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27 Nov 20:08

Scott Lord Silent Film: Anna Christie (John Griffith Wray, 1923)

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
Actresses Blanche Sweet and Eugenie Besserer starred in the 1923 version of "Anna Christie", adapted for the screen by Bradley King and directed by John Griffith Gray under the supervision of Thomas Ince. The periodical "Screen Opinions" of 1923 noted the photography of Henry Sharp as being "very good", the type of picture as being "sensational" with a "moral standard" of "average",
Greta Garbo Silent Film
24 Sep 00:40

Sherlock Holmes Trailers-Pearl of Death

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,


I happen to carry a Basil Rathbone Players Cigarette Card (1938) in my wallet.


Silent Film
24 Sep 00:30

Universal Sherlock Holmes Trailers

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:28

Silent Sherlock Holmes

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
Silent Film Silent Film
24 Sep 00:28

Sherlock Holmes The Man WithTheTwisted Lip

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
Scott Lord Scott Lord
24 Sep 00:28

Silent Film: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Worsley, 1923)

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
Silent Film Scott Lord
24 Sep 00:27

Silent Film: The Phantom of the Opera (Jullian, 1925)

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
Silent Film Lon Chaney
24 Sep 00:25

Sherlock Holmes Trailers-Terror By Night

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:25

Television Art: Lifebuoy soap plus sponsor tag (1971)

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:25

Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, 1945

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:25

Sherlock Holmes- Sign of the Four

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:24

Sherlock Holmes Speckled Band

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:24

Sherlock Holmes- A Study In Scarlet

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:24

Sherlock Holmes Trailers- House of Fear

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:24

Scott Lord Horror Comedy: Spooks in 3D

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:18

Sherlock Holmes: Silent Film

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:17

Silent Film: Douglas Fairbanks in The Mollycoddle (Victor Fle...

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
24 Sep 00:15

Silent Film to be revised , miscelaneous filmography, notes

by Anonymous
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Silent Film


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Swedish Silent Film

SILENT FILM SILENT FILM Filmic address could more often be comprised of objects put into the scene, placing the view of the spectator within it, not only to bring a greater involvement with character, but to allow the spectator to identify more often with the relation between character and enviornment, technique providing the relation between film and viewer. Specific to the relationship between character and enviornment is the relation between the character and the object towards which he or she is looking. The aesthetics of pictorial composition could utilize placing the figure in either the foreground or background of the shot, depth of plane,depth of framing, narrative and pictorial continuity being developed together. Compositions would become related to each other in the editing of successive images and adjacent shots, the structure of the scene; Griffith had already begun to cut mid-scene, his cutting to another scene before the action of the previous scene was completed, and had certainly already begun to cut between two seperate spatial locations within the scene.

Author Kenneth Macgowan praises the silent film The Avenging Conscience as a photoplay, his view being that Giriffith's film uses a narrative method of storystructure, action being secondary to character development, if not often interpolated in between scenes, his noting that it was seldom that Griffith used intertitles with lines of dialougue during a scene. Among the narrative films of Griffith filmed in 1909 was the silent film The Sealed Room.
The camera could also portray the character more fully by adding the movement of the camera to character movement, as in The Golden Louis (1909), mobilizing the gaze of the character within the organization of the look. In For Love of Gold, one of the fourty four biograph films made in 1908, D.W. Griffith and Bitzer had shifted the placement of the camera during the scene, the close up used in conjuction with the long shot and full shot. Not only could the editing together of different spatial relationships with each shot provide contrast between shots that were in a series, but the duration of each shot could be varying as well. With the use of varying camera postitions, particularly during the 1908 film After Many Years, Griffith would establish the use of the narrative close up, and by the interpolating of an individual shot between shots similar in composition as a cut in shot, editing would be used to connect seperate shots to advance plotline. With Griffith, film would create a proscenium arc of its own, that of the lens, a lens that would with the Vitagraph nine foot line bring the frame into the grammar of film, shifting from a viewpoint of playing in front of the audience to one more aligned with it, the authorial camera entering into a new relationship with the spectator.

Not incidentally, Eisenstien in a discussion of Griffith's editing goes so far as to describe "the principle function of the close shot" which is "not so much to present, as to signify, to designate, to give meaning." Belazs adds, "Only in editing is the shot given its particular meaning." Cavell writes, "If either the frame or subject budges, the composition alters." If filmic address during a cinema of attractions had begun with the act of display, it had begun to incorporate the actor as seen in close shot, which could be edited into a grammar of film - the shot had become "the unit of editing" and the "basis for the construction of the scene" (Jacobs), whereas before it had been the scene that would allow the placement of shots, it now being that there could be an assemblage of shots. Terry Ramsaye writes," Griffith began to work at a syntax for the screen narration...While Griffith may not have originated the closeup and like elements of technique, he did establish for them their function.".
Belazs mentions that the mood of a scene can be established by the particular set ups that are used, his almost attributing the ability to participate in the action to the surroundings and background in which the film takes place, as does Spottiswoode, who mentions that by filming from any number of postitions and angles, the director can decide which elements of the scene can be included in creating its mood, particularly which components of the director's subject.
Nevertheless in his best dramas of pastoral life, Sjöström to integrate the rugged Swedish landscape into the texture of his films with an almost mystical force- a feature noted and much admired in other countries." ------------ Of interest is that the establishing shot that begins the Greta Garbo film Love, directed in the Untied States by Edmund Goulding is an exterior that begins the plotline with Garbo in a snowstorm being brought homeward in a sleigh; it is a series of exterior shots that depict nature as the background for character delineation very much like in the films of Scandinavian director Victor Sjöström, so much so thaI'm pt it is revealed in the first interior shots that both the love interest in the film, portrayed by John Gilbert, and the audience, were nearly unaware of who the character portayed by Garbo really was and hadn't fully realized it untill being given later look at the beauty of the passenger, as though they were being reintroduced to someone they had been with during the journey through the snow.
And yet, if the present author has anything to add to what has been written in appreciation of Scandinavian film and its use of landscape to add depth to the development of character by creating relationships between the background and the protagonist of any given film's plotline, within that is that within classical cinema and its chronological ordering of events, it is still often spatio-temporal relationships that are developed. The viewer often acknowledging the effect that an object within the film might have upon the character, an object that is either stationary or in movement, poeticly in movement as a waterfall would be, the structuring of space within the film not only clarifies plot action, but, within the framed image, included in the spatial continuity within the visual structure of the film, establishes a relation of objects that appear onscreen to the space that is offscreen. Spatial relations became narrative. Character movement, camera movement and shot structure create a scenographic spPace which within the gaze of the actress is observed through an ideal of femininity, a unity of space constructed that links shots, often by forming spaces that are contiguous within the scene and creating images that are poeticly presented as being contiguous; subjectivity is structured within the discourse of the film and these subjectivities are presented to the viewer as being within a larger context within early Silent Scandinavian films.
Swedish film director Gustav Molander had in fact been at the Intima Teatern from 1911 to 1913. Thanhouser was also producing adaptations of literature for the screen and in 1911 filmed three plays by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen: Pillars of Society (Samfundets stotter), Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra havet, Theodore Marston) and A Doll's House (Et dukkehjem). Lubin that year filmed a version of Ibsen's Sins of the Father (Gengangere).


Although a theory of a cinema of attractions depends less upon the use of the proscenium arch written about by Nicholas A. Vardac or the camera's photographic reproduction of drama that had previously been enacted upon the stage and more upon the act of display having preceded the use of cinematic and editorial devices to propel narrative, the grammar of film would be used both to transpose the theatricality of the stage play and to adapt novels to the screen in ways which they could not be performed in front of a theater audience not only in regard to the modes of address which would position the spectator but also in regard to the public sphere of reception. Within the reception of each film there soon was a heterogeneity of filmgoers and that films were visual soon transversed language barriers between audiences that would otherwise have been seperate. Characteristic of early films that were adaptions of novels was the use of a linear narrative similar to that of the "well made novel" novel of the nineteenth century, the camera following the character into each subsequent scene. There soon would be films in which there would be a contemporaneity of narrative and attraction. Raymond Spottiswoode distinguishes between the photoplay, the adaptation of the stage play to the screen with little or no editing, and the screenplay, where camera movement and technique is used to convey narrative- the photoplay can be likened to a cinema of attractions where the scene is filmed from a fixed camera position, whereas the screenplay includes the cut from a medium shot to a close shot in order to build the scene.
In regard to the camera being authorial, Raymond Spottiswoode writes, "The spatial closeup is the usual means of revealing significant detail and motion. Small movements whicmh must necessarily have escaped the audiences of a play sitting removed some distance from its actors can thus be selected from their surroundings and magnified to any extent." While writing that how the camera is authorial includes its having only one position, that of the viewer, which, differing from that of the theater audience can vary with each shot change, depending upon the action within the scene, Spottiswoode cautions that the well written stage play is not suited for the camera's mobility. He also indirectly addresses the use of nature as a way to connect characters to their enviornment while they are being developed that is quite often significant in Scandinavian films when writing about the possibility there being a "difference film", by that his referring to a film which uses relational cutting. "To constitute such a 'difference film' is not sufficiently merely to photograph mountains and streams which are inaccessible to theater producers; the film must also choose a method of carrying on its purposive themes or meaning from moment to moment." He continues, "the public can be trained to appreciate that the differences between nature seen and nature filmed constitute the chief value of the cinema."
In the United States, with Edison (The Road of Anthracite, Race for Millions and The Society Raffles) and Vitagraph (Raffles, the Amatuer Cracksman, The Burgler on the Roof), the attraction had literally become filmed theater, scenes based on those of the stage solely for dramatic value, photographed in one reel as though in one act, from which came the knee shot, or medium full shot; the use of the proscenium arch is more pronounced before the Vitagraph nine foot line, the camera distance of the knee shot, in that there would be space left as visible in between the actor's feet and the bottom frameline, space articulated in tableau that would be more like that of when the spectator is in the audience at a theater. The legnth of one reel would be between eight hundred and one thousand feet. At first the films of Melies were shot in a single scene, as though filmed theater; in order to film narrative he then put seperate shots in order to become connected scenes, or "artificially arranged scenes". It would later become "a constant shifting of scenes" (Lewis Jacobs). Although the article discusses the lack of narrative closure and unicity of frame in early cinema, the subject of a recent e-mailed book review was the writing of one author that has offered the idea that there is less of a demarcation between early cinema and the films that provide transition to the two-reel film -writing about the editing of Melies, Ezra gives an account of his films being comprised of combinations of photographic reproduction, spectacle and narrative. Quite certainly, the images of film are moving images and can advance the narrative and more of the film that was to come later would be dramatic narrative. The cinema of Melies has been likened to a cinema of attractions in its repetitive use of suprise and sudden appearance; the temporality of attraction one of appearance-nonappearance rather than that of development.
One particular silent film, Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900), considerably under one minute in legnth, had starred William Gillete, ushering in the new century with the first screen appearance of the consulting detective. On vieweing the single shot film, the audience is as baffled as Holmes by the abrupt vanishings of a burgler that disappears and reappears throughout the room through the use of stop-motion trick photography, the film a superb example of early cinema and possibly any narrative of attractions (action within the frame) there may have been.
Charles Musser writes that more than four fifths of the films made by Edison between 1904 and 1907 were narrative or stage fiction; among these was the 1906 film Kathleen Mavourneen.
William Rothman writes that only one sixth of the film before 1907 had storyline. While Kenneth MacGowan also mentions filmmakers that had used trick photography other than Melies, among them G. A Smith of England, he adds that not untill Cecil Hepworth, with the silent film Alice in Wonderland, (1903) were there films that included seperate scenes to articulate fantasy or narrative. A later screen version of the silent film Alice and Wonderland was filmed by W. W. Young in 1915. Edison had filmed a version of Jack and the Beanstalk as early as 1902. Silent film director Cecil Hepworth would shortly thereafter bring the element of editing narrative into his films with Rescued by Rover. (1905)
Heath sees early cinema as space articulated in tableau, filmed frontally, storyline achieved by the linking of scenes, as when they are linked by characters and their having entered the frame, to the viewer, spectacle being horizontal, scenographic space. Mary Ann Doanne equates the cinema of attractions with "an early form of cinema organized around single events" looking to the one-shot films as their often being "the spectacular deployment of the female body", as in the Biograph film, Pull Down the Curtains, Suzie (1904). Within a study of trade press and preformance style, "intertextuality and contextuality", which in this instance include a volume on stage acting written bmy actress Mae Marsh, Roberta Pearson looks at Biograph and demarcates a shift from codes within cinematic acting style that had occurred while narrative films was replacing the cinema of attractions. Pearson sees a "desirability of versimiltude" clamored for by movie reviews between 1908-1913 to replace acting that may have been "false, theatrical, and stagy, or, other words, histrionic." Whether or not action can be  histrioniclly coded or have versimilar code automaticlly, or incontrovertibly, brings the spatial relationships of the figure on screen into play, and as the expression of narrative, the camera as position or having position brings a difference between stage acting and film acting that can inevitably be availed by the close-up- the artist's model has been posed tightly within content and form. As a film historian, in Eloquent Guestures, Pearson goes further with the delineation of the cinema of attractions by further outlining the development and influence of the Vitagraph nine-foot line by addrssing, "Staigers chronology, set forth in Classical Hollywood cinema". "Prior to 1907," Pearson writes, "according to Staiger, one person, the cameraman, had control of all aspects of film production, from the selection of the subject to the final editing". Why the present author would look on this as pertinent is that in light of the early film of  Charles Magnusson that may have been newsreel in character and lacking narrative, as may have been the first Danish short films,  Pearson may have found a corrollary between studios in the United States and those in Scandinavia. She continues, "By 1909, the film studios began to institute the "director-unit" system to meet the need for twenty to thirty new reels a week." This positions the director as a script-supervisor where the cameraman is left to control  the lighting of the shot.
In regard to film preservation and the intertitle, The Danish Film Institute used the screenplay to Dreyer's film Der var Engang to provide descriptive intertitles to the film that explain its plot, including explanatory description that now appears in the same intertitle as the dialouge to the silent photoplay. Carl Dreyer had adapted the screenplay from the stage and seperated the two different types of intertitle while writing. D.W. Griffithuses offscreen space in his structuring of shots during the 1910 film What Daisy Said, directed for Biograph. Most of the shots to the film are exterior longshots with two or more characters with a static camera. Starring with Gertrude Robinson, Mary Pickford enters the frame from the far left of the screen and exits near to the end of the shot from that same side. In a subsequent shot she enters from the right side of the frame, quickly climbs a set of outdoor stairs, exits from the left and then reenters the frame from the left to begin the next shot, her dancing from one side of the screen to the other and the camera cutting almost on her action of entering and exiting to begin each shot. She runs in fron of the camera from the offscreen space that frames the exterior and then runs back to the same side of the screen to exit the frame in a brief shot. She later slowly descends the outdoor stairs during the film to depict despair. Her movement as a unifying image, the moving subject, serves to link the adjacent shots, her movement within the frame carried into each subsequent shot so that the spatial relationships with the frame of each individual shot are seen with the shot to shot relationships of camera position and reposition, character movement linking the image to create narrative continuity as the viewer is brought to the edges of the rectangular frame. The significant action of the scene bringing an involvement with with the protagonist, the causality in the storyline of the film is constructed without the frequent use of explanatory intertitles.
It is not suprising that Kenneth Macgowan writing as early as 1965 in Behind the Screen divides early silent film into three periods: 1896-1905; 1906-1915; 1916-1925. Form and content in film technique seem to have developed together.
In regard to film preservation and the search for silent film, in April 2005, United Press International reported that films dating back as far as 1910, including one film entitled "Little Snow White", were found by the Huntley Archive., the unknown of collection totalling more than six hundread cans of film kept hidden in an airplane hanger in the south of England. To add to this, during June of 2006, the only copy of the first British narrative film, a film depicting a pickpocket directed by Birt Acres in 1895, as well as as many as six films that were included in the body of work filmed by Thomas Edison, was found in an attic in West Midlands, England. ------------- On the film Predators of the Sea, Forslund writes, "Sjöström recounts his story simply and straitforwardly in remarkably well thought-out images of the kind we already know from Ingeborg Holm.
------
: Urban Gad directed Asta Nielsen in her first film, The Abyss (Afgrunden, 1910) in Denmark, a film often written about due to her popularity and to a scene contained in it in which she dances eroticly; both directors went to Germany
It was also that year that Urban Gad and Asta Nielsen would travel to Germany to film for Deutsche Bioscop. Asta Nielsen appeared on screen under Urban Gad's direction with the cinematographer Karl Freund behind the camera that year in the films The Moth (Nachtfalter) and The Strange Bird (Der fremde Vogel).

