hollywood 1923-1930 film critic Erik Hedling uses the Swedish landscape that had established Sjostrom, the same chronological yardstick, 1917-1923, to Stiller and Molander measure the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film, during the golden age of and adds,”These were characterized by elaborate Swedish Silent Film, had landscapes depiction, heavy influences from high taken the innovation of art, subtle acting, expressive lighting and a sound back to the focus on specific devices, such as the dissolve proscenium arc of the and systematic cuts across the 180-degree line.” interior with Molander managing the transition to With the grace of a footnote to the writing of dialogue centered films. Bengt Forslund, Bo Florin extends Helding’s summarization by also characterizing Victor Film Sjostromas an Auteur within Swedish Silent Film, characterizing his style as displaying a “lyrical Scott Lord The Moonstone intimacy” effected by “downplayed acting, thorough work on the lighting of scenes, and mise ens scene and montage privileging a circular space with a clear center towards which movements converge.” Bo Florin includes the film “Terje Vigen” in the cannon of the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film in part for its portrayal of the interiority of the character having been explored metaphorically, perhaps more metaphorically, ie. through metonymic representation, than in Sjostrom’s earlier films which included “Ingeborg Holm”. In the article “Confronting The Wind, a Victor Seastrom Silent reading of a Hollywood Film by Victor Sjostrom”, Film Florin notes Peter Cowie as having pointed out Greta Garbo that the film “consequently reflects the conflicts both within and between the characters Film in the narrative”, his adding that Fullerton “points to the dialectics in the relationship Scott Lord -the beautiful Virginia Bru… between human and landscape, which establishes analogies between them”, Fullerton having compared elements of “Terje Vigen” with those of “The Outlaw and his Wife”. Added to this is the thought that American Silent film came under a European influence and that the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film was just that in light of it being carried over into Hollywood, which was very congenially expressed in the volume The Film Answers Back: A Historical

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