FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

82 Transition and Transformation
its power, but it comes in strict continuity, with seldom the impression of a gust. And
instead of getting along with the story, Mr. Seastrom makes his production very tedious
by constantly calling attention to the result of the wind. If it were realistic, it
would all be very well, but it isn’t. Sand and dust are discovered on the bread, on the
dishes, on the sheets, and wherever Letty (Miss Gish), a spiritual young Virginian,
turns. 12
But in retrospect, The Wind has often been considered Sjöström’s greatest Hollywood
masterpiece and one of his best works ever. Film historians have particularly
pointed out that Sjöström in this film succeeded in rendering the invisible
– the wind – visible through its effect: the sandstorm, which plays such an
important role in the film. It has been noted that Sjöström, precisely at the time
where silent cinema turned to sound, made a last effort to explore the forms of
the visible in order to make a silent record of sound, these silent sounds being a
characteristic trait in several of his earlier Swedish films. 13
Here, Bengt Forslund among others have stressed the importance of close-ups
during the director’s Swedish period, particularly those that stretch the narrative
limits of silent film by appearing to generate sound, like in The Girl from
the Marsh Croft, where the male hero Gudmund is falsely accused of murder:
Or take the effectively inserted close-up of Gudmund’s coffee cup, which falls to the
ground when Gudmund’s mother reads out from the paper the news of the murder –
a sound effect one in fact hears, in spite of the silence, and one experiences the conflicting
proceedings still more strikingly when the whole wedding comes to a halt simply
as a result of the lay assessor’s hand interrupting a fiddler’s bow. One feels the silence in
fact, as intensely as though it had occurred in a sound movie. 14
Several of the scenes from The Wind which will be discussed in the following
include and make use of violent sounds in much the same way as in Forslund’s
description above. There is of course the whirling storm itself, but just as much
its results: a herd of cows breaking their fence, a table lamp being overturned
and starting a fire, hands knocking, doors supposedly slamming in the wind.
All those images – shown in close-up or cut-in – suggest sound effects to the
extent that they seem to have functioned as such. As a matter of fact a “sound
version” of The Wind was also released, with a soundtrack containing sounds
of the wind, with some added effects (like dogs barking) together with a musical
leitmotif: “Love Brought the Sunshine”, all in order to compensate for the
film’s lack of sound. It is striking that several critics of the period actually complained
about the added sound being redundant in its doubling the sound already
mediated through the images, which also testifies to the effectiveness of
Sjöström’s method of making “a silent record of sound”. 15