Aside from this was the consideration that once films had been begun to have been made that were two reels or more, dialouge,through the use of intertitles, and expository descriptions could be added to the way the causality of plotline was developed during a film and how character was delineated, intertitles that would not only lend continuity to the linear progression of storyline but also bring unity to it. Victor Sjostrom later would in fact use intertitles to act as retrospective first person, voice over narrative.
That Sjöström the actor would later be shown in both long shot and close shot in the same sequence shows the relation between the character on the screen and the space within the frame; in that the camera had been becoming increasingly authorial, it often seemed to provide an embodied viewpoint from which an idealized spectator could view onscreen space, and by its being authorial, could seem to reposition the spectator during the film through the use of a second central character. While discussing film technique as something that is a reproduction of the images before the spectator, Raymond Spottiswoode claims that "it can never attain to art", and yethe adds that there must be a freedom available to the director "if he is to infuse his purpose and character into the beings of nature, to change them that their life becomes more living, their meaning more significant, their vlaue more sure and true." He continues that while it can be put forth that there is only one camera angle that any scene can be photographed from, one relation to the camera that any object can be aquire within the varying spatial relations that it takes while arranged with the other objects in front of the camera, "there is no reason to suppose that the choice of a camera angle is not perfectly free." The attention of the spectator could be directed spatially. It is by being authorial that the camera can impart meaning, technique not only to have brought an objectification of what was in front of the camera but also of the camera itself as it observed the actors within the scene, as it photographed the object, the structure of the image deigned by the placement of the camera, the pleasure of the spectator derived in part from the parallel between the spectator and the camera. In regard to the camera being authorial, a group member of an e-mailed silent film mailing list recently in a post quoted a postulate of the theory of there being a cinema of attractions, "The narrator in the early films is sporadic; an occaisional specter rather than a unified presence."
------------ revise below by finding copy of IMP pickford------ In the United States, Mary Pickford had a year earlier left Biograph where she had filmed under the direction of D. W. Griffith and Frank Powell to film with Thomas Ince at IMP studios during the first two months of the beginning of 1911. Among the films she made there were Their First Misunderstanding, The Dream, Maid or Man, At Duke's Command, The Mirror, While the Cats Away, Her Darkest Hour and Artful Kate. Before returning to Biograph, she spent the last two months of 1911 at The Majestic Company, filming under the direction of George Loane Tucker and Owen Moore.
i --------------- During the Biograph silent film short The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) Griffith frames Lillian Gish at a table, only half of her visible in the frameline untill she leaves the table, and then cuts on the action of her leaving the frame as she crosses the screen from one interior into the adjacent one, her crossing the screen from left to right in both the shots Griffith had edited together, toward the far left side of the screen in the first, toward the middle of the screen in the next. Vertical space allows a disclosure in the film, one allowed by the moving figure as Gish skirts from one room to the next, her moving into the unexpected space the audience may or may not have already seen where there is action that has been simultaneously transpiring within the temporality of the film. In a film from the same year in which Gish only briefly appears, A Burgler's Dilema, Griffith again cuts on action often, particularly during entrances, but interpolates very brief exterior shots in between scenes, increasing their frequency and interspersing within the scene as the film continues and the pace of the action hastens, or complicates, with the plotline.
If it is that spatial compostition can be included as a part of the grammar, or syntax, of film, within that is pictorial continuity and the use of visual tropes. A spatial relation is established through screen direction as figure movment becomes motion within the frame and action that the camera can cut on before continuing it in the subsequent frame, the camera cutting within the scene for effect. The spatial movement of the character is continued from shot to shot, linking each of them through a directional continuity, and yet, within the scene, the contour of objects, their proximity to the camera and their arrangement in front of the camera as its various positions cause it to become more authorial, is varied with each contrast between the adjacent shots within the temporality of the scene. As an inscription of its own being authorial, the camera could participate in narrative drama as an unseen presence, particularly through its own repostioning, unobtrusive if omnipresent in its guiding the spectator toward the action of the scene. Establishing the relation between spectator and content, the actress as an element of the film's pictorial compostion, in turn, could, as an aesthetic object, often substitute for the gaze of the female spectator, particularly as a motif for femininity, quite possibly more noticebly during cut in close ups where, while photographed with the space between her and the camera only represented by her near filling the area of the frame, spectator interest would recess into brief plateau before the narrative would climb into an increase of identification untill the quiet, slow stillness of the close up that would come next.
The following year Mary Pickford would go from Biograph to Famous Player to make Bishop Carriage (four reels), Hearts Adrift (four-five reels) and A Good Little Devil (five reels) with the director Edwin S. Porter. Of the film, Pickford wrote, "we were made to read our entire speeches before the camera. The result was a silent reproduction of the play, instead of what should have been, a restatement of the play in terms of action and pantomine." For the most part, when filming her, Porter used medium and long shots; Kirkland would later use the close up. Writing about 1912 in her autobiography Sunshine and Shadow, silent film actress Mary Pickford remembers her first close up, "Billy took the shot, which was a semi-close up, cutting me at the waist...It was a new image of my face that I was waiting to see. What a frightening experience when my grotesquely magnified face finally flashed on the screen...But I was critical enough to notice the make up...'I think there's too much eyebrow pencil and shadowing around my eyes,' I said. Later,on a seperate occaision, she had realized there was low light reflected back towards her while she was readying her make up for a scene and had asked her director to use artificial light from below while filming her. The autobiography of silent film star Douglas Fairbanks, was titled Laugh and Live
------------ Having directed The Indian Massacre and Across the Plains the year before, Thomas Ince directed the silent films The Invaders (three reels), starring its co-director, Francis Ford,and Ethel Grandin, Shadows of the Past and Custer's Last Fight in 1912. Ince, and the directors that photographed with him, have been attributed with having been among the early directors to have varied camera postitions with the use of more than one shot during a scene, particularly the use of the reverse angle to cut around a scene and its use to develop the action of the scene during its climax. Author Kenneth MacGowan notes that Ince "strove for a theatric effect", but only with scripts that were "direct and tight" and used intertitles to advance character action, dramatically relating events as a technique of exposition.
If this was later remarked upon as being part of a comparision and contrast, Mary Pickford was to write, "As I recall, D. W. Griffith never adhered to a script. Improvisation was frequently the order of the day. Sometimes the camera registered an impromputu piece of off-story action and that too stayed in the film." Lillian Gish in no way contradicts her by writing about how Griffith used the editing room to develop storyline, particularly by adding close ups and shots of objects, "Later, he would make sense of the assorted shots in the cutting room, giving them drama and continuity." These cut-in shots were inserted into the scene to add "depth and dimension to the moment".
During 1912 the first film that would star Mary Miles Minter would appear on the marquee, the one reel The Nurse and Anna Q. Nilsson would make her first film, the one reel Molly Pitcher. Oddly enough, Nilsson's studio, Kalem, had given the title role of The Vampire to Alice Hollister, the two later united on the screen in A Sister's Burden (1915). In addition to the films of Louise Glaum,whom Fred Niblo directed in Sex (1920, seven reels), and Valeska Suratt, another film of that title had starred Olga Petrova, it seeming that quickly " 'vamp' became an all too common noun and in less than a year it was a highly active verb, transitive and intransitive" (Ramsaye). Anna Q. Nilsson would appear in War's Havoc, Under a Flag of Truce and The Soldier Brothers of Suzanna in 1912. Lillian Gish would later play a vamp in Diane of the Follies (1916). Birgitta Steene writes that in the films of Ingmar Bergman, "the vamp is portrayed as the social victim rather than the embodiment of sin."
Danish silent film director August Blom in 1912 filmed with the photographer Johanne Ankerstjerne for Nordisk Film, notably with the actress Clara Weith Pontoppidan, whom he directed in the film Faithful Unto Death (Et Hjerte af Guld) and had directed a year earlier in the film In the Prime of Life (Ekspedtricen), photographed by Axel Sorensen. Blom that year also for Nordisk Film directed Robert Dinesen in the films Stolen Treaty (Secret Treaty/ Den Magt Trede and The Black Chancellor (Den Sorte Kansler) with Valdemar Psilander, Ebba Thomsen and Jenny Roelsgaard, The Black Chancellor having been a film in which Danish silent film scriptwriter Christian Schroder appeared on screen as an actor. That year August Blom also directed A High Stake (Hjaerternes Kamp).
Danish film director Benjamin Christensen  followed with  Blind Justice (Haevnansnat, 1915), both films having starred the actress Karen Caspersen. The two films by Christensen were of the only three produced by the Dansk Biograf Compagni. Benjamin Christensen had starred as an actor with actress Karen Caspersen and Ellen Malmberg during 1913 in Skaebnebaeltet, directed by Danish silent film director Sven Rindom, his also that year having starred in the films Children of the Stage (Scenens Born, Bjorn Bjornson), starring Bodil Ipsen and Aud Egede-Nissen and Lille Klaus Og Store Klaus (Elith Reumert). Children of the Stage was produced by Dania Biofilm Kompagni.
--------- For Ingmar Bergman,the first notable Silent FILM is Ingeborg Holm from 1913. In an interview with Jonas Sima, he describes the directing of Victor Sjöström, "It is one of the most remarkable films ever made...Often he works on two planes, something being played out in the foreground,but then,through a doorway for instance,one sees sI'm omething quite different is going on in the background.". Produced by AB Svenska Biograteatern and five reels in legnth, it is also his screenplay from a play by Nils Krook which Sjöström had adapted for the stage in 1907. ------- Like Sarah Bernhardt, Hilda Borgström had came to film. Also in the film are Aron Lindgren and George Gronroos. William Larsson and Carl Barcklind both appear in the film as well. It is almost astounding that under the title Give Us This Day the legnth of the film is listed as having reached seven reels. Einar Lauritzen wrote, "The primitive tableau of the time cannot destroy the genuine feeling for both character and enviornment which Sjöström brought to almost every scene."
As a side note from the present author, the caption on the cover to the filmed version of The Painted Veil, starring Naomi Watts reads, "Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people." What is beautiful is not only that the images of film consist of our being in a position to them spectatorially, or the look that is entailed within suture, but that behind the close ups of faces there is a character, quite often one in the midst of drama- if the cinema of attractions was followed by a cinema of narrative integration, what concerns aesthetics is that no matter how maudlin or whether or not plot was translated into fantasy, the cinema had begun to develop character more fully, more deeply. Bengt Forslund writes, "I am fairly convinced that it was always the fate of the individual that intrigued Sjöström- not the circumstances that led to it."

Interestingly enough, one of the best explanations of classical narrative construction, narrative form which is often based on there being a casual relationship between events that are connected spatially during the film brought about by its characters, comes from the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. In his autobiography Images, Ingmar Bergman relates that it was Stina Bergman, then head of the script department, who had asked for him at Svensk Filmindustri. She and her husband Hjalmar Bergman had in fact met with Victor Sjöström while in the United States, where Stina Bergman had acquired the technique of scriptwriting. "This technique was extremely obvious, almost rigid; the audience must never have the slightest doubt where they were in the story. Nor could there be any doubt about who was who, and the transitions between various points of the story were to be treated with care. High points should be allotted and placed at specific places in the script and culmination had to be saved for the end. Dialougue had to be kept short." Author David Bordwell often approximates this description of continuity in the feature film. Bergman continues in the autobiography to write that many of the remarks that Stina Bergman made at that time were treasured by him and that Hjalmar Bergman was his idol.
the early photoplay Falling Leaves directed by Alice Guy Blanche the year prior to the filming of Ingeborg Holm, also being among films which centered its characters around a social drama. ---------- -Sweden, in 1953, made The Bread of Love (Karlekens brod). Writing about the films of Victor Sjöstrom, Bengt Forslund notes, "Guilt Redeemed, shot in the early summer of 1914, may perhaps be seen as an attempt to repeat the success of Ingeborg Holm. Guilt Redeemed (Skana Skuld) starred actress Lili Bech.
In 1913, Griffith directed Blanche Sweet in the films Love in an Apartment, Broken Ways, If We Only Knew and Death's Marathon. After the four reel Judith of Bethulia, a film which interestingly "is really an interior drama, in as much as the majority of the action is thoughtful, an interchange of emotions between two characters" (Slide), Griffith had left Biograph for Mutual to direct Gish in the five reel The Battle of the Sexes. With the advent of the feature film, in adddition to including a greater number of characters during each film, directors could more often include minor characters that would become spectators in the film watching the action, as when the camera had cut from a master shot to a closer angle, or during panning, character interest increased as the characters the viewer was watching were observed by the other characters in the film, the individual characters on the screen visual elements of the film that were to move in relation to each other, the film's secondary characters framing the action and visual interest of the film. The editing of Griffith would in fact begin to shift from one group of characters to another more often.
Lon Chaney appeared in his first films in 1913, among those being Back to Life (Alan Dwan, two reels), The Lie, Discord and Harmony and The Embezzler
Manne Gothson having had been being the assistant director to the 1915 film In the King's Uniform (I kronas klader). George af Klerker in 1915 contributed the film The Rose of Thistle Island (Rosen pa Tistelon), the first film in which the actresses Elsa Carlsson and Anna Löfström were to appear. The film was produced by Hasselblads Fotografiska and Victorias Filmbyra. Goteborg, Sweden provided the location in which the studios of Hasselblads Fotografiska AB were housed. Two of Hasselblad's photographers that filmed under the direction of George af Klercker were Gustav A. Gustafson and Sven Pettersson.
Besides the photographers Julius and Henrik Jaenzon, another of Sweden's cameramen was Hugo Edlund who photographed the film His Father's Crime (Hans faders brott, 1915), the director F. Magnussen's first film, it having starred Richard Lund and Thure Holm. Both Edlund and Julius Jaenzon are listed as having been the cinematographer to the films Den Moderna suffragetten and For sin karleks skull. Magnussen in 1916 also directed the films The Hermits Wife (Enslingens hustru), starring Greta Almroth, Her Royal Highness (Hennes kungliga hoghet) ,starring Karin Molander and At the Eleventh Hour (I elfte timmen), also starring Greta Almroth, each filmed by Hugo Edlund.
It was in 1915 that Frances Marion began writing photoplays, her being the scenarist to Daughter of the Sea (Charles W. Seay, five reels). She wrote The Gilded Cage (H. Knoles, five reels) in 1916 and Stolen Paradise (H. Knoles, five reels), Battle of Hearts (Apfel, five reels) and The Feast of Life in 1917. Theda Bara would make her first film in 1915, The Clemenceau Case and two films for the director Herbert Brenon, Kreutzer Sonata (five reels) and Two Orphans (seven reels), which had been filmed by Selig in 1911 with Kathlyn Williams. Montague Love, who appeared with Lillian Gish in Victor Sjöström's The Wind began in film in 1915 with Exile and in 1916 with A Woman's Way, The Gilded Cage, and Bought and Paid For.
Clarence Brown during 1915-1917 was the assistant director and editor at Universal for director Maurice Tourneur. Notably, in 1925 he directed The Goosewoman with Louise Dresser and Constance Bennet for Universal/Jewel..Cameraman William Daniels had been an assistant cameraman at Triangle before becoming chief cameraman at Universal.
1914-1915 was also the brief period during which Dansk Filmfabrik, in Aarhus, Denmark produced the films of director Gunnar Helsengreen, including I dodens Brudeslor (1914), starring Gerda Ring, Jenny Roelsgaard and Elisabeth Stub, Sexton Blake (1915), Menneskeskaebner (1915) and Elskovs Tornevej (1915), also starring Jenny Roelsgaard, Gerda Ring and Elisabeth Stub.
(photo:cinemateket) Directed by Victor Sjostrom and photgraphed by Julius Jaenzon, the first of Gustaf Molander's screenplays to become well known was Terje Vigen (1916), from the poem by Henrik Ibsen. The intertitles being from the poem, the structure of a poem would accomodate the structure of a silent film, and yet the film shows that there was beginning to be a grammar to film technique of its own. Edison's 1912 The Charge of the Light Brigade has a similar use of the lines from the poem as intertitles and there had been an adaptation by the Independent Motion Picture Company of Hiawatha (1909) with Gladys Hulette as well. The 1912 poem Vanteenheittajat, written in Finland by Eino Leino, was to be filmed shortly after its publication by director Kaarle Halme as Summer (Kesa) with Hilma Rantanen. In regard to film preservation, the film Terje Vigen was rediscovered from a German print in 2004 and the translated restored intertitles charmingly read Svenska Biografteatern at the top framed by their owl logo and are in the from of stanzaic quotation, their being expository. The opening sequence is shot beuatifully and shows Victor Sjostrom portraying Terje Vigen as elderly against a background of the ocean at night during a storm in a series of shots during which he is filmed in blue tint and is shown framed by a doorway in adjacent masked shots alternating between over-the-shoulder and strait on shots, our sharing his view of the storm as well as watching his looking out into it. The intertitles then take the form of narrator as the film cuts to a restropective scene shot in a sepia-like red of Sjostrom as a young man aboard a ship to begin the storyline. Tytti Soila writes, "The film also established the term 'literary cinema' in Sweden." When reviewed in the United States, the film was seen as "forcefull despite its occaisional indulgence in too much sentimentality and moralizing." Bengt Forslund writing about the film notes, "the explanation is undoubtedly that the description of Nature plays such a major role. It is really the sea that has the main part, like the mountains in The Outlaw and His Wife and the dust strom in Sjostrom's last major work, The Wind. Appearing in the film with Victor Sjostrom are Bergliot Husberg, Edith Erastoff and August Falck. Molander had written Miller's Dokument (1916), directed by Konrad Tallroth and starring Greta Almroth, before writing for Sjöström. Later, with his film DefiancPe (Trots, 1952) Molander was to introduce another screenwriter to modern audiences, Vilgot Sjöman (Lek pa regnbagen, Playing on the Rainbow, 1958). The film begins the story of Terje Vigen aboard a ship, the early exterior shots including his climbing the mast. Sjostrom cuts from an extreme longshot to a full shot of Terje Vigen sitting on the mast. His wife in the film is portrayed by Swedish silent film actress Bergliot Husberg the interior shots in which she is shown with are for the main part non-tinted. Sjostrom is seen in the foreground of a midshot during a tinted exterior shot and then, during the shot, runs from the camera to the background of the shot, the camera then returning to an exterior midshot of the husband and wife. To reinforce his use of the Scandinavian landscape and the foreground of the shot as a source of compositional depth, the interior scenes are again, contrastingly, non-tinted intercut with shots of Terje Vigen silhouetted in the froeground of the shot in front of the expanse of the night sea, the film tinted blue. During the film, the movement within the composition of the frame is often that of the sea. Act Two beins with Terje Vigen having eluded his pursuers. He is show in the foreground of the shot in his skiff rowing against the background of the sea, spotted in a vignette circled masked shot of his pursuers telescope. Crosses at a graveyard are silhouetted against the ocean's horizon to end Act Two. Act Three begins with the same scene that was used to being the film, Sjostrom as elderly looking toward the ocean at night. He leaves his cottage to kneel on the beach, the waves crashing against the rock. Sjostrom espies a sinking craft admist the pounding surf and boards his skiff to aid in their rescue, the ship tossing in the spray of the ocean. In a later shot, Sjostrom leaves his cottage as Edith Erastoff sails away, the film ending with a shot of the crosses at the graveyard near the ocean.
During 1916 Geoge af Klercker wrote and directed the film Calle's New Clothes (Calles nya klader), starring Mary Johnson and Tekla Sjoblom, and Calle as a Millionaire (Calle som miljonar), the first film in which actress Helge Kihlberg was to appear.

a the 1916 Danish Silent Film The Queen of the Stock Exchange (Die Borsenkonigin), written and directed by Edmund Edel. The film is from the Nederlands Filmmuseum. Paired with the film will be the trailer to the lost film The Sunken (Die Gesunkenen, Rudolf Walther-Fein, 1925) also starring Asta Nielsen, a film in which she costarred with the actress Olga Tschechova.
Triangle Film Corporation had been formed in late 1915 to combine the efforts of Thomas Ince, D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett. Sennett, who began at Biograph as an actor under Griffith had founded Keystone Studios in 1912. Not only was Sennett present at Biograph and Triangle with Griffith, but as a pioneer of silent film his name is alongside Griffith's in his contribution to the development of film technique and the development of a grammar of film, a grammar of scene construction. It may well be that the comedies of Mack Sennett have their origin in, or are a continuation of, the earliest of narrative films that prior to 1907, and prior to Griffith's joining Biograph, had brought together a cinema of attractions with films that depicted action, or the chase film. Just as Swedish silent film directors would use nature and landscape as a visual language, comedy would rely upon the visual in its use of the sight-gag. Among the comedies of 1912 were Love, Speed and Thrills directed by silent film director Mack Sennett and Love, Loot and Crash, also directed by the silent film pioneer Sennett, both films currently in public domain and both presently offered online by the Internet Archive, who were kind enough to write to the present writer and who it is sincerely hoped that in the future they will return again as my reader.
At Keystone in 1914 Mack Sennett had directed the first films of Charlie Chaplin, Making a Living and the silent film Kid Auto Races at Venice. In 1915, the silent film The Tramp would introduce a Chaplin character that would become familiar to audiences untill the end of the silent era. Silent comedian Charlie Chaplin would in 1916 leave Essanay studios, where he had made fourteen films, to film two-reel comedies with the Mutual Company, where he filmed The Immigrant (1917). Anthony Slide writes that Chaplin used as much film to shoot The Immigrant as D. W. Griffith had to film The Birth of A Nation. It was also at Mutual, where Chaplin had made eight films untill 1923, that Chaplin would film his first full legnth feature as director.
In 1912, while Stiller was beginning to film comedy in Sweden and Mack Sennet was beginning to film at Keystone, one of the other studios to produce comedies was Vitagraph. After joining Vitagraph in 1910, a studio for which he appeared in the film A Tale of Two Cities (1911) with Florence Turner and Norma Talmadge, John Bunny quickly became one of the most beloved of early silent screen comedians, teaming with Flora Finch in 1912 for films that included A Cure for Pokeritis, Stenographers Wanted, Irene's Fascination, and The Suit of Armor. The 1913 film Queen for A Day with John Bunny and the 1915 film Unusual Honeymoon with Flora Finch was screened July 30,2005 in Rosslyn, Virginia, near Arlington Virginia, as part of their film festival of silent comedies, which opened July 28 with the film Pool Sharks and a retrospective of the films of Mack Sennet, including Billy Bevan in the film Hoboken to Hollywood (1928).


