"The Divine Woman" directed in the United States during 1928 featured three
Swedish Silent Film stars from the Golden Age of Swedish Silent film, two of whom,
Victor Sjostrom and Lars Hanson, would soon return to Sweden to mark the advent of sound film. Sjostrom would return to act and only act, in front of the camera rather than behind it. Only one reel of the film survives, it being presumed lost with no other footage of the film surviving other than the fragment.
Bo Florin, Stockholm University, in his volume Transition and Transformation- Victor Sjostrom in Hollywood 1923-1930, looks as a film detective not only to film critics and magazine articles printed during the first run of the film, as I have, this webpage in fact subtitled "Lost Films, Found Magazines", (please excuse the trendy contemporary use of subtitles during peer review) but also to the the cutting continuity script, his finding a specific sequence where Sjostrom uses "a combination between iris and dissolve", one which, as an iris down, fulfills the "classic Sjostrom function of an analogy". There are two other dissolves in the same sequence that are used as transitions, spatial transitions, yet both are taken from different camera distances. It is a contonuity cutting script from which author Bo Florin has found fifty four dissolves that were used in the film. Again, no footage from the scene or the reel it is from survives. One can ask if double exposures were only infrequently published in magazines or advertisements as publicity stills, or even as lobby cards or posters and if modern audiences have ever seen photographs from the scene- Screen Secrets Magazine during 1928, in their Tipping off the Screen's Secrets, provided a photograph of Victor Sjostrom filming "Lars Hanson and some French soldiers from the hurricane deck of a bus".
Greta Garbo biographer Norman Zierold writes, "Garbo asked for, and got, Victor Seastrom as her director in 'The Divine Woman'." Journalist Rilla Page Palmborg, in The Private Life of Greta Garbo fulfills the search for Lost Film, Found Magazines when giving an account of being on the set of 'The Divine Woman' for a rare interview with Greta Garbo, giving a description of what what on film in a film we at presenent no longer have. "There came a shy little French girl and a young officer walking slowly down the street. They paused in a doorway. The officer asked a frowsy inkeeper for lodgings. The girl looked up shyly at the officer. She hesitated a moment, raised up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. Then she hurried past him up the stairs. 'Cut' shouted the director." The director was in fact
Swedish Silent Film director
Victor Sjostrom, Greta Garbo leaving the set in a high collared cape to bring journalist Rilla Page Palmborg to her dressing room. The commodity Garbo at that time? The journalist had obtained the interview not to ask about
Lars Hanson, Victor Sjostrom or the upcoming film "The Divine Woman", but was admittedly there to ask Garbo about her tabloid romance with actor
John Gilbert. The dressing room was small and on wheels and Garbo politely expressed concern if they both would fit into it. Greta Garbo answered the question regarding her intentions of marriage with "it is only a friendship. I will never marry. My work absorbs me. I have time for nothing else. But I think Jack Gilbert is one of the finest men I have ever known." There would seem a contradiction between the onscreen Garbo who 'nearly invented the torrid love scene' and the extratextural discourse of pursuing the reclusive hermit Garbo everywhere- oddly enough Palmborg claims that the relationship between Garbo and Lars Hanson and his wife Karin Molander was more professional than social although Hanson and Garbo arrived from Sweden at the same time with
Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller.
Swedish Silent Film actress
Karen Molander explained, " 'Garbo never had any friends with whom she chummed around in Stockholm.' said Mrs. Hanson. 'When we knew her she was devoted to Mauritz Stiller. He seemed to be the only person with whom she would associate.' "
Paul Rotha, in his volume The Film Till Now, commented on the topic that would be taken up by Bo Florin during this century, the artistic differences between the films made by
Victor Sjostrom for Svensk Filmindustri, Stockholm and for Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Hollywood. "But Sjostrom has ceased to develop. He remains stationary in his outlook thinking in terms of his early Swedish imagery. He has recently made little use of the progress of cinema itslef. 'The Divine Woman', although it had the Greta Garbo of 'The Atonement of Gosta Berling' had none of the lyricism, the poetic imagery of the earlier film."
In regard to Lost Films, Found Magazines- gleaning conceptions about what appeared on the screen in the
silent films that have been lost by finding magazine articles, pressbooks, lobby cards, movie posters and other extratextural discourse documenting the film's first run, Gary Cary, Museum of Modern Art, in his volume Lost Film views the photoplay of "The Divine Woman" as being less autobiographical than it was presented. "The play upon which the film was based on was reportedly inspired by the life of Sarah Bernhardt. The movie, however, departs radically from both play and Madame Bernhardt's life. The leading role of Marianne was played on stage by Doris Keane, a popular favorite of the period."
Photoplay Magazine during 1928, in its The Shadow Stage pages, offered a review of the film, "A Story based on the life of Sarah Bernhardt and played by Greta Garbo as the Divine Sarah Herself" while adding the provision, "The interest centers in the acting of Miss Garbo and Lars Hanson, her soldier lover, rather than the story itself." Perhaps after the audience reception of Garbo and Gilbert having had been being a phenomenon both onscreen and off, using romance as a genre commodity commercially suggested using the life of the French theatre actress as primarily a backdrop for the dynamic.
Victor Sjostrom and Greta Garbo
Greta Garbo in The Temptress
Greta Garbo in The Torrent
Silent Greta GarboSilent Film
