FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

100 Transition and Transformation
present. In discussing this relation, Paolo Cherchi Usai takes on an even more
radical standpoint by claiming that: “it is the destruction of moving images
that makes film history possible” at all – as it is only the past that “presents us
with a limited set of choices on which to exercise such knowledge as we are
able to glean from the range of perspectives that remain”. 6 As Cherchi Usai
rightly reminds the researcher, “history is filled with traps”, and the first trap
for a film historian “is a very treacherous one: however much a film may seem
to be complete, some parts of it may not belong to the ‘original’ work”. 7 Indeed,
as he concludes: “The ‘original’ version of a film is a multiple object fragmented
into a number of different entities equal to the number of surviving
copies.” 8 This insight indeed diminishes the gap between lost films, surviving
film fragments and preserved and restored “complete” copies; they should all
be dealt with and analyzed as fragments of a larger cinematic or cultural history.
Two of Sjöström’s Hollywood films seem to be (at least to this date) completely
lost – The Tower of Lies and The Masks of the Devil – whereas two – in
addition to Name the Man – are partly preserved: from Confessions of a
Queen, the first to the fourth reels remain, as well as a fragment from the seventh
reel. 9 In the case of The Divine Woman, the third reel is preserved almost
in its entirety. 10 In these four cases, however, the cutting continuity scripts are
preserved, in addition to the original scripts in the two cases of The Divine
Woman and The Masks of the Devil. In the case of the latter, a preserved
Daily Production Report has also been recently discovered. 11 All this material
offers good opportunities to study at least the original conception of the films, if
not their realization on screen, and in the cases of the remaining fragments, also
to compare the different sources in the “virtual” and (parts of the) “actual” versions
of the films.
The aim in this chapter is thus not to try to make up for the losses by analyzing
the films as a whole, as this “whole” can be nothing other than a construction.
Rather, what I attempt to do is to look for traces of Sjöström’s authorial
signature in the sense that this signature has emerged through the analyses in
the previous chapters, and, to the degree that it is possible, also look at these
films in the context of their production.
Authorial imprints: Confessions of a Queen
The shooting of Confessions of a Queen started only two weeks after the premiere
of He Who Gets Slapped, in mid-November 1924. The film took only
four weeks to make and it premiered on 30 March 1925. The script, by Agnes