---------- The Sunbeam, the first film written by June Mathis appeared on the screen during the year 1916 and Frank Lloyd would direct his first film, The Code of Marcia Gray (five reels), King Vidor his first film, Intrigue. Louise Glaum would that year star in The Wolf Woman (five reels). John Gilbert appeared in the films Apostle of Vengence, Bullets and Brown Eyes (five reels), The Eye of Night, Hell's Hinges and The Phantom and Lewis Stone appeared in his first films, The Man Who Found Out (1915) and Honor's Altar (Raymond B. West, 1916, five reels).

In directing The Girl From Marsh Croft (Tosen fran Stormyrtopet, 1917) for AB Svenska Biografteatern, Victor Sjostrom began a marriage between novel and film in his adapting the novels of Selma Lagerlof-one that would establish Swedish silent cinema as being f ilmic poetry. It is also his screenplay, as are the other screenplays he adapted from her novels, each of them having been reviewed by Lagerlöf. Writing in 1971 that the films of Swedish silent cinema were those to which "the prescence of mountain and pastoral landscapes gave a dimension of authenticity and elemental persuasiveness", Peter Cowie remarks upon Sjöström's use of bucolic subjects, David Robinson upon Sjöström's depiction of man's relationship to nature. Both find something spiritual or supernatural to the writings of Selma Lagerlöf, as though within the relation to the character's surroundings there is a solitude. Lauritzen noted that there is often the "juxtaposition of man and nature" in early Swedish cinema. Although remarking upon the films of Brunius, Stiller and Sjöström not having had been distributed to large audiences, as were the films of Ernst Lubitsch (Passion) that had starred Pola Negri, author Lewis Jacobs writes, "Opposed to the artificiality of the German films in their stress on the real world of nature, the sea and the landscape, Swedish pictures were impressive for their simplicity, realism, sensitive acting and sincerity." Starring the actress Karin Molander, when reviewed in the United States, the film was commended for its "unity of plot structure" and for "all its dramatic elements (being) dramatically related, its development (being) climactic and consitent.". Also in the film are Greta Almroth, Concordia Selander and Hilda Castegren in her first appearance on screen. The novel was in fact filmed again in 1947 by Gustaf Edgren and in 1958 Pby Gustav Ucicky with Maria Emo. Peter Cowie has put the films of Finnish director Ruani Mollberg (Earth is a Sinful Song, Maa on syntinen laula, 1973) alongside the films of Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, his writing, "His characters move not against the backdrop of field and lake and forest, but deep within the enveloping topography." ---------- Charles Magnusson in 1909 had hoped to film the novel The Wonderful Journey of Nils Holgersson, which Victor Sjöström had read with enthusiasm.
--------- Greta Garbo is quoted by Sven Broman as having said, "I know that he courted Sarah Bernhardt and wanted to write plays for her...But Strindberg still managed to get Sarah Bernhardt to do a guest performance in Stockholm- in La Dame aux Camelias at the Royal Dramatic Theatre."   Silent Film director idirector J. Gordon Edwards in 1917 would direct Cleopatra (ten reels) and Camille (six reels), written by Frances Marion, as well as Salome (seven reels), The Rose of Blood (six reels), The Forbidden Path and Under the Yoke (five reels). The Forbidden Path  like several of the films in which J. Gordon Edwards directed actress Theda Bara, is a lost film, and there are today no surviving copies in existence.  ,Frank Powell directed Heart of the Desert. A Modern Musketeer (five reels), directed and written by Allan Dwan, starred Marjorie Drew and Douglas Fairbanks. His first screen appearance had been in Bertie The Lamb. Frances Marion that year also wrote the photoplay to the film Temple of Dusk (James Young, five reels), her following it in 1919 with the scenarios to A Regular Girl (James Young, five reels), The World and its Woman (Frank Lloyd, seven reels) and The Cinema Murder (George Baker, five reels). Lillian Gish in 1917 had starred in the films The House Built Upon Sand (Ed Morrisey, five reels) with Kate Bruce and Souls Triumphant with Wilfred Lucas.
Actress Olga Hallgren appeared in two films directed by George Klerker, Brottmalsdomaren, with Gabriel Alw and the actor George Blickingborg in his first appearance on screen and Ett konst narsode with Greta Pfeil, the assistant director to the film, Manne Göthson. For hem och hard was photographed by Swedish cameraman Sven Pettersson, Brottmalsdomaren by Swedish cameraman Gustav A Gustafson and Ett konst narsode, by Carl Gustav Florin. In 1918 Klercker directed The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter (Fyrvaktarens dottar), Night Music (Nattliga toner), photographed by Gustav A Gustafson and starring Agda Helin, Helge Kihlberg and Tekla Sjöblom and Nobelpristagaren.
Thomas Ince left the Triangle Motion Picture to form Thomas H. Ince Studios. One silent short that had belonged to Blackhawk Films, was a tour of the studios filmed by Hunt Stromberg between 1920-1922. An intertitle from Blackhawk Films reads, "Insisting upon strict adherence to complete shootingscripts, Ince supervised the direction and editing of each picture and thus managed to give all the appearance of having been directed by Thomas H. Ince, regardless of who did actually direct." The short, sent to exhibitors, shows footage of Ince viewing the rushes from the previous afternoon.
--------- Part of Sjöström's directing included placing objects in an anglular relation to the camera. He reversed the direction of the character's profile when cutting back between full shots and close ups of the same shot and cut ins of the exterior landscape in the use of varying camera distance, the size of the object within the frame of each shot, the composition within the rectangle of the frame, also varying, it becoming "a screen technique of close up and cutback to clarify plot movement, intensify emotional content" (Ramsaye). The dramatic interest is as though fastened to the character, the attention of the spectator directed to him or her within the relation of each shot to the shots that are subsequent to them, composition decided upon in accordance with editing; an element of the scene could be included in the interest of the scene by the director with each decision as to where to position the camera. It may often be that character interest can be enhanced by thematic meaning and its processes, as something that is reiterated at different junctures of events and as a background to the developing relationships between characters, their interactions, it being that thematic meaning, within narrative, is enacted. It is not only landscape that can provide a backdrop that will develop the atmosphere within a film, but there is also the script, mood advanced with and by plotline, the character bringing unity to the narrative. In that both are elemnts of composition, the use of nature as a background and mise-en scene are part and parcel of each other, subject positioning being not only that characters interact not only with the spectator but also with mise en scene reflecting that spatial temporality is the interplay between mise en scene and the film's characters, characters that move into the space seperating the objects in the film, characters that move in front of and behind objects within the frame, characters that inhabit the space in which they are seen. If narrative organization could be provided by the use of mise en scene, mise en scene that would include within the spatial arrangement of composition the figure of the character within subject positioning, narrative clarity could be provided by the use of camera positions and the editorial devices of technique. There is a unique use of reverse direction in the opening sequences of F. W. Murnau's film Sunrise (nine reels) where the screen direction of adjacent shots is reversed while being incorporated into the montage, the montage effect, of the sequence.
During Orphans of the Storm, Griffith reverses the screen direction of close shots during a dialouge scene by inserting a shot of the absent Lillian Gish. After a dialouge intertitle of it being announced that the character is to marry a Princess of the Blood, Griffith cuts from a close shot in profile of the character facing the left edge of the frame to an interpolated shot of Gish as his beloved and object of his reverie, her facing the left edge of the frame, the camera then cutting back to the conversation and original close shot of his facing the left edge of the frame, Griffith reversing the screen direction while both are in close shot. In effect, the shot functions as disruptive-associative montage, the shots linked thematicly by their placement in the sequence. It very well could be that the use of spatial discontinuity, the cutting to a different location during the scene, harkens back to the cinema of attractions and the use of brief static shots for effect, a single shot with its own aesthetic value included into the narrative as being seperate, editing and camera placement articulating the erotic as thematic within narrative through the use of the eroticism of display.
Silent Film director J. Gordon Edwards in 1918 directed actress Theada Bara in the film Her Greatest Love, and if it seems like there is no bridge between Griffith and other directors that were his contemporaries in his later career, particularly De Mille, the subject matter of the film is "founded on the novel Months, by Ouida"; the first British novel to depict a divorced woman as happily remarried, and yet the novel is all that there is to go on other than magazine articles from the time period, the film itself is lost.



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Scott Lord on Silent Film
Silent Film
24 Sep 00:12

Swedish Film

by Anonymous

An e-mailed letter to the present author ends, "Many people in Sweden says that Greta Garbo is a main collector's item but the Garbo posters didn't fetch much interest." It was sent by a collector of movie posters who had been to the movie poster auction in Gothenburg, Sweden, which was held as part of the Gothenburg Film Festival, February, 2006. Included in the auction were two posters from the film A Two Faced Woman.

As there was speculation as to what script could possibly bring Greta Garbo back to the silver screen, as Eva Henning and Viveca Lindfors were being introduced to Swedish audiences and as Ingmar Bergman was laying the beginnings of a body of film that would secure him as the director that would circulate the films of the Swedish Film Institute into an international viewing, Ingrid Bergman was in the United States making the 1946 film Notorius with Alfred Hitchcock, her earlier having appearred in the film Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1941). It was also at this time that there would be a remake of Anna Karenina, starring Vivien Leigh and directed by Julien Duuvier.

From a script co-written by Birgit Tengroth based on her short stories, Three Strange Loves ( Thirst, Torst 1949), directed for Svensk Filmindustri by Ingmar Bergman and photographed by Gunnar Fischer, had starred Mimi Nelson, Eva Henning and Hasse Ekman. Birgit Tengroth also appears in the film. Hugo Bolander filmed as an assistant director with Ingmar Bergman and Oscar Rosander edited the film. Bergman writes that the film is in fact about a journey and that his aim was that the "complicated camera movements" be unnoticed by the audience; "you can see the seems if you look closely" (Ingmar Bergman). Bergman, during an interview with Swedish author Jonas Sima, had remarked, "I like Eva very much. She was an extraordinarily fine actress." Before Eva Henning appeared in The Banquet (Banketten, 1948), she had also appeared in Elvira Madigan (1943) and The Royal Rabble ( Kungliga patrasket, 1945) which also starred its director, Hasse Ekman. Ekman directed her with Alf Kjellin in 1945 in the film Wish on the Moon (Vandring med mannen). In 1947 she appeared with Sonja Wigert in his film One Swallow Doesn't Make A Summer (En fluga gor ingen sommar). Hasse Ekman had begun directing with With You In My Arms (Med dej i mina armar, 1940), the first film in which Elsie Allbin was to appear, it being followed by First Division (Forsta Divisionen, 1941) in which he and Lars Hanson starred. In 1942 he directed Ingrid Tiblad in Langor i dunklet and Marguerite Viby in Luck Arrives (Lyckan kommar). While comparing Swedish actresses of the thirties, Tytti Soila writes that Royal Dramatic Theater (Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern) "actors were easy to identify thanks to their inflated and stylized acting and above all-after the introduction of sound film- by their unnatural manner of delivering lines. Actors like Lars Hanson and Inga Tiblad never succeded in liberating themselves from this formal style of acting" Apparently this was not entirely to the dismay of Swedish audiences, as their films were still popular in Sweden.

In 1943 Hasse Ekman continued with the films Unexpected Meeting, Change of Trains (Om byte ar tage), with Sonja Wigert and The Sixth Shot (Sjatte Skottet), written by Gösta Stevens and starring Edvin Adolphson, Karin Ekelund and Gunn Wallgren. In 1944 he directed Lars Hanson again in His Excellency (Excellensen), with Gunnar Sjoberg and Erik Hampe Faustman as well as having directed A Day Will Dawn (En Dag Skall gry) with Edvin Adolphson for Sandrews Productions.

In 1946 the director filmed Nightly Encounter (Meeting in the Night/Mote i nattan) starring Eva Dahlbeck and When The Door Was Closed (When The Door Was Locked, Medan portan var stangd), all of which were films in which he had starred. Writing about the premiere of A Ship Bound for India (Skepp till Indialand, 1947), a film which had been based on a play by Martin Soderhjelm that had starred Gertrude Fridh, Ingmar Bergman describes a meeting with Hasse Ekman with "an unbelievably gorgeous Eva Henning at his side." The film was produced by Terrafilm.

Girl with Hyacinths (Flicka och hycintar, 1950) had again brought Eva Henning to the screen, it starring Anders Ek and directed by Ekman. The film is listed as being one of the favorites screenings of director Ingmar Bergman. Bordwell and Thompson, in a Bloglines RSS entitled Observations on film art and Film Art, blog that there are ten retrospective narrative scene-sequences in Girl with Hyacinths, but more notably rePlate that these retrospective narratives interlock. During the previous year Eva Henning had appeared with Hasse Ekman in his film The Girl From the Gallery/The Girl in the Third Row (Flickan fran tredje raden), which had also starred Maj-Britt Nilsson. Ekman directed the film for Terra Film.

She then made The White Cat (1951) (Den vita katten) with Gunnar Bjornstrand and Alf Kjellin and Gabrielle (1954), photographed by Gunnar Fischer and also starring Karin Molander, both of which films were also directed by Ekman. In 1948, Ekman directed Each Goes His Own way (Var sin vag) with Eva Dahlbeck and Gosta Cederlund and Little Marta Returns (Lilla Marta kommer till baka), produced by Terrafilm.

Viveca Lindfors began acting on the screen with the director Ivar Johanson in the films The Spinning Family (Snurriga Familjens, 1940), scripted by Torsten Lundquist and starring Annalisa Ericson, Imagine If I Marry the Vicar (Tank, Om Jag Gifter Mig Med Prasten), a Swedish Karleksdrama based on a novel by Ester Linden and starring Gudron Brost, Arne Mattsson the assistant director to the Swedish Karleksdrama, (1941) and The Yellow Ward / The Yellow Clinic (Gula Kliniken, 1942), with Anna Lindahl, Barbro Kollberg, Karin Kavli, Gull Natorp, Ruth Stevens and Mona Martenson. She then appeared with Birgitta Valberg in In Paradise (I Paradis, 1941) directed by Per Lindgren and with Gudron Brost in The Sins of Anna Lans (Anna Lans, 1943) a Swedish Karleksdrama directed by Rune Carlsten and photographed by Ernst Westerberg, it having been the first film in which actress Toivo Pawlo was to appear. Black Roses (Svarta Rosor, 1945), directed by Rune Carlsten, a remake of the earlier film, would star Viveca Lindfors with Eva Dahlbeck and Ulf Palme. Gösta Cederlund directed Lindfors in The Brothers' Woman (Brodernas kvinna, 1943), based on a novel by Ebba Richert and starring Britta Holmgren. The film was produced by Film AB Lux.

Eric Petschler, who had directed Greta Garbo in Sweden before she had travelled to the United States, appeared as an actor with Lindfors in the film Jag ar eld och luft (1944) directed by Anders Henrikson the assistant director to the film Gösta Folke.

One of the first films that Arne Mattsson was to direct, Marie in the Windmill (Maria pa Kvarngarden, 1945) had starred Viveca Lindfors, it also featuring the daughter of Victor Sjöström, Guje Lagerwall, as well as Edvin Adolphson, Irma Christensen, Linnea Hillberg and Rune Carlsten. In 1946, Lindfors starred with the director Hasse Ekman in his film (In the Waiting Room of Death(Interlude/I dodens vantrum) which had been based on a novel by Sven Stolpes, the assistant director to the film Bengt Ekerot. Like Greta Garbo she later came to the United States to make film. Among those in which Lindfors had appearred were The Adventures of Don Juan (1948) and The Raiders (1952). Swedish Film actress Mai Zetterling would decide upon England. Before later returning to Sweden, she appearred in several British films, the first of which, Frieda (1947), her performance having had been being under the direction of Basil Dearden. In 1948, Mai Zetterling was to appear in Terence Fischer's Potrait from Life, her then having appeared in the films The Bad Lord Byron (Macdonald), The Lost People (Knowles) and The Romantic Age (Greville).

Having read the script to the adaptation and having agreed to make the film,in 1949 Garbo made a thirteen minute screentest in black and white for La Duchesse de Langeais shot by William Daniels and James Wong Howe.

"I thanked him by leaving for Svensk Filmindustri, where Gustaf Molander had meaninwhile made a film out my original screenplay, Woman without a Face." Filmed under Victor Sjöström, the cinematographer to Kvinna utan ansikte (1947), scripted by Ingmar Bergman, was Ake Dahlqvist. The film stars Alf Kjellin, Gunn Wallgren, Anita Björk and Marianne Lofgren.

Photographed by Goran Strindberg and directed by Alf Sjöberg, Miss Julie (Froken Julie, 1950) begin with a series of exterior shots, often cutting in close up shots with long and full shots, almost as though to supplant the establishing shot with the use of an entire scene before it introducing two initially minor characters in a kitchen by showing the title character, potrayed by Anita Björk, evesdropping on them. He uses a horse drawn carriage to connect the interior dialouge of the one-act play to the open countryside, using long shots from different camera positions. As the film continues, Sjöberg uses statues and a lake during exterior shots of a garden to connect the characters to the landscape , which can nearly seem pastoral as the film begins to depend more and more upon the dramatic acting of Björk. The film then shifts to a legnthy interior dialouge scene as the two characters decide whether to leave the country and begin again together. The film concludes by Miss Julie being last seen in an exterior reestablishing shot. While writing about The Road to Heaven (Himlaspelet), Cowie attributes Söberg as being a director that "could reconcile the alfresco scope of the cinema" with the compressed acting and dialouge that comprises the playwright's articulation of the visual on the stage. Sjöberg had in fact returned to the theater after having directed Anders Henrikson The Strongest (Den Starkaste, 1929). Author Peter Cowie goes so far as to write, "But during the thirties Sjöberg was ostracized by the film industry. So keen was the appetite for frivolous domestic comedies that a director of Sjöberg's intent incongruous at the studious." Examining Sjöberg's adaptation of the Strindberg play, Tytti Soila views the subject positioning of the Anita Björk character as the use of the theatrical within film to structure the look of the character, "The object of her desire is her possibility of knowing and the consequences of knowledge: more than sexual satisfaction and love, the drama is about acquiring sexual experience and knowledge about sex." Ostensibly, the feminine gaze as a desire to acquire knowledge about sexual relations is also thematic in Vilgot Sjöman two films I am Curious Yellow and I am Curious Blue. The film Home from Babylon (Hem fran Babylon, 1941), starring Gerd Hagman, marks the beginning of Alf Sjoberg's return from the theater to to film . Alf Sjöberg directed Maj-Britt Nilsson in her first film, Journey Out (Resanbort, 1945), photographed by Martin Bodin and starring Gunn Wallgern and Hjordis Petterson. In 1946 Sjöberg paired Mai Zetterling and Alf Kjellin in Iris and the Lieutenant (Iris och lojnantshjarta). Froken Julie was produced by noted author and film historian Rune Walderkranz for A B Sandrew.

After filming Sonja Wigert in And All These Women (...och alla dessa kvinnor, 1944) Arne Mattsson continued directing in 1945 with the comedy Sussie, written by Sölve Cederstrand and starring Gunnar Bjönstrand and Marguerite Viby and the films Incorrigible (1946) and Bad Eggs (Rottagg, 1946), scripted by Sven Zetterström and photographed by Sten Dahlgren and starring Marianne Lofgren, Ingrid Backlin, Harriet Philpson and Elsie Allbin. In 1946 Arne Mattsson also directed Gunnar Bjornstrand in the film Peggy pa Vift, starring Gunnel Brostrom and Marguerite Viby, and, in 1947, followed with the film Father Wanted (Pappa sokes), starring Gunnar Bjönstrand and Sickan Carlsson.

