FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

134 Transition and Transformation
based on Sidney Howard’s own script from his Broadway play, which had also
been awarded the Pulitzer Prize three years earlier. Thus, these two films were
in perfect continuity with Sjöström’s long series of films based on Nobel Prize
winners and former theatrical successes. It also seems clear that while in Hollywood
Sjöström carried on with the close relationship to the literary sources that
he had followed during his Swedish years, and did not rely only on the intermediary
of the scripts, not least in the case of The Scarlet Letter.
Moreover, the scripts assigned to Sjöström as director all seem to have carried
some at least potential possibilities to develop aspects of his particular style.
This is as true of the films which have been considered as successes as of those
which film historians have tended to consider as failures or impasses. In all
cases, it was at least in some sense evident from the scripts that they would
contain a potential as to innovative visual cues; Sjöström would thus possibly
be able both to repeat and renew his earlier “tours de force”, either from the
earlier “golden age” of Swedish cinema, or from his previous Hollywood successes.
Thus, after all, the Hollywood policy of distributing scripts to potential
directors does not seem all that arbitrary.
Sjöström’s strategy turned out to be successful. First of all, in several of his
films he kept what has sometimes been discerned as a Swedish “national style”,
the style that had once brought him international fame as director. This style is
revealed in the mise-en-scène, and has to do, in particular, with the portrayal of
landscape, with light or with what I have called lyrical intimacy. At the same
time, the phantasm of origins, which in Sjöström’s case was closely associated
with landscape, seems to keep hovering over his Hollywood films and the discourses
surrounding them.
A second aspect of the Sjöström style surviving in Hollywood films is located
on the level of the particular details that characterized his Swedish period and
reappear in Hollywood. Of these, the cut across the line creating a 360-degree
space, survived in his first film, but then disappeared, most likely as it represented
too much of a violation of Hollywood norms. The shadow cast on
screen from a character arriving from off screen, just like the general use of shadows,
is by no means unique to Sjöström, but had still become an important
marker from his Swedish period. A more recurrent aspect, which is also more
difficult to pinpoint in the absence of more specific source material, is the integration
of pictorial aspects both from book illustrations and from art history in
general.
Throughout most of the films, Sjöström also kept his perhaps most significant
stylistic device where the dissolve is used as analogy, sometimes in connection
with a superimposition. This way of using the transition between shots as an
analogy, or even an expression of a transformation, was developed during the
Swedish years and became almost, as I have shown, his trademark as director.