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Introduction – From Sjöström to Seastrom 13
relation to questions of cinematic style – the latter also including cinematic landscape
portrayal, generally considered one of the most important stylistic characteristics
of Sjöström’s films from the Scandinavian heydays. To these general
analyses discussions have been added of different contexts or framings, such as
some aspects of critical reception where these are particularly called for, or the
literary sources and their use. Analyzing this question of adaptation is relevant
especially when there is a particular dynamic between the original work and its
screen version – such as with Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped and Sjöström’s
script for the film (this aspect has been much discussed) or such as in the case
of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Scarborough’s The Wind – but it has been left
out in the discussion of A Lady to Love, where the writer of the drama, Sidney
Howard, also wrote the film script. In analyzing The Wind, I make a close-reading
of the plot development in relation both to style and to different frameworks
and contexts. This is motivated not only by the close intertwining of plot and
style (this could be argued of several Sjöström films), but rather by the fact that
this film, paradoxically enough as it has been considered Sjöström’s Hollywood
masterpiece, has previously been subject only to marginal analysis. 16
The reason for abandoning chronology is that all of Sjöström’s Hollywood
films that are lost or only preserved in short fragments are dealt with in a sixth,
more general chapter. Two of these films – Confessions of a Queen (1925) and
The Tower of Lies (1925) – were made after Sjöström’s second Hollywood film,
and two of them – The Divine Woman (1928) and The Masks of the Devil
(1928) – after his double collaboration with Gish, and immediately preceding
his last Hollywood film. The reason for bringing together all lost films or shorter
fragments in a separate chapter is that they have important historiographical
problems in common: the question how to deal with partially or completely
lost film material as well as issues of reconstruction.
Finally, another film considered lost for a long time – A Lady to Love (1930),
Sjöström’s last Hollywood film, which has recently been rediscovered – is analyzed.
As the director’s first sound film, which for this reason was also produced
in different versions, the film provides rich material for discussing from
yet another perspective the intersection between different film cultures. It also
demonstrates the consequences of the transition to sound for an individual director,
who was frequently using visual “sound effects” in his films during the
silent era.
When working on a research project for many years, as I have done in the
present case, it is inevitable that some central observations do reoccur in different
papers and articles. I have already published several texts on Victor Sjöström
in other contexts. The most comprehensive is my bilingual presentation,
written for a retrospective at the Swedish Film Institute, Regi: Victor Sjöström/
Directed by Victor Sjöström, which is based on my original research but does not