1946 was to mark the film Det eviga leendet being on the theater marquees in Sweden, it being the film that would introduce Eva Lombard. The film was written and directed by Lars Eric Leidholm and starred Barbro Hogstadius. Eva Dahlbeck that year appearred in Rolf Husberg's film Love Goes Up and Down/Love and Downhill Skiing (Karlek och stortlopp), starring Agneta Lagerfelt, Signe Furst, Hjordis Petterson and Karin Miller in her first on screen appearance. Agneta Lagerfelt would also that year appear in Rolf Husberg's film Evening at Djurgarden (Djurgardsikvallar), phototographed by Julius Jaenzon and starring Ingrid Bjork, Naima Wifstrand and Emy Hagman as well as the film Kvinnor i vantrum, directed by Gösta Folke, written by Solve Cederstand and photographed by Eric Blomberg. The film stars Britta Holmberg, Anna Lindahl and Solveig Lagström. Eic Blomberg that year was also the cinematographer for the film Wedding at Sun Island (Brollopet Pa Solo), directed by Ivar Johansson and starring Rut Holm, Emy Hagman and Sibrit Molin in what was to be her first appearance on the screen. Nils Poppe in 1946 would direct The Balloon (Ballongen), with Marianne Aminoff, Inga Landgre, Marianne Lögren, Ingrid Borthen and Marianne Gyllenhammar. Schamyl Bauman that year directed the film Saltwater Spray and Tough Old Boys (Saltstank och Krutgubbar) photographed by Sven Nykvist and starring Irma Christensen, Gull Natorp and Inrid Ostergren.

Finnish film director Teuvo Tulio directed actress Regina Linnanheimo in two films during 1946, The Cross of Love (Rakkauden risti/Karleckens kors) and Restless Blood (Levoton veri/Orolist blod). He followed in 1947 by directing her in the film In the Grips of Passion (Intohimon vallasa/I ledelsens famn). Finnish actress Helena Karan that year appeared in the film Ruined Youth (Tuhotto nuoruus), directed by Hanu Leminen.

Ake Ohberg in 1948 directed Where the Wind Blows (Dit Vindarna Bar), the first film in which Ingrid Thulin was to appear. In the film are also George Fant and Eva Strom. Elof Ahrle that year directed Livet pa Forsbyholm, photographed by Julius Jaenzon. That year Gosta Werner directed Maj-Britt Nilsson in The Street (Gatans). Arne Mattsson that year directed the film Dangerous Spring (Farlig var). Erik Hampe Faustman in 1948 directed Eva Dahlbeck in the film Lars Hard and George Fant with Illona Weiselmann in the film Foreign Port (Fremmande hamn/Strange Harbor). Anders Henrikson in 1948 directed Eva Dahlbeck in the film The Girl From the Mountain Village (Flickan fran fjallbyn).

Photographed by Gunnar Fischer and edited by Oscar Rosander, Port of Call (Hamnstad, 1948) starred Nine Christine Jonsson as the central character in a script written by Olle Lansberg titled The Gold and the Walls, the film "shot on location in Gotheburg, with interiors at the SF studios in Stockholm" (Peter Cowie) where the camerawork of Bergman begins showing not only the enviornment in which the characters find the situations that emerge around them, but also what may isolate the character while involved with the development of plotline events as he or she develops as character. Also in the film are Bergit Hall, Mimi Nelson, Birgitta Valberg and Britta Billsten. Jorn Donner remarks upon Port of Call as being noteworthy for its "unsentimental tone" in regard to the narrative and its exposition of storyline, and for there being a uniformity to the style in regard to the technique used in the film. In Images, Ingmar Bergman writes that he tried to include as many exteriors as he could in order to create something new with Swedish cinema that would include the use of realism. Jorn Donner in fact attributes the film with having brought a realism to its character portrayal and goes so far as to invoke the camerawork of Stiller and Sjostrom in that Bergman uses the enviornment to bring the development of its characters to the depth that ends the film.

In 1949 Arne Mattsson directed Victor Sjöström in The Railroad Men (Rallare), based on a novel by Olle Lansberg. It was photographed by Martin Bodin who had worked with Arne Mattsson on the film A Guest Came (Det kom en gast, 1947) with Sture Lagerwall and Anita Björk. Mattsson again directed Sjöström in Hard klang (1952) with Margit Carlqvist and Edvin Adolphson and Men in Darkness (Mannen i Morker, 1955). In 1949 he also directed Woman in White (Kvinna i vitt) with Mimi Nelson and Eva Dahlbeck.

In her autobiography, All Those Tommorows, Mai Zetterling writes, "Music in the Dark was to be my first and last picture with Ingmar Bergman directing. It was in 1947...Music in the Dark was basically a sentimental love story about a man who goes blind through an accident and a young girl who falls in love with him. What Ingmar was interested in was the man's loss of identity, his lonliness and his despair." She continues candidly and with all kindness to describe her relationship with Bergman as an actress at that time as not having brought enough to her performance and that she looked to Alf Sjöberg for inspiration. Musik i Morker (Night is My Future) was photographed by Göran Strindberg and stars Hilda Borgström, Gunnar Björnstrand and Birger Malmsten. Jorn Donner writes, "Compared with Port of Call, Night is My Future seems to be an almost completely commercial film. In his autobiography Images, Bergman writes that he had in fact directed the film with the thought of it being enjoyable to watch

Theaters in 1947 were to see the script writing of Rune Walderkranz, cowriting with Ragnar Arvedson on a film that Arvedson co-directed with Schamyl Bauman, Maj pa Malo, photographed by Sven Nykvist and starring Inga Landre. Rune Waldekranz that year produced the film Life in the Finn Woods (Livet i Flunskogarna), directed by Ivar Johansson and phtographed by Eric Blomberg. Starring are Sigbrit Molin, Barbro Ribbing, Mirjami Kuosmanen and Nine-Christine Jonsson. It was also the year that Song of Stockholm (Sangen om Stockholm) , would be shown on the theater screens of Sweden. Directed by Elof Ahrle, the film stars Hilda Borström, Alice Babs, Karin Swenson and Marianne Gyllenhammar. Audiences would also be reintroduced to actress Eva Dahlbeck, who appeared in the film The Key and the Ring (Nyckeln och Ringen), under the direction of Anders Henrikson. The film was photographed by Harald Berglund and scripted by Swedish silent film screenwriter Bertil Malberg. Also starring in the film were Aino Taube, Ulla Sallert, Hild Bögström and Maj Töblad. Henrikson would again direct Eva Dahlbeck in 1948 in the film The Girl from the Mountain Village (Flickan fran fjallbyn), photographed by Bertil Palmgren and written by Sven Gustafson. The film also stars Kerstin Holmber and Sif Ruud. Inger Juel would appear in her first film in 1947, The Most Beautiful in the World (Det Vackraste Pa Jorden), also directed by Anders Henrikson and starring Marianne Lofgren. Gosta Bernhard directed his first two films in 1947, 91:an Karlssons permis and En sommarweekend. Sture Lagerwall went from actor to director with the film Here We Are Coming (Har kommer vi) in 1947, scripted by Torsten Lundquist, Greta Garbo biographer Fritiof Billquist and Marianne Aminoff having appeared in the film. The film was co-directed with actor John Zacharias, as was the film I Love You, Karlsson (Jag Elskar Dig, Karlsson) in which he starred with Marguerite Viby, Viveca Serlachius, Solveig Lagstrom and Linnea Hillberg. The cinematographer to the film was Rudolf Frederiksen. Lagerwall appeared as an actor in Gunnar Skoglund's film How to Love (Konsten att alska, 1947) with Wanda Rothgardt and in Bengt Palm's film The Night Watchman's Wife (Nattvaktens hustru, 1948) with Britta Holmberg, a film which was produced by AB Centrumfilm. Gosta Folke that year directed Maj-Britt Nilsson in the film Maria. Stig Jarrel in 1947 directed and appeared in the films Evil Eyes and The Sixth Commandment (Sjatte Budet), which also starred Ingrid Backlin and Gosta Cederlund. Lars-Eric Kjellin directed his first film that year, Don't Give Up (Tappan inte sugen), starring Ulla Sallert and Annalisa Erickson and photographed by Gunnar Fischer. Eva Dahlbeck that year appeared in the film Two Women (Tva kvinnor), directed by Arnold Sjöstrand. Eric Hampe Faustman in 1947 directed the Viking-medieval adventure film Harald the Stalwart (Harald Handfaste), with George Ryderberg and George Fant. Anita Björk that year appeared in the film No Way Back (Ingen vag till backa), written and directed by Edvin Adolphson. Ragnar Arvedson that year directed Edvin Adolphson and Karin Ekelund in the film Dinner for Two (Supe for tva), with Mimi Pollack, it having been the first film in which actress Ann-Mari Wiman was to appear. Swedish actress Monica Nielsen appeared in her first film in 1947, Kvarterets Olycksfagel directed by P. G. Holmgren with Ella Lindblom and Lillemor Appelgren.

Swedish Film-EvaThe following year, Gustaf Molander continued directing with the film Life Starts Now (Nuborjar livet, 1948), photographed by Ake Dahlqvist, edited by Oscar Rosnader and written by Rune Lindstrom and starring Wanda Rothgardt and Mai Zetterling. The Trumpet Player and the Lord (Trumpetar och Var Henne), a film written by Ingmar Bergman was became an opportunity for he and Gustaf Molander to script the film Eva (1948), directed by Molander and photographed by Ake Dahlqvist, with Eva Stiberg in the title role supported by Swedish actresses Hilda Borgström Wanda Rothgardt and Inga Landgre. Erland Josephson and Stig Olin play to Birger Malmsten in the film. In 1949 Molander directed Love Will Conquer (Karleken Segrar), scripted by Gösta Stevens, with Ingrid Thulin. Egil Molmsen in 1948 would direct Ingrid Thulin and Gerda Landgren in the film Kann dej som hemma. The very beautiful Else Fisher was introduced to Swedish movie goers in 1948 in the film Stanna en stund, directed by Alex. Jute and photographed by Sten Dahlgren. In 1952, she appeared with Yvonne Lombard in the film Bom the Flyer (Flyg-Bom).

Gunnar Hogland directed the film Vi bygger framtiden with Ingrid Thulin in 1949. Both Eva Dahlbeck and Max von Sydow that year appeared in the film Only a Mother (Bara en mor), adapted from a novel by Lo-Johansson, photographed by Martin Bodin and directed by Alf Sjöberg. The film was the first film in which actresses Sonja Rolen and Margaretha Krook were to appear. Mimi Pollack also appears in the film. Bara en mor is listed by the Ingmar Bergman Foundation as being among one of the most liked by the director. The Woman Who Disappeared (Kvinnan som f'rsvann), directed by Anders Angström and photographed by Bertil Palmgren in 1949, starred Inger Juel and Cecile Ossbahr. Arthur Spjuth that year wrote and directed his first film in 1949, Bohus Bataljon, codirected by Sölve Cederstrand, it starring Greta Garbo biographer Fritiof Billquist. After having directed his royal majesty Gustaf V. Kung av Sverige in the film Directorn ar upptagen (1945), Per Gunvall directed the film Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Langstrump, 1949) with Viveca Serlachius and Benkt-Ake Benktsson. Lars-Eric Kjellin in 1949 directed the films The Lord from the Lane (Greven fran granden) with Mimi Nelson and Annalisa Ericson and Father Bom (Pappa Bom). In a film scripted by Rune Lindström, Ake Ohberg that year brought Sonja Wigert, Inger Juel and Margareta Fahlen to the screen in Destination Rio (Vi flyger pa Rio). Schamyl Bauman in 1949 brought Harriet Andersson to the screen in the film Playing Truant (Skolka Skolan). Maj-Britt Nilsson in 1949 appeared in the film Spring at Sjosala (Sjosalavar), produced by Rune Waldekranz and directed by Per Gunvall. Ivar Johansson in 1949 wrote and directed the film Lasky-Lasse goes to Delbo (Lang-Lasse i Delsbo), photographed by Sven Nykvist and starring Anna Lindal and Ulla Andreasson. The Swedish Horseman (Svenske Ryttaren) was directed by Gustaf Edgren in 1949 and starred Elisabeth Söström, Gunnel Brostrom, Gull Natorp and Barbro Nordin.

Ingrid Thulin-Swedish FilmIn 1950, Ivar Johansson directed When Lilacs Bloom (Nar Syrenerna blomma), photographed by Sven Nykvist and Land of Rye (Ragen Rike), photographed by Sven Nykvist and starring Nine-Christine Jonsson and Linnea Hillberg. Hasse Ekman that year directed Ingrid Thulin, Irma Christenson, Gertrud Fridh and Eva Dahlbeck in the film Jack of Hearts (Hjarter knekt), the first film in which Barbro Larsson would appear. The Newer, a novel by Albert Olsson published in 1947, was quickly adapted for Arne Mattsson, who directed Ingrid Thulin , Ruth Kasdan, Sigge Furst and Irma Christenson in the film When Love Arrived in the Village (Nar karleken till byn, 1950). Mattsson also that year directed Cruise Romance (Kyssen pa kryssen), starring Annalisa Ericson, Gunnar Bjornstrand and Ake Gronberg as well as Saucepans-journey (Kastrull-resan), starring Eva Dahlbeck and Sigge Furst. Scripted by Gösta Stevens and photographed by Ake Dahlquist, Gustaf Molander directed Eva Dahlbeck, along with Elsa Carlsson, Olaf Winnerstrand, Viveca Serlachius and Karl-Arne Homsten in the film Fastmo uthyres, 1950, the first film in which actress Birgitta Olzon was to appear. Ake Ohberg that year directed Ulla Sallert and Mimi Nelson in the film Young and in Love (Ung och kar). Kungs Film in 1950 produced Gosta Werner's film Across the Yard and Two Flights Up (Tva trappor over garden), photographed by Sten Dahlgren and starring Gertrud Fridh, Irma Christensen, Ilse-Nore Tromm, Sif Ruud, Lisskulla Jobs, Ann Bornholm, Ingrid Lothigius, and Else Fischer. Schamyl Bauman in 1950 paired Edvin Adolphson and Sickan Carlsson in Frokens forsta barn, a film that would include an early screen appearance of Swedish film actress Harriet Andersson. Froken forsta barn was photographed by Hilding Bladh. During 1950, both Birger Malmsten and Haide Göransson appeared on the same movie set together with the film Regementets ros, directed by Begnt Jarrel and photographed by Olof Ekman. Also in the film are Margareta Fahlen and Siv Thulin. Swedish film actress and acquaintance of Greta Garbo Mimi Pollack directed her first film, Mama gor Revolution, photographed by Elner Akesson and scripted by Elsa Appelquist, in 1950.

Peter Cowie looks to the film Summer Interlude (Sommarlek, 1950), starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, Alf Kjellin and Annalisa Ericsson, as being the film where Ingmar Bergman began to develop unique uses of film technique and a more extensive use of the close-up to dramaticly develop character. In his autobiography Images, Ingmar Bergman writes, "A touch of tenderness is achieved through Maj-Britt Nillsson's performance. The camera catches her with an affection that is easy to comprehend." In his autobiography Images, Bergman gives an account of his writing the script, "I wrote several versions, but nothing fell into place. Then Herbert Grevenius came to me aid. He chiseled away all the superfluous episodes and pulled out an original story." To continue the tradition established by Sjöström and Stiller of using the enviornment to convey theme in Swedish film, a tradition that would show Bergman's technique in Cries and Whispers as being that of a director that had filmed after Gustav Molander, Bergman discusses the lighting used in the film and his filming at twilight, "The landscape had a special mixture of a tempered countryside and wilderness, which played and important part in the different time schemes." Immediately after filming Summer Interlude, Ingmar Bergman went into the production of the film This Can't Happen Here (Sant Hander Inte Har). He writes, "I was not at all adverse to making a detective story or a thiller; that was not the reason for my discomfort. Neither was Signe Hasso the reason. She had been hailed as an international star who Svensk Filmindustri, with incredible naivete, had hoped would make the film a raging success." Again Herbert Grevenius was to be the scriptwriter with Bergman, his adapting for the screen a novel written by Peter Valentin. The cinematographer to the film was Gunnar Fischer, its editor Lennart Wallen. Alf Kjellin also appears on screen in the film as does actress Yngve Nordwall.

In 1951 Arne Mattson directed the film Rolling Sea/Carrying Sea (Barande Hav) with Eva Dahlbeck and Ulla Jacobsson. Eva Dahlbeck that year also appeared in the film Daisywheel Helena (Skona Helena), cowritten by Rune Walderkranz with its director, Gustaf Edgren and photographed by Hilding Bladh. That year Gosta Bernhard directed Kenne Fant in the film Poker, which also starred Ingrid Backlin and Margetha Löwler.

Swedish poet Folke Isaksson in 1951 published the volume Vinterresa, his following it in 1954 with the volume Det grona aret. 1953 saw the publication of Isaksson's novel Irrarder.

In 1952 Gösta Werner directed Ingrid Thulin in the film Mote med livet. The Long Search (Memory of Love, Han glomde henne aldrig, 1952), a film that had featured the daughter of Victor Sjöström, Guje Lagerwall, and Anita Björk, had also starred Sven Lindberg, who co-directed the film with Robert B. Spafford. Lars Eric Kjellgren was again to be the director of Mimi Nelson, his teaming her with Annalisa Ericson that year for the 1952 film Say it with Flowers (Sag det med blommar), scripted by Gösta Stevens.

Noregian film director Arne Skouen in 1952 wrote and directed the film Forced Landing (Nordlanding), photographed byPer G. Jonson and starring Randi Kolstad.

Secrets of Women (Waiting Women, Kvinnors vantan, 1952) is of an episodic narrative structure, it being a film where "its narrative method gives us more variety than depth" (Birgitta Steene); each of the female characters narrates a retrospective account from their marriage, Bergman dividing the film not only between scenes but between characters as well. In the film are Anita Bjõrk, Maj-Britt Nilsson and Eva Dahlbeck. Anita Björk and Jarl Kulle are filmed in close-up, Maj-Britt Nilsson and Birger Malmsten are shown on location in exterior shots and Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand are filmed by Gunnar Fischer in an elevator sequence during a dialouge scene involving mirrors which are "used to suggest the inanity of the repartee" (Peter Cowie) as the conversation is drawn out by the couple being filmed in a continuous take. Ingmar Bergman had based the scene on one of his own experiences. He writes, "There was something fateful about the meeting between the three of us: me, Eva and Gunnar. Both of them were talented and creative actors. They felt immediately that although I had perhaps not yet written a spectacular text, the collaboration offered them great oppourtunities.

Bergman writes that it was because he was so pleased with the acting performances of Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Bjönstrand in Secrets of Women that he wrote A Lesson in Love (En lektion i karlek, 1953) for them in order to develop the theme of the elevator sequence more elaborately. Birgitta Steene also compares the two films thematicly, their both being concerned with the acceptance on the part of the female character of a husband within an erotic relationship. As in Secrets of Women, Bergman uses retrospective narrative to present the characters and storyline. Photographed by Martin Bodin, A Lesson in Love quickly introduces itself as a comedy with a voice over and a musical box. Gunnar Bjornstrand and Eva Dahlbeck meet each other on a train after a series of dialougue scenes that cutback and forth establishing the films interwoven narrative structure. The camera then holds Bjornstrand and Harriet Andersson in conversation during a series of scenes in which she falls alseep in his arms. Bergman uses the train compartment to keep Eva Dahlbeck and Bjornstrand in close up and in tight close up. The prolonged dialouge scenes that are contrasted with the complicated narrative framework then shift to the retrospective of Eva Dahlbeck as she is framed by a camera that pans only minimally. The storyline, after reintroducing Harriet Andersson into the film, concludes in Denmark.

