FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

Fragmented Pieces: Writing the History of the Lost Hollywood Films 117
In mapping out intertextual references from a limited Swedish political context
with the Branting-inspired caricature, as well as from different literary contexts
– Selma Lagerlöf, Eugene O’Neill – this archaeological work places Sjöström’s
lost films or film fragments within the much larger context of global
cinema in the 1920s, incorporating very different social, political and cultural
issues. The intratextual references, most notably in the development of the use
of dissolves but also the insights in the conditions of daily production work,
that may be traced from cutting continuity scripts as well as from the Daily
Production Report in the case of The Masks of the Devil, give evidence of
another kind. They speak of the cultural passages provided by cinema, down to
the smallest details in the system of production, but on the other hand also of
the unity of textual space and of cinematic devices allowed for within the system.
In all these fragmented pieces, one important factor remains constant: they
are all more or less stories of depravity which, all to different degrees, might
challenge the norms of the Hollywood system, with the auto-censorship that
took place by its very establishment. Of course, they may share this feature
with other films by Sjöström or films made during the period, but the interdisciplinary
intertextuality mapped out by the analysis would also allow for the construction
of a different look, one which – following Giuliana Bruno – would
reclaim “marginality and difference”, thus revealing “discontinuous, diverse,
and disqualified areas”. 55
However, the consideration of these fragments from the Hollywood years unavoidably
leads to a further question: what knowledge do we actually have of
Sjöström as a director, considering the fact that most of his early films for Svenska
Bio are also lost?
The only answer to this rhetorical question would lie in another question:
given that we have no actual knowledge in detail, apart from the necessity to
rethink both spectatorship and authorship within a general transnational panorama
of cinematography, is it at all possible to give a statement on Sjöström’s
work as a whole?
In the light of Bruno or Cherchi Usai, this should perhaps rather be regarded
as the wrong question. However, Sjöström’s particular discourse in the Foucauldian
sense of the terms – in the intersection between archaeology and history –
should be possible to trace, not least given the different openings that his work
as a director offers in all directions, and thus construed “as a distribution of
gaps, absences, limits, and divisions”. 56 Also, in the light of Bruno’s visual and
cultural archaeology, a mobile theory of spectatorship is required, as well as an
epistemological topography, in the form of a grand panorama, which may include
both narratological aspects and intersubjective dimensions of a general
revision of realism, not least called for by Bruno herself. The panorama of Sjöström’s
lost films or film fragments from the American period puts this question