The Wind (1928) dir. Victor Sjöström

San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2024: exposure to the shadows of the past

I was looking for Yoda when I bumped into Eadweard Muybridge. These are the circles film history moves in. This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the 27th, took place in the grandeur of the theatre of the Palace of Fine Arts, an elegant neo-classical folly of gigantic proportions, built as a temporary attraction for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition and then rebuilt in more permanent…

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WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957)

Dir: Ingmar Bergman DP: Gunnar Fischer

Terje Vigen, Victor Sjöström (1917)

Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) (1957) Ingmar Bergman

December 10th 2022

Ingeborg Holm, Victor Sjöström, 1913

“Lillian Gish parted company with Griffith in 1921. After she had done independent work with a number of directors, Louis B. Mayer in 1925 offered Gish a lucrative and unusual contract that gave her the rights of script selection as well as director and cast recommendations for the films in which she would appear. Under these arrangements Gish helped give MGM two of its last great silent masterpieces: The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind.

Renowned for her fragile, vulnerable screen personae and for transparency in conveying human suffering, Gish saw in The Scarlet Letter’s heroine, Hester Prynne, a character ideally suited to her acting acumen. Playing a woman branded for adultery in a puritanical society, Gish superbly conveyed a victimized but stoic sufferer. She had recommended and won for the project the acclaimed Swedish director Victor Sjostrom (or “Seastrom” as he called himself while under contract at MGM in the 1920s). It was a good choice. Seastrom’s talent for creating an environmental mise en scene that underscored character emotion and psychology was evident in his pastoral rendering of a 17th-century New England landscape. Together Gish and Seastrom turned The Scarlet Letter into a critical and popular triumph for MGM.”

article by Frank Beaver – film historian and critic and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus of Film, Television, and Media at U-M.

Greta Garbo 'The Divine Woman' 1927

Greta Garbo (1905 - 1990) and Lars Hanson (1887 - 1965) star in 'The Divine Woman', directed by Victor Sjostrom for MGM.

The Wind (1928) dir. Victor Sjöström

Pirmoji Banga 2022: keeping silent cinema weird in Vilnius

Pirmoji Banga 2022: keeping silent cinema weird in Vilnius

Greetings from Lithuania! It has been a bit of a quiet summer here. The reason is that I have been working on a couple of research projects, and travelling too – mostly around the country talking about Pre-code cinema (I’m in Scotland this week, and Belfast next month – links below). But also to further-flung spots such as Vilnius, home of Pirmoji Banga. And if you don’t know what that is, you…

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Victor Sjöström - The Wind (1928)

Conrad Veidt-Annabella “Bajo el manto escarlata” (Under the red robe) 1937, de Victor Sjostrom.

Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru, Victor Sjöström, 1918

Victor Sjöström, September 20, 1879 – January 3, 1960.

Charlie Chaplin, Swedish director Victor Sjöström (aka Victor Seastrom) and his wife Edith Erastoff pay a visit to Chaplin Studios 1925.

In the U.S. he was also known as Victor Seastrom. He directed 2 of Lillian Gish’s most known films “The Scarlet Letter” (1926) and “The Wind” (1928) both also starred Swedish cinema star Lars Hanson. “The Wind” was also the last silent in Miss Gish’s filmography.