In 1953 Erik Hampe Faustman directed Inga Tiblad, Annalisa Ericsson, Birgitta Valberg, Eva Dahlbeck and Ulla Sjoblom in the film House of Women (Kvinnohuset). Notably, Eva Dahlbeck also that year starred in Alf Sjöberg's film Barabbas, with Yvonne Lombard and Jarl Kulle. Rolf Husberg that year wrote and directed the film All the World's Delights (All jordens frojd), starring Ulla Jacobsson, Kenne Fant and Birger Malmsten. Gustaf Molander in 1953 directed Unmarried (Glasberget) starring Hasse Ekman and Gunn Wallgren.

Hidden in the Fog (I dimma dold) was directed in 1953 by Lars-Eric Kjellgren and starred Eva Henning, Sture Lagerwall and Sonja Wigert, its cinematographer, Gunnar Fischer. That year Lars Eric Kjellgren also directed Max von Sydow, Anne-Marie Gyllenspatz and Ingerid Vardund, Lissi Alandh in the film No Mans Woman (Ingen mans kvinna). The film also marks the first Swedish screen on screen appearance of Norwegian actress Ella Hval. Hasse Ekman in 1953 directed the film We three are making our debut (Vi tre debutera), starring Gunnar Bjornstrand and Maj-Britt Nilsson, the cinematographer to the film Gunnar Fischer. That year Eva Dahlbeck appeared in The Shadow (Skuggan), the first film directed by Kenne Fant. It was photographed by Kalle Bergholm and also starred George Rydeberg and Pia Arnell. That year Fant also directed Edvin Adolphson and Pia Skoglund in Wingbeats in the Night (Ving slag i nattan). Bror min och jag, directed in 1953 by Ragnar Frisk and starring Anna-Lise Baude included Birgitta Andersson in a small role, it being the first film in which she was to appear. Eva Dahlbeck appeared under the direction of Ake Ohberg in the 1953 film The Chief from Goingehovingden (Goingehovingden). Martin Söderhjelm in 1953 directed Fritiof Billquist in the film Dance with my Doll (Dansa min docka). Rolf Husberg in 1953 directed Swedish silent film actress Hilda Borgstrom in the film Each Heart has its Own Story (Vart hjarta har sin saga). Egil Holmsen that year directed Margit Carlqvist in the film Marianne. Carlqvist also during 1953 appeared in the film Path to Klockrike (Vagen till Klockrike), directed by Gunnar Skoglund and starring also starring Edvin Adolphson. The first two films directed by Stig Olin were released in 1953, both starring Alice Babs and Sigge Furst and both written by the director, I dur och skur, photographed by Hilding Bladh and also starring Yvonne Lombard, and Resan till dej, co-written by Hasse Ekman and photographed by Göran Strindberg, Anders Henrikson and Ulla Sjöblom having also starred in the film. Storm over Tjuro (1953), starring Gunnel Broström and Margaretha Krook and Salka Valka (1954), starring Gunnel Broström and Folke Sundquist, both directed by Arne Mattsson, were photographed by Sven Nykvist. Mattson in 1954 also directed the film Enchanted Journey (Fortroll ad vandrig).

During an interview, Ingmar Bergman told Stig Bjorkman, "Bibi has one or two lines in Smiles of a Summer Night, but she had already been in lone of my Bris films. Even at the time she had been in a lot of films: The Ghost at Glimmingehus and Dumbom. Bibi had started when she was sixteen." The Ghost at Glimmingehus (En Natt pa Glimmingehus, 1954), directed by Torgny Wickman, had also starred Begnt Logart, Gunnilla Akerrehn, Ingeborg Nyberg and Britta Ulfberg.

The Bris Soap commericial, Reklamfilm Bris, in which Bibi Andersson had appeared was one of the last of nine entitled The Princess and the Swineherd (Prinsessan och svinaherden, 1953). The commercials were filmed over a three year period and photographed by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer In Images, Ingmar Bergman writes, "Later, during the time when movie production was shut down, I put together a series of commercials for the soap Bris (Breeze), and I had alot of fun challenging stereotypes of the commercial genre by playing around with the genre itself and making miniature films in the spirit of George Melies." The Magic Show (Trollenet), starring Lennart Lindberg had appeared in 1952. Lindberg also that year appeared in the commercial The Film Shooting, with Torsten Lilliecrona. Commercials filmed in 1951 had included Bris Soap (Tvalen Bris) with Barbro Larsson and King Gustavus III (Gustavianskt). Barbro Larsson in 1952 appeared in The Inventor (Uppfinnaren) and The Rebus (Rebusen). The Film Shooting (Tredimensionellt), with actress Marion Sundh, was filmed in 1953.

Kenne Fant in 1954 directed the film Young Summer (Ung sommar), photographed by Kalle Bergholm and starring Lennart Lindberg, Birgit Lundin and Edvin Adolphson and based on a novel by Per Olof Ekström. Kenne Fant again directed Birgit Lundin in 1956 in the film I takt med tiden, written by Volodja Semitjov and photographed by Olof Ekman. That year Fant also directed The Taming of Love (Sa tukas karleken), starring Karin Ekelund and Jane Friedmann. The film was produced by Nordisk Tonefilm. Eric Hampe Faustman in 1954 directed Gull Natorp, Ulla Sjoblöm, and Marta Dorff in God the Father and the Gypsy (Gud Fader och tattaren) photographed by Swedish cinematographer Curt Jonsson and Annalisa Ericson in the film The Lunchbreak Cafe (Cafe Lunchrasten). Stig Olin in 1954 directed Hasse Ekman in his film The Yellow Squadron (Gula Divisionen) starring Meg Westergren. Dance on Roses (Dans pa rosor, 1954), starring Sickan Carlsson, was written and directed by Schamyl Bauman. Victory in the Dark (Seger i morker), directed by Gösta Folke appeared in Swedish theaters in 1954. Torgny Wickman in 1954 directed Astrid Bodin and Berit Frodi in their first appearances on screen in the film Girl Without a Name (Flicka Utan Namn), photographed by Rune Ericson and written by Volodja Semitjov. The film was produced by Sandrew-Bauman and also stars Karin Miller, Alf Kjellin and Els a-Ebben Thornblad. Swedish silent film director Alf Sjöberg in 1954 wrote and directed the film Karin Mansdotter, in which Ulla Jacobsson, Birgitta Valberg and Ulla Sjöblom appeared.

In addition to filming Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens Leende), in 1955 Ingmar Bergman directed Journey into Autmun (Dreams, Kvinnodrom). Peter Cowie writes that it was Anders Hendrikson that was to appear in the film, the role being written for him untill forfieted and taken by Gunnar Bjöstrand. Scripted by Bergman and photographed by Hilding Bladh, the film stars Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, Inga Landre, Niama Wifstrand, Git Gay and Renee Björling.

Alf Sjöberg in 1955 wrote and directed the film Wild Birds (Vildfaglar), starring Maj-Britt Nilsson, the cinematographer to the film Martin Bodin. The film is based on the novel Nisse Bortom written by Bengt Anderberg. Anders Henrikson in 1955 directed the film Married (Giftas) in which he starred with Gösta Cederlund, Anita Björk and Mai Zetterling. The film was produced by AB Europafilm. Stig Olin that year directed Ingrid Thulin in the film Hoppsan, Borje Larsson that year directing her in the film The Dance Hall (Danssalongen) with Sonja Wigert. Stig Olin in 1955 also wrote and directed the film Mord, lilla van, photographed by Hilding Bladh and starring Inga Landre and Gösta Cederlund. The first film in which Gio Petre was to appear ,(The Merry Boys of the Fleet (Flottans muntergokar), was in theaters during 1955. Directed by Ragnar Frisk, the film starred Marianne Löfgren, Rut Holm and Rene Bjorling. Ragnar Frisk that year also directed Annalisa Ericson in the film Merry Go Round in the Mountains (Karusellen i fjallen). Gustaf Molander in 1955 directed the film The Unicorn (Enhorningen), starring Sture Lagerwall, Inga Tiblad, Edvin Adolphson and Briger Malmsten, the film's cinematographer Martin Bodin. Schamyl Bauman that year directed Darling at Sea (Alskling pa Vagen), scripted by Solve Cederstrand and Sjuth and starring Sickan Carlsson and Sigge Furst. The Last Form (Sista ringen), directed in 1955 by Gunnar Skoglund, brought George Rydeberg, Marianne Aminoff and Marta Arbin to the screen along with Margareta Henning in what would be her first film appearance. Swedish film director Torgny Wickman in 1955 directed Catherine Berg in her first film, Blocked Tracks (Blockerat spar) with Alf Kjellin and Torsten Ulliecrona. The following year, Bengt Blomgren directed and starred with Gunnel Lindblom in the film Gunpowder and Love (Krut och Karlek, 1956). He followed it with the film Linje sex, starring Margit Carlqvist and Ake Gronberg. Georege Arlin directed his first film that year Bla himmel starring Ingeborg Nyberg, Barbro Larsson, Mim Ekelund and Monica Nielsen.

--------http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/Film_Star_Covers_5 -------------Finnish film actress Tuija Halonen was bginning to become known to film audiences in 1955 with the film Near to Sin (Lahella Syntia, Nara Synden) directed by Hannu Leminen. The previos year she had starred in the film Enchanted Night (Taikayo), directed by Willaim Markus and based on the 1946 novel by Martti Larni. She would later, in 1959, appear on the screen in Fate Makes its Move (Kohotalo Tekee Siiron) directed by Armand Lohikoski.

Hasse Ekman in 1956 directed the film Private Entrance (Engang ingang), photographed by Gunnar Fischer and starring Maj Britt Nilsson and Bibi Andersson. Rolf Husberg that year directed Anita Björk and Brita Oberg in the film Moon over Hellesta (Moln Over Hellesta) Its script is based by the novel Moln over Hellesta, published by Swedish author Margit Soderholm a year earlier. The previous year Soderholm had published the novel Jul pa Hellesta. Photgraphed by Goran Strindberg and starring Maj-Britt Nilsson and Karlheinz Bohm, A Girl for the Summer (Sommarflickan, 1956) was brought to the screen by the directors Thomas Engel and Hakan Bergstrom. Kenne Fant in 1956 directed Eva Dahlbeck in the film Tarps Elin, the film also starring Ulf Palme, Marta Arbin and Fritiof Billquist. Mimi Pollack, who had studied at the Royal Dramatic Academy with Greta Garbo. in 1956 directed, The Right to Love (Rattaen att alska), starring Max von Sydow. Gunnar Hellström that year brought Harriet Andersson to the screen in Children of the Night (Nattbarn), starring Birgitta Olzon. Scriptwriter Barbro Boman that year directed the film It's Never Too Late (Det ar aldrig for sent). Gunnar Skoglund in 1956 brought Kristina Adolphson and Catrin Westerlund to the screen in the film Blanande hav. Arne Mattsson that year directed the film Girl in a Dressing Gown (Girl in Tails/Flickan i frack), produced by Rune Waldkranz and scripted by Herbert Grevenius. The films stars Maj-Britt Nilsson, Sigge Furst, Kerstin Duner and Elsa Prawitz. Mattsson also that year directed the film A Little Nest (Litet bo).

Bergman writes that the screenplay to The Last Couple Out (Sista Paret Ut, 1956) "had been floating around Svensk Filmindustrustri for a long time in synopsis form." He continues by writing, "Working rapidly, Sjöberg and I started churning out the screenplay for The Last Couple Out, from which Sjöberg later wrote his own version." The earlier title for the script written by Ingmar bergman had been For the Children's Sake. The film, photographed by Martin Bodin and edited by Oscar Rosander, is written around a character portrayed by Bjorn Bjelvenstam, his becoming involved romantically with characters played by Harriet Andersson, who was closing out an affair with Bergman, and Bibi Andersson, who was begining an affair with the director. Added to the plotline is the dialouge between Bjelvenstam and the character portrayed by Eva Dahlbeck. Cowie quotes Alf Sjöberg as having said,"It was an old script and marked an unhappy stage in our collaboration." Last Couple out was the first film in which Mona Andersson was to appear.

Having starred in a number of films, including Playing on the Rainbow (Lek pa regnbagen, Lars-Eric Kjellin 1957), a film written by Vigot Sjöman and photographed by Gunnar Fischer in which he co-starred with Mai Zetterling, Alf Kjellin wrote and directed A Girl in the Rain (Flickan i regnet) with Gunnel Lindblom, Pia Skoglund, Bibi Andersson and Marianne Bengtsson in the first film in which she was to appear as well as directing Twilight Meetings (Encounters at Dusk/Moten i skymningen (1957), based on a novel by Pers Anders Folgelstrom, with Eva Dahlbeck , Birger Malmsten and Ake Gronberg, the scriptgirl to the film having had been being Katherina (Katinka) Farago and the cinematographer again having had been being Gunnar Fischer. Arne Mattson that year directed Spring of Life (Livets Var) and No Tommorow. The following year he directed There Came Two Men, The Lady in Black (Damen i svart), with Anita Björk, Lena Granhagen and Annalisa Ericson, a film shot mostly in interior scenes with the use of low-key lighting, and Mannequin in Red (Mannekang i rott), with Rune Carlsten and Anita Björk. Hasse Ekman in 1957 directed Bibi Andersson and Gunnar Bjönstrand in A Summer Place is Wanted (Summer Cottage, Sommarnoje sokes). He also that year directed With a Halo Askew (Med gloria pa sned) with Sickan Carlsson and Sture Lagerwall. Arne Ragneborn in 1957 directed Ingrid Thulin in the film Aldrig i livet. Stig Olin that year directed Guest at One's Own Home (Gast i eget hus) with Monica Nielsen and Anita Björk. Lars-Magnus Lindgren in 1957 directed the film A Dreamer's Walk (En drommares vandrig, photographed by Sven Nykvist and starring Margit Carlqvist, Jarl Kulle, Keve Helm, Inga Landre, Linnea Hillberg and Brita Oberg. Also appearing in the film is Eric Hell. Hans Lagerkvist in 1957 directed the film The Rusk (Skorpan), photographed by Martin Bodin and starring Marianne Bengtsson, Anna-Lisa Baude and Fritiof Billquist. Marianne Bengtsson that year also appeared in the film Night Light (Nattens ljus), directed by Lars-Eric Kjellgren and photographed by Ake Dahlqvist. Gunnar Bjornstrand and Birger Malmsten star with Bengtsson. Written and directed by Goran Gentele, Varmlanningarna (1957), was photographed by Karl-Erik Alberts. Not only does the film star Busk Margit Jonsson, Marta Dorff and Marta Arbin, but Greta Garbo biographer Fritiof Billquist also appears in the film.

Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman and the present author feel very much the same about the film The Brink of Life (Nara livet 1957). In his autobiography, Images, Bergman writes, "I sat watching the same film years later in the darkness, alone and influenced by no one....When the movie ended, I sat there, suprised at myself and a little annoyed- I suddenly liked the old film." While explaining Bergman introduces the film as a story written around three characters, these being portrayed in the film by Eva Dahlbeck, Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Thulin. He describes it as "warm, honest and intelligently done, with first-class performances." He also gives a nod to Max Willen, the film's cameraman, who during the filming was "an adequate craftsman without any sensitivity". Peter Cowie writes, "Brink of Life is the first of those Bergman movies in which dialog and characterization take precedence over scenery and locations."

Norwegian Film director Arne Skouen in returned to directing in 1957 with the film Nine Lives (We Die Alone/ Ni liv) produced by by Fotorama and photographed by Ragnar Sorensen. The film stars Lydia Opoien, Henny Moan and Grete Norda. He continued the following year by directing A God and His Servants (Herren og hans tjener, 1958) based on the 1955 play by Axel Kielland. The film, photographed by Finn Bergan, stars Urda Arneberg, Anna-Lise Tangstad and Wenche Foss.

In 1958 Gösta Stevens and Hasse Ekman co-scripted two films that were directed by Ekman, The Great Amateur (Den Store amatoren), with Marianne Bengtsson, and Jazz Boy (Jazzgossen), in which he starred with Maj-Britt Nilsson and Alice Babs. Goran Gentele in 1958 brought Lena Söderblom to the screen in the film Miss April (Froken April), in which she starred with Gunnar Björnstrand. Froken April was the film that would introduce Swedish actress Gunilla Ponten. In 1958, Jan Molander directed Harriet Andersson in Woman in Leopardskin (Kvinna i leopard), which, adapted from his own screenplay, was his debutorial film as a director. The film also stars Ulf Palme, Renee Bjorling, Siv Ericks, Mona Malm. Stig Olin that year directed Andersson in Commander of the Navy (Flottans overman). Stig Olin that year brought the film You are My Adventure (Du ar mitt aventyr) to the screen. Greta Garbo biographer Fritiof Billquist appeared on screen with Astrid Bodin, Ann-Marie Gyllenspetz, Git Gay and Ulla-Bella Fridh in the film Travel to Sun and Spring (Far Till Sol och Var), directed by Lars-Eric Kjellgren and photographed by Martin Bodin

In 1959 Hasse Ekman directed the films Good Heavens (Goodnes Gracious/Himmel och pannaka) and Miss Chic (Froken Chic), both starring Sickan Carlsson and co-scripted by Gösta Stevens. Both films were photographed by Martin Bodin. Alf Kjellin that year returned Alice Babs to the screen in the film Swinging at the Castle (Det svanger pa slottet, which also starred Yvonne Lombard and Lena Granhagen. Goran Gentele in 1959 brought Jar Kulle and Lena Söderblom to the screen in the film The Theif in the Bedroom (Sangkammartjuven.

In 1959 Arne Mattsson directed Rider in Blue (Ryttare i blatt), the first film in which the actress Solveig Ternström was to appear, and Lend me your Wife (Far jag lana din fru?), with Annalisa Ericson. In 1960, Mattsson directed When Darkness Falls (Na morkret faller) with Nils Asther and Birgitta Pettersson and Summer and Sinners (Sommar och sydare) with Gio Petre, Yvge Gamlin and Elsa Prawitz. In 1961, he followed with The Summer Night is Sweet (Lovely is the Summer Night, Ljuvlig ar sommarnatten), photographed by Tony Forsberg and starring Marta Albin, Elsa Prawitz, Tekla Sjoblom and Christina Carlwind in her first appearance on the screen.

Kenne Fant in 1959 directed the film The Love Game (Den kara leken) with Bibi Andersson, Sven Lindberg and Lars Ekborg, his following it in 1960 with The Wedding Day (Brollopsdagen), in which Bibi Andersson stars with Elsa Carlsson. Both films were photographed by Swedish cinematographer Max Wilen. Alf Sjöberg in 1960 directed Ingrid Thulin and Mona Andersson in the film The Judge (Domaren), the film's cinematographer Sven Nykvist. That year Rolf Husberg directed the films Av hjartans lust and Tarningen ar karstad starring Anita Björk and Gio Petre. Hasse Ekman in 1960 wrote and directed both The Decimals of Love (Karleckens decimaler), based on a novel by Gösta Gustaf-Jansons and starring Eva Henning and Eva Dahlbeck and On the Beach in the Park (Pa en bank i park), in which he starred with Lena Granhagen and Sigge Furst. Helena Brodin appeared in her first film in 1960, Three Wishes (Three Desire/Tre Onskningar). Directed by Goran Gentele, the film also starred Eva Dahlbeck and Mimi Nelson.

After having directed the film The Pleasuregarden (Lustgarden, 1961), a film scripted by Ingmar Bergman and Erland Josephson, photographed by Gunnar Fischer and starring the "polished performances" (Robert Emmet Long) of Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Bjönstrand, Gösta Cederlund and Sickan Carlsson, Alf Kjellin directed Harriet Andersson in his film Siska-en kvinnobild, in 1962. The film was photographed by Gunnar Fischer. Ragnar Frisk directed Anita Lindblom in We Fix Everything (Vi fixar allt) in 1961, in Tre dar i buren in 1963 and again in Three Days A Vagabond (Tre dar pa luffen) in 1964. Vi fixar allt was the first film in which the actress Anna Sundqvist was to appear. Also in the film is Swedish actress Sangrid Nerf. Hasse Ekman in 1961 directed the film The Job/Braces (Stoten) with Gunnar Hellstrom, Tor Isedal, Maude Adelson and Ann-Mari Wiman. That year the first film directed by Lars Magnus Lindgren, There are no Angles (Anglar, finns dom) was to star Christine Schollin and Margit Carlqvist.

During 1962, Sandrew Film produced the film One Zeroe Too Many (En Nolla For Mycket) directed by Bjorje Nyberg and photographed by Hilding Bladh. The film stars Birgitta Andersson, Toivo Pawlo, Mona Malm and Lill-Babs.

silent film
18 Sep 03:19

Scott Lord Silent Film: Castle Films Travelogue

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
28 Aug 05:14

Greta Garbo

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
Garbo, Sjostrom and Stiller

Mulvey, in Visual Pleasure and Narrative, namedrops: "SImilarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Deitrich) for instance, or a face (Garbo), integrate the narrative into a different mode of eroticism."
Journalist Rilla Page Palmborg begins her autobiography of Greta Garbo from 1931, The Private Life of Greta Garbo, by mentioning her availability to the press, the importance of the title now almost lost on us in that by being the Hermit of Hollywood, as a recluse, all there was was the private life of the actress, other than her being an onscreen fictive creation. "During her romance with Jack Gilbert, Garbo did give a few interviews. But since Jack's marriage to Ina Claire she flatly refused to talk. The motion picture magazines have been desperate to get stories about her." At this time she was already Garbo, and had she been an alcoholic the study of feminism in the twentieth century might seem easier; reports of John Gilbert having drank heavily seemed to be spared until his early death may have necessitated them.

Greta Garbo talar!

     "Greta Garbo talks on Love" was printed in the larger font in a small square advertisement placed in Screenland Magazine during 1931. In as much as Hollywood screenwriters may or may not have been influenced by the extratextural offscreen discourse of fan magazines while constructing their diegetic fantasy worlds, biographers later putting into the biography, mise-en-legend, rather than putting in the scene, mise-en-scene, the photo-caption read, "Would you like to know how the greatest siren of them all feels on the greatest subject in the world? The answer in Garbo's own words is in the August Silver Screen- this and fifteen other startling features." In its own way the announcement of a coming magazine attraction" in itself predates a discussion of genre, Greta Garbo by then having refined her image, and studio contract, from sexsymbol youth, to romantic actress, to soon to be costume drama leading lady. One biographer who encapsulated the spirit of the fan magazine was John Bainbridge, as difficult as it is to ascertain whether he was reluctant to divulge the identities of people whom he had personally spoken to, or whether he had a penchant for quickly taking notes from material that had been published twenty years earlier. As a companion to his biography on Greta Garbo Bainbridge published a three part condensed biography in Life Magazine printed in early 1955.

The Ture Sjolander of 1971 began his photographic essay on Greta Garbo very differently than contemporary Richard Corliss, writing shortly thereafter, had began his. Sjolander very accurately writes, The stories, observations, descriptions, analyses and interpretations of Garbo are legends alone and contrast sharply with the lack of information from Garbo herself. Distorted by rumor, guess, error, or motive, the real Garbo remains silent and elusive...The truth about Garbo is in pictures." His biography of Greta Garbo follows her from her childhood home in Bickingatan, Stockholm to her third visit to Sweden in 1935 to later photos taken as the actress was living as a recluse, her briefly passing the camera and it allowing only a glimpse of her. His account includes mysterious excursions where Greta Garbo in between films travelled under the names Phyllis Smith, Beatrice Wille, Helene Morgan and Harriet Brown. While not publishing works of film cristicsm or history, Sjolander has in fact continued as a dynamic visual artist to the present. The private life of Greta Garbo much to the contrary, escapes the slightest scrutiny of Richard Corliss, the earliest acting done by Greta Gustafsson only intimated as biography by a still photograph from the film Peter and the Tramp. By his own admission, Corliss only writes about the films Greta Garbo appeared in, as one of us, her many spectators, and keeps in front of the screen as a moviegoer in a theater. Referred to as peerless by Time Magazine, Corliss nevertheless acknowledges writes of biography as acquaintances that were brought to him though the study of actress Greta Garbo among them being Ray Durgnant, Andrew Sarris and Molly Haskell, added to which are the names John Bainbridge, Kevin Brownlow, Pauline Kael and Norman Zierold that appear in his bibliography, which also attempts to add Parker Tyler, Georges Sadoul and Bosley Crowther. Nancy Gibbs, editor of Time Magazine reported the death of film critic Richard Corliss during the middle of 2015. These are the film's of Greta Garbo reviewed by Corliss, editor of Film Comment, for their value as films along with the interest in them and in the Greta Garbo that helped create them that was left unevaluated by the prolific film reviewer.
     To begin the year 2017, I finished a two day correspondence with biographer Eve Golden. It had been more than a decade since I received a letter from Leatrice Gilbert Fountain (I still call her Leatrice Joy Fountain), who at that time expressed her delight at being on the Internet at her age, so I was excited when something came to my mailbox concerning John Gilbert and Ruth Harriet Loiuse. Sadly, Ms. Golden wrote that she has forsaken biography for the moment, her writing "no more books for me" claiming that the expense of preparing a biography outweighs its production, but the author "highly recommended" the work of author Robert Dance and I promised to keep watch for anything new that Ms. Golden may be writing.

     In the "First Interview She has Granted to any Magazine in Months", Greta Garbo in "The Swedish Sphinx Speaks" broke "her long silence" about when she would exit the silent film era, interviewed by Ralph Wheelwright in Screenland Magazine during 1929. "'I hated talking pictures when they first came out,' said Greta, stimulating a shudders guesture by way of adding emphasis to her words. 'They screeched and scratched. They were neither of the stage nor screen. Just monstrous nightmares. I thought to myself, I I have to appear in anything like that I ought to go home to Sweden and stay there. ugh! Now-' and Greta threw back her head and laughed. I am bored to death when I see a silent picture. It seems that something is lacking: life is gone when the players fail to speak their lines."
In the article Greta Garbo discussed there having had been being rapid technological developments in sound film while she had been in Sweden and mentioned her ability to fluently speak English, perhaps with little no Swedish accent. Not yet entirely completely refusing to be seen or quoted in public, she continued, "The public likes or dislikes a player solely upon what it sees of the player on the screen. I do not think a star's private life exposed in intimate detail serves any purpose than to satisfy curiosity. I am just a human being like anyone else. I resent prying into my personal affairs just as much as anyone in any other staOtion or position rightfully resists similar intrusions.'" It was a monthly issue in which Helen Ludlam had introduced The New John Gilbert and Fashion Editor Adrain had introduced himself, authoring an article that was accompanied by one of his sketches and a photograph of himself with Greta Garbo taken three years earlier.
     "Greta Garbo portrays the torments of love, but little else" was one photcaption that had accompanied Greta Garbo through the pages of fan magazines during 1930, specifically Picture Play Magazine, that had pages earlier praised sound film for having improved John Gilbert's image as a lover. Although correctly referred to a a hold-out for M.G.M, along with Lon Chaney, by author Richard Corliss, by then Greta Garbo by all accounts had made three sound tests, one from a monologue from Goethe's Faust, one a selection from Peer Gynt delivered in Swedish, and the other from Shakespeare's Hamlet, as Ophelia, the speech delivered in English. Norbert Lusk of Picture Play magazine was the film critic author Richard Corliss chose while deciding whom to select to relate the phenomenon of "The Voice: Greta Garbo's Sound films". To look at the article further and expand Corliss's quote, Lusk, who had serialized the photo plays of two reelers into fictional magazine adaptations, merely becomes perplexed by the baritone of Greta Garbo as the mystery of the Swedish Sphinx was to become more enigmatic and reach higher into the firmament reclusively. Significantly, or more significantly than is often viewed, by July of 1930, Talking Screen magazine has been added to the newsstand extra textual discourse. It read, "Gridley has fired. The Sphinx speaks! Greta Garbo has made a talkie. And the great myth of the movies- the legend of Hollywood- has received another tremendous impetus that will mean millions to M.G.ffM and it's sequestered Swede....according to director Clarence Brown...List to the oracle: 'I consider Greta Garbo one of the three Greta actresses the world has known, Bernhardt, Duse, and now Garbo.'" Author Herbert Cruikshank continued with his article Garbo Myth of the Movies More Amazing Than All the Mystery Stuff Is the Truth-Presented Herewith-Concerning Greta'" If not typical of the sentiment of the new adventure with sound, Talking Picture Magazine also went into publication as a proponent of the new moving, and talking, picture.




"Gorgeous Greta Garbo has swept into a national acclaim accorded few people in all of show history. The Phrase 'Greta Garbo Talks'- was blazoned from thousands of theaters. And ticket buyers came in droves." advertisement circulated by MGM to announce Greta Garbo in her second talking picture Romance, 1930

     

The Film Mercury reported the return of Greta Garbo tophlegmaly, comparatively matter of factlduring 1929, "With the return of Greta Garbo from Sweden, where she passed her vacation, announcement was made by M.G.M that 'Anna Christie' will be her next starring vehicle and incidentally her debut in talking pictures...In the picture, Miss Garbo will play the role created on stage by Pauline Lord...Clarence Brown will direct the picture, an all-talking version of the play, as soon as he finishes 'Wonder of Woman' in which he is now directing Lewis Stone and Peggy Wood."
     Other publications from the time period may seem more indicative of fan magazines in their following the chronology of the shooting schedules of any particular film of the era, and where criticism was left out, often a synopsis of the film's storyline was inserted, describing the characters and character action.
     "Greta Garbo will have Charles Bickford as leading man in Clarence Brown's production of Anna Christie for M.G.M. and not John Gilbert as was first reported." After announcing the coming of a new Greta Garbo film, Motion Picture News printed an extensive series of advertisements by Metro Goldwyn Mayer on the new season of film. "Greta Garbo will appear in two all talking and one silent picture" appeared above the full page advertisement in MotionPicture News paid for by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. It ran below, "Greta Garbo in Anna Christie. Her first All-Talking picture! There's a title that will blaze mightily from marquees all over this broad land in the coming season. Greta Garbo, the divine beauty talking to her vast public!..In addition to the All-Talking picture Anna Christie, Greta Garbo will appear in a secOnd All-Talking Drama, title shortly to be announced. This second speaking role for Miss Garbo is a vividly colorful characterization uniquely suited for her extraordinary beauty and talents. It will also be a silent production." "Garbo talar!!" was the title decided upon for the webpage oauthored by Louise Lagerstrom of the Swedish Film Institute when the the actress was first introduced to European surfers of the Internet as having Omade her first sound film in the United States, which would happen to be where she made all her sound films to follow.

Talking Screen Magazine during 1930 included the film "Anna Christie" in its screen reviews section, "Every single human being who admires Greta Garbo has been waiting with bated breath for the sound of her voice on the talking screen...All through this poignant drama of a girl who found love after her life had been thoroughly embittered by men, Greta's voice tells of her tragic story with compelling power."

If it does seem more post-climatic than anti-climatic, actor John Barrymore had literally tried it first in an earlier film with synchronization, Pickford and Fairbanks both leaving their individual projects to co-star together shortly thereafter; Picture Play magazine speculated, "The Garbo Voice. What will it sound like? The Whole World waits to her the Swedish enchantress for the first time in Anna Christie." And yet, while audiences were waiting not all movie theaters were available for sound film and M.G.M divided their advertisement into a "Summary 16 Pictures Available for Theatres Without Installation: Greta Garbo, the flaming orchid whose seductive personality has made her an audience draw will appear in one silent picture, title of which is to be announced." While John Gilbert was scheduled to appear in his first sound picture Olympia, "Olympia:Title to Be Changed", Redemption, an adaptation of Tolstoy was being advertised as "A Fred Niblo Production, Screenplay by DorothPy Farnum". Before continuing to its advertisement of films "For Wired Houses", it included, "Lon Chaney in three thrilling silent pictures, the first Bugle Sounds. Titles of two more Lon Chaney silent pictures to be announced." Early during 1929, M.G.M. advertised Greta Garbo in PWild Orchids, "Sound or Silent", her having been assigned to "the most gripping story she's ever appeared in", and John Gilbert in Thirst "Equipped for Silent or Sound". Fred Niblo, introduced by a photo of Dorothy Sebastian in front of a microphone while filming one of her "new style scree tests, one for voice and one for photographic qualities", was attributed with having written the articles Crashing the Soundgates for Screenland magazine during 1929. The silent film director Niblo, noted in the photcaption for having directed Ben Hur, wrote, "Breaking into the talkie racket raises the ratio two thousand to one." Beneath them was a septagonal portrait of Greta Garbo Motion Picture News reported in July of 1929 that Greta Garbo was in rehearsals for Anna Christie, "her first talker". Picture Play magazine awaited the film, "At the very height of the talkie excitement, M.G.M. risked Garbo in an all silent picture in The Single Standard. It was a hit. Following her experiment in dialogue with Anna Christie, she may return to the silent fold, and I for one will not mourn. Garbo is a shadow. She suggests mystery, a mystery that has been in silence. What then will the spoken, tangible thought have to do with this peculiar appear? An out of character voice will ruin Garbo. She must speak as she looks- soft, alluring, and yet with a huskiness which her sophistication suggests...Always a good actress, Lilyan Tashman's throaty contralto has increased her prestige and emphasized her individuality. The talkie has given Conrad Nagel a new lease on popularity."
In 1930, Katherine Albert penned the article Is Jack Gilbert Through for Photoplay Magazine. She outlined Jack Gilbert's power of script approval, notifying audiences that his first sound film, Redemption had been "shelved by the studio." and that she wondered if it would ever be shown in theaters. The article reviewed his performance as having been "nervous", "too highkeyed and "sel-conscious". In the same issue, Photoplay released stills from Anna Christie, "This Clarence Brown filming of the O'Neil play for M.G.M. is eagerly awaited by Garbo fans everywhere. Garbo's first talkie is bound to bOe one of the sensations of the next few months."

Greta Garbo eludes, Greta Garbo evades

"There are many things in your heart you can never tell a person. They are you. Your joys and sorrows- and you can never, never tell them. It is not right that you should tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself when you tell them."

Silent Film actress Greta Garbo

While waiting for the release of Anna Christie (Brown/FeydHer, 1930), Picture Play magazine included a portrait of Greta Garbo taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull. Edwin Shallelert wrote, "Greta Garbo has gone to the extreme when exacting it within the studio itself...Greta Garbo has pursued the same phantom. The ordinary news gatherer, and the majority of the extraordinary, are not permitted on her set. It is told that once even some of her countrymen of the press came to visit and were ritzed, or felt they were." New Movie magazine devoted a page to Greta Garbo's first sound film, "Elsewhere in this issue Herbert Howe refers to Greta Garbo as the Hollywood Sphinx. But the Sphinx speaks in her next Metro Goldwyn picture, a new talkie version of Eugene O'Neil's Anna Christie once done by Blanche Sweet. Clarence Brown is introducing the Swedish Star to the microphone." The magazine also featured a portrait of Garbo dressed for tennis captioned, "The exotic Swedish star plays a great game of tennis. This isn't a posed sport picture. It's the real thing." Motion Picture News reviewed the film during 1929, "Her work is a sensation. Garbo has an exceptional talking voice, recording with a rich mellowness that exactly conveys her personality. A fine delivery of lines coupled with a splendid performance classes her among the finest of dramatic actresses...Clarence brown handled his direction with a deft hand that sustains the fullest interest in dramatic movement. His work is superb and the individual characterizations are particularly fine, with a small cast of four principals presenting sterling performances." It added, "Just as audiences repeat for Garbo in silent form, it is predicted the will do the same in her talker productions." "She was not pleased with the Anna Christie, writes John Bainbridge about a film that Garbo had first seen in the company of director Jacques Feyder and Wilhelm Sorensen, "'Isn't it terrible?' she whispered to them time and again as the picture unfolded. 'Whoever saw Swedes act like that?'" Although she apparently left early during the screening she visited actress Marie Dressler the following day with Chrysanthemums. Sorensen, after appearing in the refilming reversed their position, or emotion rather, "Garbo thinks this is one of the best pictures she has ever made, and she gives most of the credit to Jacques Feyder." Greta Garbo had worked out dialogue changes with the director during her second filming of Anna Christie. The character played by Dressler would in the second film be reenacted by Salka Viertel, who became, along with Mercedes de Acosta, one of Greta Garbo's more devoted companions during the period of early sound film, Feyder having returned to Europe after making the film, as had Hanson and Sjostrom. Garbo, who without entirely disappearing as though mysteriously, purportedly was travelling under the name of Gussie Berger, would infrequently be seen with Lilyan Tashman. After retiring from film, Garbo would later register at hotels as Mrs Harriet Brown. Author Paul Rotha hesitates; in his second quickly penned masterwork on the advent of the new art form of sound film, Celluloid Today, which followed on the heels of Film Till Now, while lamenting the death of silent film director F.W. Murnau, Rotha appraises the need for suitable roles for Greta Garbo, by then in his estimation, one of the greatest actresses,  after her having been paired with Gilbert, of the silent era. he calmly included the film Anna Christie among a trio of films that accordingly are brilliant for the visual expression in their opening, but lapse into pure dialogue insufficient to explain character. Incidentally, if not coincidentally, if we return to the world of silent film and its era, biographer Lotte H. Eisner gives an account, in Murnau, of Salka Viertel having visited F. W. Murnau after his inevitably fatal car accident and the ensuing time before his premature death, "Everyone's private life is sacred....Venomous tongues did not fail to set to work in the great Babel of Hollywood. Not many people had the courage to come and bid the great director a last farewell in the funeral parlor 19 March: the two Viertels, Greta Garbo, William K. Howard, Thomas Mirande, Edgar Ulmer, Herman Bing and three others- eleven people in all. For along time Greta Garbo kept the death mask of this man who had been as solitary  she."
     John Bainbridge in his three part article for Life Magazine succinctly introduced a well known to us Greta Garbo, "Her talking-picture debut in the title role of 'Anna Christie' in 1930 was described as 'the most eagerly and fearfully awaited cinema event since talking pictures'. Her producer, M.G.M. Considered two words sufficient billing for the picture and those words blazoned across the U.S.: GARBO TALKS." During 1930, Metro Goldwyn Mayer specifically used the phrase again, which wholehearted encouragement, in advertisements proclaiming, "Chaney Talks"for the film "The Unholy Three." It admonished, "You know how M.G.M electrified the amusement world with 'Greta Garbo talks in Anna Christie'. Box office history will repeat when you tell them 'Chaney Talks'...No question but he will duplicate the stir and excitement caused when you advertised Greta Garbo's first talkie."
    The magazine Hollywood Filmograph traced the early stardom of the entrance of Greta Garbo into sound film during 1930. It reported, "Niblo had planned to film Red Dust with Greta Garbo, but Romance was put on schedule ahead of this, so he will direct the Haines picture first, then Red Dust, according to present plans." It followed with the heading "Garbo in a new talkie", which read, "Forsaking the Swedish accent of Anna Christie for Italian dialect andP garbed in crinolines in place of sweaters and oilskins, Greta Garbo has started work on her second talking picture. Romance, an adaptation of the famous stageplay...Clarence Brown, who filmed Garbo's first talkie for Metro Goldwyn Mayer, is directing." Hollywood Filmograph then alluded to Garbo's then next film, "Greta Garbo will be seen in at least three productions during the coming season, the first of which will be Red Dust This is based on William Collison's story and presents the magnetic Swedish star as a Parisian." It later reported, "Fred Niblo, having just completed directing Easy Going starring William Haines at M.G.M., is right now preparing to direct Greta Garbo in her next story Red River which Fred De Grease is writing and adapting for the screen." Motion Picture News during 1930 echoed with a similar report on Red Dust, "M.G.M is preparing Red River as Greta Garbo's next talker following her current picture Romance. Fred Niblo is to direct upon finishing Easy Going. Red River is an original by Fred De Greasac and was formally known as Red Dust." With this was also, "M.G.M switches Niblo from Red Dust to Haines film- Fred Noblo will dGirct William Haines in the latter's next film for M.G.M, N original titled Easy Going...Niblo was originally scheduled to direct Red Dust with an all star cast but this has been postponed to follow the Haines picture so that Greta Garbo can take the starring assignment in Red Dust." The magazine later reverted to the title having had been being Red Dust and it having been based on a story by Wilson Collison, but it also carried an advertisement from M.G.M. itself, which read, "Greta Garbo in Red Dust" which claimed it would be Greta Garbo's third sound film. "The most unusual part she has ever played. On a Chinese rubber plantation her past in Paris is forgotten- gorgeous Greta Garbo gives the talking screen a performance such as you've never witnessed. This stageplay by Wilson Collison has the power of Sadie Thompson. It's going to be one of the year's greatest." The New Movie Magazine during 1930 looked at Garbo in regard to fashion. "The glamorous Garbo, away from the studio, affects dull tweeds and flat heel shoes. No expensive wardrobe for Miss Garbo. Yet she is Hollywood's most I'm lavish purchaser of lovely lingerie. She spends thousands every year on fancy underthings. Above the photo of Garbo was a caption reading, "Spend between $5,000 and $25,000 on clothes." It continued pages later, "For evening Garbo is magnificent...She goes so little to social functions that one can do little speculating as to the number of outfits shew has, but the writer has seen a magnificent ermine wrap, with white fox trimming and several elaborate white satin, white lace, white chiffon, and white moiree gowns that could not cost less than three hundred dollars a piece." Within months the magazine added, "She wore a tan beret and a tan overcoat with a high collar and a pair of horn rimmed glasses. As time goes on the great Garbo seems to become more and more like a hermit." Another item read, "Greta Garbo loves spaghetti and never eats in the studio lunch room. Three years later the magazine interviewed the make-up girl at M.G.M., Lillian Rosini, "Greta Garbo has never used anything but the thinnest dusting of flesh-coloured powder, rather pinkish, and pale lip-rouge; nothing on her eyes at all. And by they way if I get anymore letters asking me if Garbo's eyelashes are artificial, I'll scream...I've been making her up for nine years...I ought to know her lashes are real.

Advertisements sent by M.G.M. itself to Motion Picture News during 1930 relied upon the theme expressed on the cover of Exhibitors herald World, which almost comicly announced, "Greta Garbo talks again in Romance. Its her greatest"; after acknowledging the fame that Garbo had acquired by returning to the screen in a sound film, it depended on the recognition of her as an investment and it was discernably giving her press of its own, "Already the word comes out of Hollywood that Miss Garbo's new Talking picture Romance is destined to overshadow Anna Christie by far. There's no figure in all studioland whose screen activities are of such widespread interest. Long before a Greta Garbo attraction reaches the screen the magazines of the nation are heralding its approach, the public is breathless with anticipation. Its nice to have a Greta Garbo under contract to your theater. In 1930-31, the first of her three vehicles will Red Dust." Motion Picture Classic during 1930 noted in "Garbo at her best" that "It is probable that her latest and greatest photoplay, Romance marks the zenith of Greta Garbo's career. Garbo plumbs new dramatic depths. She adds new charm to her attractions, and is very much the star of the production...The selection of Gavin Gordon is less fortunate, but the shadow of the great Garbo softens the glLare of his defects." Directed by Clarence Brown, the screenplay to the film was written by Bess Meredyth and Edwin Justus Mayer. Richard Corliss saw "recognizable curtain lines" that were to almost harken back to the proscenium arc of "filmed theater" during the cinema of attractions, deeming the blocking of the film playlike, "It was as if Clarence Brown, the admirable technician, had died with the coming of sound, and most of his later films were directed not by his spirit, but by his shade. The result is a feature-length series of static two shots, of statuesque poses instead of felt guestures." The portrait of Greta Garbo in costume from the set of Romance published in Motion Picture magazine was photographed by George Hurrell. Adela Rogers St. Johns, writing in New Movie magazine gave a portrait of Greta Garbo that veers from her being a recluse in The Heart of Garbo, How the Plight of her Leading Man Touched the Sympathies of the Star Who Walks Alone, Gavin Gordon went to Hollywood because he found out that Garbo lived and made pictures in the distant land of which he had heard so much." A still of them in the film Romance accompanies the article with the explanation of how Garbo insisted that he be in the cast and that she sent him roses, it quoting the actor, "'And she helped me through those scenes so wonderfully.' he said,'She didn't think of herself and how it would be for her. She was so kindly, she always made it possible for me to do each scene.'"
     Journalist Marie Howe arranged for a "Screenland Scoop" by quoting director Clarence Brown on the set of the film "Romance". Brown was attributed with having said, "The public will find not this picture more of the Garbo they are used to, a different Garbo from 'Anna Christie' and yet essentially the same. A sophisticated woman of the world, a lovely open star who has a tender romance with a young clergyman. In the O'Neil drama they were earthy characters with a sordid background....She adores these crinolines and flounces. The tiny hats. And it is a lovely story. I like it myself."
     Silver Screen was attentive to fashion and style while during 1932 while publishing a portrait of Greta Garbo  taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull, remarking that the hat Greta Garbo would wear in the film Romance would transform devoted Garbo fans into princesses, "Look at the portrait above and admire the new hair style. It's the latest and will undoubtedly go over with a bang as did the Garbo bob- with bangs in front."
     "Garbo- That's All! And that's enough for most people." Screenland magazine introduced Greta Garbo not only in her new talking picture, the film "Romance", but with a new portrait photographer, known only as "Hurrell", their two full pages an exclusive publication.

"Love?" She laughed softly, "Of course I have been in love. Love is the last and first of a women's education. How could you express loveI'm if you have never felt it? You can imagine, but its not like the feeling- who hasn't been in love?"
Greta Garbo - Photoplay magazine


Faith Service, who had for more than a decade been writing about silent film and adapting photo-plays into magazine short-stories, printed the article "Garbo Never Sleeps- This is Her Tragedy- The Real Explanation of her strange life and her Broken Romance." Interesting to read, it contains what seems to initially be a plausible theory that begins to explain the mystery of Greta Garbo with, "The reason why she does what she does, the reason why she doesn't do the things other people do, the reason for her famous eccentricities and hermit-like existence, her lack of response to a social life, her lack of response to eager lovers is this- Garbo is an insomniac. She never sleeps." The article claimed that Mauritz Stiller had experienced bouts of sleeplessness before his death and go back and forth between rooms before finding a suitable bed, and that Garbo too had had mild instances on occaision that she was now using "constant sunbaths" and "endless walks up and down the beach" to preempt. It continued that John Gilbert's heart was still broken- "Garbo, too tired to love." Motion Picture Classic magazine during 1930 instructed, "To locate Greta Garbo, take out your binoculars and study the sun. Discover the hottest ray, locate where it strikes Hollywood and with the aid of a compass seek the spot. There you will find the mysterious one sunbathing. She never misses, so you will not have wasted a minute." Tiding from Talkie Town, in Talking Screen magazines during 1930, reported an affinity between Greta Garbo and Mary Pickford as well as a penchant on the part of Greta Garbo for solitary sunbathing. Marion Davies had confirmed Lady and Lord Montbaten as guests at an upcoming party, and they had in turn requested the presence of Greta Garbo. As the actress was unable to contact Garbo, Mary Pickford offered to speak to her on the behest of the now socialite actress. Pickford found Greta Garbo on her patio sunbathing and the invitation to the party was then declined. New Movie Magazine during 1931 reported, "Greta Garbo seems to be emerging from her mysterious seclusion. She gave Malibu quite a thrill lately when she came down and spent a whole afternoon on the beach with friends." Journalist Cary Wilson later gave a portrait of the Greta Garbo he had met in Photoplay during 1936 claiming that he referred to her as "Fleck", which was short for "Svenskaflecka" and that he had first been introduced to her when she was standing on her head; she had been playing tennis which was then in turn followed by an hour's swimming and then another hour of hiking, "she still contained so much physical exuberance that standing on her head, on a sofa pillow, seemed to be the simple and desirable thing to do." Garbo had been winning at tennis after only having been playing for seventeen days. The extra-textural discourse depicting the off screen activities of motion picture actors, and sometimes directors, and more than often not the enigmatic ghostlike swirlings of the Swedish Sphix, Greta Garbo, whOoo was by then established as the most reclusive actress in Hollwood, included an announcement during 1932 in the magazine Hollywood Filmograph, "Humphrey Pierson, one of Hollywood's best known writers was signed today by Joseph I Schnitzer and Samuel Schnitzner to do the adaptation and screenplay of "Greta, the Great", which is said to be based upon the life of Garbo." Earlier it had reported, "A number of feminine stars in Hollywood are said to be worried for fear that their private lives will soon be public since it has been revealed that Rilla Page Palmborg, author of the sensational 'Private life of Greta Garbo' is at work on a second book. It is not known whether or not this book will be a 'private life' although the book is said to concern Hollywood." Close Up magazine during 1932 also reviewed the biography, "But Rilla Page Palmborg in The Private Life of Greta Garbo got dope from Garbo's private servants. For the first time one learned that Garbo buys all the fan magazines and asks for her money back if there is nothing in them about herself. For the first time one learns that Garbo's favorite breakfast is grape fruit, creamed dried chipped beef, fried potatoes, an egg, home made coffee cake and coffee." Biographer John Bainbridge goes so far as to quote Gustaf and Sigrid Norin and after giving a similar account of Garbo reading, and returning fan magazines adds to that her bringing her lunch to the studio in a brown paper bag. "She also made a point of seeing every film directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Eric von Stroheim- in her opinion two of the most gifted directors in Hollywood. She usually saw her own pictures two or three times, on different occaisions." To the account is added that she avoided beauty shops and that she rinsed her hair after shampooing with camomile tea, which the housekeeper brewed from camomile seeds. Although Adrian had visited the house and had arranged its living room furniture and decorated its interior, the butler is quoted as having remarked that Garbo was apathetic about it and the making of purchases for it. During the filming of Sign of the Cross, Movie Classic quoted the film's director, without him expressing any further interest in the mysterious Garbo, and yet there is an allusion to the seductive roles that she was trying to ascend in his typifying her as a woman that could gain power through sensuality, "'The most voluptuous-looking woman in Hollywood,' adds DeMille. "is Greta Garbo. She has true voluptuousness- not of body, but of mind.'". To end the silent era, two months before Greta Garbo's last silent film, The Kiss (Feyder, 1929), Clarence Sinclair Bull became the gallery photographer of Greta Garbo, photographing her through several years, only in costume and only on the (closed) set. Author Mark A Vieira writes, "She liked him because, like Clarence Brown, he spoke softly, if at all." In an e-mailed correspondence with the present author, Mr. Vieira sent still photographs scanned from their original negatives in two seperate letters, their having been mostly left over and unused from the editorial decisions during the publication of his biography Greta Garbo, A Cinematic Legacy. One of the portraits taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull, as the reader will notice, is the one used on the cover of Mr. Vieira's biography without the publisher's title lettering. Vieira, who was an apprentice of Clarence Sinclair Bull, quotes Greta Garbo, "As she said, 'I had it all my own way and did it in my own fashion.' This is what ended her career and what makes her cinematic legacy the exquisite thing that it is."
One portrait of Greta Garbo included in the Estate of Greta Garbo auction was a gelatin silver print on double-weight matte paper with Clarence Sinclair Bull's blind stamp from the film Susan Lennox Her Rise and Fall. Motion Picture Magazine during the release of Susan Lennox Her Rise and Fall was explicit, perhaps perfunctory, in its publishing a portrait of Greta Garbo by Clarence Sinclair Bull with the caption, "The One- and Only" Underneath read, "There's only one gown in the world like this, just as there is only one Greta Garbo. It was designed by Adrian. An exquisite portrait of Greta Garbo taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull appeared in Modern Screen Magazine in 1931 with the caption, "Although almost everyone in Hollywood knows where Greta Garbo lives, the swedish star hasn't moved for some time. Perhaps she's getting used to inquisitive fans peering through the hedges. She takes long hikes everyday and is usually accompanied by a woman companion." 1932 saw the article Garbo is like Lindbergh, written by R. Fernstrom and published in New Movie Magazine."Garbo is like Lindbergh. They act alike toward publicity.They shy away from reporters. Garbo is like the King of Sweden in many ways- kind, but aloof to everyone." Greta Garbo was in fact the owner of a letter written in Latin by her majesty Queen Christina of Sweden to Joachim of Wickfort during 1651. The document had been given to her by her companions Count and Countess Wachtmeister. Biographer John Bainbridge gives an account of Greta Garbo and Countess Wachtmeister having been introduced while crossing the Atlantic during 1928 en route to Gothenburg, Sweden.

It is a gendered spectatorship that places Garbo as a Cleopatra, who, as an alluring Queen, is looking at wealth as an abstraction in that to her it is aphrodisiac, her displaying herself as desirable admidst a backdrop of opulence; to know the secrets of her body is to be allowed by her within the solitude of grandeur. After Victor Sjostrom had returned to Sweden, Robert Herring, writing in Close Up magazine on Uno Henning in En Natt, a classic early Swedish sound film directed by Gustaf Molander, abruptly interrupted his essay to enter into a legnthy discourse oI'm n Greta Garbo, it being glaring that the section on Garbo is displaced in the essay, as if by overenthusiasm, to where he compares Garbo to Bridgette Helm only to stall with more on Greta Garbo before returning to Molander's film, "For with Garbo, too, there is the same sense of being linked to something more than one's personal life. Of carrying on and of being carried. Garbo in love, uses her lover as a means of reaching that land, that mood, that peace she requires. That is what is so difficult for her leading men, and so hard to find scenarios in which her leading man can continued to be wooed...Garbo has never lost this, this restless quiet..It is what makes her sometimes tired, which the movies try to turn into langorousness; it is what makes her dynamic, determined...Garbo astonishes people by being alternatively strangely careless and suddenly precise, right and assured." Film Daily reviewed the film Inspiration, "Greta Garbo dominates every situation and is the Garbo the fans want....Miss Garbo brings to the screen all the great possibilities of her talents with a combination of heart-gripping emotion and carefree indifference." With the superlative photography of Clarence Sinclair Bull, Greta Garbo inherited Photoplay Magazine journalist Katherine Albert, who summarized her writing during 1931 by herself paraphrasing her, "I'm bored with Garbo.", her looking at and foreward to the sensation differently with the articles Did Brown and Garbo Fight and Exploding the Garbo Myth, the former concerned with "the carefully guarded walled in stage where Garbo was starring in Inspiration, the latter making an event of Greta Garbo objecting to a line of dialouge on the set of the film Romance, including a photocaption which read, "the writer, who knows hers says there is not mystery about Greta Garbo". After explaining how successful artisticlly the work of Clarence Brown and Greta Garbo had been it asks what happenned during the filming of Inspiration, "The piece is an adaptation of Sappho. The book is now old fashioned. So is the play. A new script had to be written and neither Garbo nor Brown were entirely satisfied, but there was nothing to do but experiment on the set and see how it read. In order to get anything out of it, they must rehearse and rehearse and change and change. That's where the trouble began. Garbo would not rehearse." Photoplay reviewed the release of the film The Rise and Fall of Susan Lennox, "If you like your romance thick, your passion strong and your Garbo hot, don't miss this...M.G.M. stuck closely to the tale, modernizing it of course, and adding a trick ending. Garbo does her utmost with the tile role, natural for her."  Beneath the review of Greta Garbo as Susan Lennox was a still photograph of Herbert Marshall, "English actor-husband of Edna Best", in the film "Secrets of a Secretary" with Mary Boland and Betty Lawford. Although the announcement may seem odd to this century, The New Movie Magazine in 1931 had reported, "King Vidor has selected Ernest Torreace for one of the important roles in The Rise and Fall of Susan Lennox, Greta Garbo's current picture." During 1932 it was well within the knowledge of "all the more studious Garbo fanatics" (Picture Play) that Greta Garbo was on the screen with Clark Gable, Their attraction to each other is understandable, their antagonism predestined, and their desperate reunion at the end of the picture holds no hope of tranquility." Picture Play thought highly of Greta Garbo adding, "Nor does she triumph in spite of her picture. it is a story entirely worthy of her." Richard Corliss includes Mata Hari with those films in which Greta Garbo's performance had been reviewed as "intentionally, or perhaps artisticly, lethargic". "M.G.M. had put Garbo through so many variations on the beautiful spider falling in love with the idealistic fly that the actress could have performed this part in her sleep- and more than one critic accused her of doing just that." During 1932 Regina Cannon directly quoted Ramon Novarro in New Movie Magazine in The Most Eligible Couple Will Never Marry, "Garbo is my ideal woman, but PI shall never marry." The "startling frank article continued, "No other woman has impressed me so much; not even Barbara La Marr. Greta is everything that man desires. She has beauty, lure, mystery and aloofness that only men understand, for it is a quality which is usually to be found only in men. It is not coldness either. It is emotion." Journalist Ralph Wheelridge chronicled the making of Mata Hari for Photoplay magazine, "Announcements of the co-starring assignnment for Mata Hari sounded signal guns for rumors, conjecture and prognostication of all description. Those who have seen Miss Garbo about the lot during the making of the picture commented upon the gorgeousness of her costume and her unruffled contentment." The author mentions that her co-star had only met Greta Garbo socially oOpn one or two occaisions, "On her dressing room table that morning Garbo found a huge mound of pink roses." He had sent a card reading, "I hope that the world will be as thrilled to see Mata Hari as I am to work with her- Ramon Novarro." Ben Maddox announced during the middle of his article Garbo and Novarro Together, Has Garbo found her Perfect Screen Lover at Last published in Screenland Magazine that he "had a long talk with Ramon during the making of Mata Hari. Ostensibly, little of it was about Greta Garbo, his quoting Novarro as having said, "Popularity is fleeting. So why should I be dazzled with a material success that is bound to end...However, I was delighted to do Mata Hari, it gives me an excellant role, one for which I am fitted. To me, the play is the thing. I like the co-starring plan. When one person alone is featured, the story is distorted to stress one character. And as a result the picture cannot be dramaticly effective..After thirty something happens to you. You get a more serious outlook on life."  To begin My Hollywood Diary, the last work of Edgar Wallace, his wife explains that he wrote his letters in diary form, her publishing those from 1932. in one representative of the time period, while discussing his having dinner with Evelyn Brent and Lowell Sherman, who introduced the topic of Mata Hari, Wallace wrote, "By the way all Hollywood is agog as to whether Greta Garbo will turn up at her premiere. most people think she won't." Wallace included a portrait of Garbo in the volume captions with merely "Metro Goldwyn Mayer" and related that people in Hollwood referred to Greta Garbo only as Garbo. He later added, On Saturday night, I forgot to tell you I met a Mrs. Glazner. Greta's reticence is not pose. She told me a lot about her. She was an assistant in a barbershop-used to mix the lather- then went into that where Tiller (Stiller), the producer met." Owing to that Edgar Wallace wrote novels about Scotland Yard, it is uncanny, or eerie that decades later we would not hold the belief that he had met Garbo, the actress, in disguise or traveling under a pseudonym.


Scott Higgins, currently. Professor of Film at Wesleyean University and recently the editor of Arnheim for Film and Media draws a portrait of Arnheim as an outdated, archaic formalist lacking vision, but notes that the author, a proponent of the visual as the basis of aesthetic theory, maintained that "an action can gain expressive power through 'indirect representation'. This may be in part evident in Arnheim's 1934 piece on Motion, "When in Grand Hotel Greta Garbo walked through the lobby with a springy, dynamic gait, she produced not only the most beautiful moment of the film, but also the most telling characterization of the dancer, whose part she was playing. Sr risk of doing an injustice to the most animated face in the history of film art, it may be said that Greta Garbo could give equally strong expression to the human soul by the rhythm of her gait, which depending on the Occaisionalism was victorious Nd energetic, transfigured, or tied, broken anxious and feeble."
Richard Corliss describes the work of Greta Garbo with director George Fitzmaurice, "As You Desire Me begins with a fascinating premise, and reworks a Pirandello play that seems intriguingly relevant to the creation of Garbo the star. indeed the film has everything going for it but good writing, acting and directing. For most of the film, Garbo looks as if she's simply fiinishing out her five year contract." Photoplay Magazine gave an eerie, perhaps unsettling, review of the film, " 'This may be the last Garbo picture you see' but at this moment she will not make any more now...if ever...And Garbo has never been more marvelous....The love scenes between Douglas and Garbo are the high points of the film and they are almost equal to the ones played so long ago by Gilbert and Garbo. if this must be her last picture, we are glad it is such a fitting swan song. And you don't need us to tell you not to miss the film."  Picture Play Magazine during 1932 reviewed the film with, "There are only two kinds of fans- those who like Garbo and those who do not. Those who like her surely want 'As You Desire Me' to head the reviews this month, want praise of a more intriguing Garbo than has been for some time. I'm for Miss Garbo though and must say that her new film affords her one of her finer performances. it gives feeder range to natural talent for comedy....At the same time, she employs her reliable trick of expressing a whole speech in one husky monosyllable."
     Actor Melvyn  Douglas 'co-authored' the article "Why is Garbo great?" for Silver Screen magazine with journalist Patricia Keats during 1932. It began with the explanation that Greta Garbo was filming on As You Desire on location in Laguna, California and that Melvyn Douglas was sullen over having watched his own on screen performance in the film The Broken Wing during the previous evening, a film which he felt would compromise his bid for immortality or impair his relation with his audience, but he went on to give a synopsis of the plot to the new film in which he would be appearing, " 'Pirandello, as usual, let's you draw your own conclusions.'" The article continued to fulfill the promise of its subtitle, which had been "Melvyn Douglas, her new leading man, describes Garbo..'Since I have been in pictures,' Mr. Douglas continued, ' I have never met anyone as interesting as Garbo. I expected a cold, haughty woman who demanded thus-and-so by means of temperamental outbursts. But instead I found charming, emotional girl suffering from one of the worst inferiority complexes I have ever seen.'"
Film Daily tersely, perhaps succinctly, announced during 1932, "Greta Garbo, who gets more publicity by trying to avoid it, is reported due today with intentions of sailing on the liner Grispholm for Sweden. At the M.G.M. home office yesterday, nobody had any idea as to the whereabouts of the Glamorous Greta." It followed later with. "Greta Garbo wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and accompanied by the Countess Wactmeister has been reported in Paris for the last week shopping. She is expected to return to Stockholm this week. Hollywood Filmograph during 1932 chronicled that, "Greta Garbo, while in Djuisholm, Sweden, refused to see American reporters. But the door was opened to Rene Kraus, German writer. Greta told Mr. Kraus that she would not be back in Hollywood for two years. That Maurice Stiller had not left her any money. That she had not played a part in Ivar Kruger's life. That she was only a frien
d to Newspaperman Sorensen. That she had no intention of getting married." The magazine later continued, "WILL GARBO RETURN seems to be a much mooted question with the executives as well as the fans debating the question since the Swedish star left our shores, but she's still elusive." Movie Classic in 1932 reported that the United States was on tenterhooks as Greta Garbo neared the shores of Sweden, "She permitted a young American poet, named Philip Cummings to share her society- and even to laugh with her. And when her boat docked at Gothenburg, she was so excited that she actually summoned reporters to her! OShe told them- with a smile- that she was not afraid of reporters...but that she was tired of being written about so much. She added that she was not returning to America in the near future...She said she could tell no one her future plans." Movie Classic reported that while talking to reporters Garbo had to admit to the eventuality of her returning to the Hollywood screen. John Bainbridge gives an account of the events around Greta Garbo and her having departed for Sweden for an entirety of eight months. "Besides arranging to have her name omitted from the ships passenger list, she quietly slipped aboard the liner the night before it sailed. She had spent a period of weeks on an island swimming and sunbathing before returning to Stockholm, where she was visited by Mercedes de Acosta. She had read a biography of on encouragement of Salka Viertel about the throne of Sweden and of one who, during her reign, her "distaste of marriage was profound, she had swarms of lovers...she rewarded her favorites lavishly with money, land and titles...She also gave away half the crown lands." Garbo read the completed script to Queen Christina written Viertel and a colleague, it being made a stipulation of the renewal of her contract. She was met by Viertel on her return to the United States.

Nearing the end of 1933, Hollywood Filmograph reported. "The famous Lola Montez- will be the next character that Greta Garbo will try as M.G.M have bought a story of the dashing Lola that vamped The King of Bavaria. The title of the story Heavenly Sinner, which has a glamorous, picturesque background and should exactly fit the mysterious one. That year the periodical published Looking through the Telescope, by Lal Chand Mehra, which outlined filmic spectatorship as being concerned with "the channels of the mystery of knowledge" and that the spectator remained distant and aloof so as to mystify the view, "Greta Garbo's greatest appeal in my humble opinion lies in the fact that this consummate actress always leaves an air of mystery about her. Even though she has portrayed ordinary human characters in all her pictures, she has carried an aloofness that the audiences never understand. This very distance has made Miss Garbo an attractive character...Her human portrayals are mystically beautiful. This question is- what can she do in a real mystic part?" Rilla Page Palmborg, the journalist, who has on several occaisions been credited with having created the initial "Mysterious Stranger" image of Greta Garbo in regard to the interpretations of Greta Garbo's personal life and how they were or were not neccesarily translated on to thOoe screen, returned to Photoplay in 1933 to write the article "Now Its $12,500 a week", the title coming from Garbo's apparently wondering if there would be an early retirement she would enter and if he current salary would compensate for her being neglected, "However that may be, Garbo is now busy with her friend, Mrs. Berthold Viertel, wife of the German motion picture directoI'm r, hunting a house and otherwise getting established. Metro is humming with excitement- and these matters stand untill the next development." Garbo had returned from Sweden and "She didn't know whether she'd care to make pictures next year." To begin 1934, in Hollywood Reporter it was reported that, "M.G.M has quietly shelved The Paradine Case by Robert Hichens. Story was wrangled over as a possible vehicle for Greta Garbo, but no go, owing to a character problem that could not be cracked, to which it within months added, "M.G.M. cannot make up its mind as to the cast decisions for Indo-China, originally scheduling it under Bernie Hyman's wing for Constance Bennet, but now giving it serious consideration as possible Greta Garbo vehicle."

New Movie Magazine anticipated the release of Queen Christina in Advanced News of Films in the making, "The Garbo set, as usual, was closed to all but the people actually working on it...Miss Garbo's schedule during production never varies a minute. You could set your watch by the entrance of her limousine through the front gates each morning at seven forty five. She spends an hour studying her lines and being made up. At nine o'clock on the dot she arrives on the set. At nine thirty, the first scene rehearsed or made, she disappeares into her portable dressing room and has fruit juice and tea, her breakfast" New Movie went on to outline the rest of her predictable day of shooting. During 1934, Photoplay succinctly encapsulated the onscreen Greta Garbo, "in Queen Christina, Greta Garbo and John Gilbert have a rendezvous in an inn. To Christina, all the inanimate things in their chummy room become very dear, due to their association with her romance. One sequence consists of Garbo hovering about the room, caressing various objects while Gilbert watches silently. She takes her time too." The caption of a portrait of Greta Garbo taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull published in Photoplay during 1934 read, "Greta Garbo as Queen Christina is impressively beautiful." In Three Weeks with Garbo, published in 1936, Leon Surmelian began with, "After twelve years of entertaining the public as the screen's No 1 glamour gal, my and your weakness, the incomparable Garbo remains the same elusive shadow, the same lovely enigma to the world that worships her at her feet...It was during the filming of the memorable Queen Chistina when Katerine Hepburn tried to crash Garbo's stage as an extra and failed where I succeeded. And now I will give you an intimate closeup of the Swedish Sphinx out of my won personal observations.
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It reviewed the film, "The magnificient Greta, after an abscence of over a year, makes a glorious reappearance on the screen...on the whole, Rouben Mammoulian's direction is admirable; S.J. Behrman's dialouge is scintillating; settings and costumes are rich." Tucked away in a secluded corner of a 1933-4 issue of Cinema Quarterly is a review of Queen Christina written by Paul Rotha. "I do not find it in me to write about this picture, but I must write instead about Garbo, who contrives, though Heaven knows how, to surpass all the badness they thrust upon her...Here a lithe figure sheathed in men's breeches and stamping boots, she strides into our prescence and again reveals her dynamic personal magneticism. She is a woman, it seems, destined to contrive in a world that spells misunderstanding...Queen Christina perhaps comes nearest; with its great close-ups and sublime fading shot. But the showman tricks of Mamoulian and the falseness of the environment conspire against her." Cinema Quarterly was also a magazine that published The Film Critic of Today and Tommorow, by Rudolph Arnheim, who wrote, "In an essay....Mamoulian was blamed for having allowed himself to be influenced by the "innocent vanity" of Greta Garbo. Almost simultaneously there appeared in a German newspaper, an interview in which Greta Garbo said, "You ask whether I am satisfied with the Christina film? Not at all. How could you think that? If I had any say in the matter, it would be quite different. But what one would like oneself is never realized. I shall never act the part of which I have dreamed." After continuing to write that he and his readers were not to be concerned "with a defence of Greta Garbo", Arnheim notes a creative dichotomy between actor and director, much like the one posited by silent film historians that saw the two reel film evolve into the eight reel during the time of Bitzer and Griffith where the scenario and photoplay emerged and developed. Hollywood magazine during 1934 published an article titled, "Garbo Finds Love" without revealing the name of its author, the headline reading, "The budding and blossoming of Garbo's romance with Mammoulian, as seen through the eyes of an actress who worked with her in Queen Christina, but for obvious reasons must remain anonymous." It began, "As one of those who worked with Garbo in Queen Christina, I saw her romance with Rouben Mammoulian bud and grow and flower into love. And I, like the rest of Hollywood, believe they will soon marry." The cover Movie Classic magazine hosted the title, "Will Garbo marry her Director". Between the covers, underneath an oval photograph of Greta Garbo as Queen Christina, read the caption,"Portrait by Bull". It stated, "Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were only a few feet away from the city clerk and matrimony when she turned away, shaking her head. 'I have changed my mind.', she said. But now apparently the man for whom she has waited has now appeared. Rouben Mammoulian, the famous director of stage and screen, is that man." Journalist Dorothy Manners for New Movie Magazine that year asked, "Will Garbo Marry Mamoulian during an article in which she quoted the director, "Mamoulian only shrugs, 'The story that Miss Garbo and I plan to be married is absurd.'" Mamoulian, Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel had been dining together that evening. Silver Screen during 1934 observed, "The Garbo Mammoulian romance seems to develop steadily. The two have been quietly lunching at the Ambassador and dining at the Russian Eagle quite often lately." It was nestled on a page titled More Gossip-Whispers are Little Daggers. John Gilbert would make only one film after having been reunited with Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, The Captain Hates the Sea (1934). Bainbridge writes, "It was reported, erroneously, that when Garbo was informed of his death she said, 'What is that to me?' Actually she was vacationing in Stockholm when Gilbert died [1936] and was given the news by a Swedish reporter in the foyer of the Royal Dramatic Theater during an intermission. She refused to make any comment; shortly afterward she left the theater." There is one account, if not more, that the role in Queen Christina was first going to be offered to Lord Olivier and was given to John Gilbert on Greta Garbo's insistence. According to John Gilbert himself, it may seem to have been. John Bainbridge chronicles that not only had Lord Olivier filmed screen tests and signed a contract, but he and Greta Garbo had rehearsed love scenes before his having had been decided against by the actress.
     Modern Screen magazine during 1933 briefly reviewed Queen Chrstina with the exclamation, "Triumph for Garbo. The picture is an unending series of exceptional scenes, packed with fine characterization a and good direction." it saw the film as a "comeback" for John Gilbert. Pages later it ran an article by Gladys Hall that began, "John Gilbert called me on the phone one night. he said, 'I am filing a complaint against the studio to have my contract construed. When I gave you the first story about my comeback, thanks to Garbo, I told you I'd give you the next big story that might happen to me. it happened." The title of the article was "Don't Send Gilbert into Exile" and it carried a rectangle plaque I between the two vertical paragraphs which read, "His fate is in your hands...write and tell us your opinion...It will determine John Gilbert's fate".
     it is eminent that Roland Barthes is looking at the final pullback shot of Mammoulian's film during the essay The Face of Garbo, irrespective of the pullback shot itself having been first developed by silent film director Clarence Brown and any contrived metaphor that that the frozen facial expression of Greta Garbo may have been Intended to represent a farewell to the silent era itself within the loyalty of nostalgia. Barthes writes, "It is indeed an admirable face-object. In Queen Christina, a film which has been shown in Paris in the past few years, the make up has the snow thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster, protected by the surface of the color, not by it's lineaments. Amid all the snow, at once fragile and compact, the eyes alone, black like strange soft flesh, but not the least expressive, are two faintly tremulous wounds....Now the temptation of the absolute mask (the mask of antiquity for instance) perhaps implies less the theme of a secret...than that of an archetype of the human face...And yet in this deified face, something sharper than a mask is looI'm ming." It may seem unavoidable that we question the fictional characters of Ingmar Bergman's film Personna on their isolated island as we look at the mythology earlier written by Barthes in 1957.
     Interest in "How Garbo became Garbo" was still flourishing in fan magazines during 1934, it seemingly artificially catapulted by the death of Mauritz Stiller in retrospect after the advent of sound film and articles persisted to peer into the childhood of Greta Garbo spent in Sweden. Photoplay published the article "Greta Garbo Wanted to be a Tightrope Walker" in which journalist Leonard Clairmontoutlined his making a film on the Making of Greta Garbo. He claimed to have travelled to Sweden to film Greta Garbo's grandmother, supplying biographical details to those interested in the young actress. "To film Greta Garbo's grandmother is not an easy task. If anyone thinks so, just try it...she just simply refused to be filmed." He added that the woman was then seventy six years old and had never seen her granddaughter on film. The grandmother as having said,"Because she was from the city, she thought she was a city girl and didn't think much of my cooking...She wanted to be a tightrope walker and tied ropes between the trees and had everybody in the place worried stiff."
     Reviewer Hal E. Wood contributed Garbo Frowns Again to Hollywood magazine in 1934, "Greta Garbo is anything but pleased over the action of Metro in signing assigning Victor Fleming to direct her in the Painted Veil. In fasct there are rumblings to the effect that the Swede is dusting off." The magazine claimed that Garbo wanted to leave for Sweden due to her lack of director approval and that she favored making a second film with Mammoulian, to which it appended, "Greta's lonely again" in its News Slueth section, "It's all over between garbo and Rouben mammoulian if you take the word of the chatters...Incidently, the star has rescinded her demand that Mammoulian, who directed her in Queen Christina be named her guide through The Painted veil and has approved Richard Boleslavsly as her megaphonist" Milton Brown photographed Greta Garbo on the set of The Painted Veil for The New Movie Magazine during 1934. It pointed out, "Notice the raised boards Garbo walks on to increse her height." A second photograph taken on the set of The Painted Veil by Milton Brown accompanying Garbo Starts Her New Picture took up more than three fourths of two pages in Photoplay, "Take 1- which means the first scene in Greta's new Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film, The Painted Veil. The first call of 'Camera' for a Garbo pictYure is always a thrilling second. This time it stirred more excitement than ever before...All the sets for The Painted Veil were constructed on stilts, as this photograph reveals. The set has a ceiling, which is unusual from a scenic angle." Hollywood magazine during 1935 printed the article "Garbo's Cameraman Talks At Last, where William Daniels was quoted as having said, "She has been pictured as gloomy, aloof, frightened, imperious and a hundred other things as unlike her real self as are midnight and noon. The real Greta Garbo is the most sensible woman I have ever known. The keynotes of her character are intelligence, simplicity and absolute sincerity....Garbo likes to look through the camera to see what the scene is going to look like, but she does n't thrust her opinions on any of her fellow workers....She almost never troubles to look at the 'rushes' of her films, nor even at the first rough assembly of the picture. Instead she waits for the previews." In the article there is a photo caption reading, "Camerman Daniels wants to photograph Garbo in color. He believes her complexion is the loveliest he has ever filmed." William Daniels is quoted by journalist William Stoll as having related, "When it came time to film retakes on The Painted Veil, Director Boleslawski had been called away to another studio, so W.S. Van Dyke took charge. He is probably the breeziest, quickest shooting director in the business, he literally cuts and edits his pictures as he shoots them. Our first retake was a scene of Miss Garbo coming down a long flight of stairs. we made the shot- once. Van Dyke said to me, 'Okay-wrap it up! Now, let's move over here!' Miss Garbo's face was a study; then she slowly smiled and saOid,'Well, I suppose there is only one way to walk down stairs.'" Memory would be insufficient to serve in regard to the often related story about Greta Garbo's slippers as to whether it originated with Mauritz Stiller or William Daniels, but as Hollywood folklore, John Bainbridge whispers that it was Daniels, "Whenever possible, she wore an old pair of carpet slippers on the set for the sake of comfort. before a scene was shot she always asked Daniels, 'Is the feet in?'. If they were out of camera range, she kept the slippers on, regardless of what fabulous Adrain creations she was wearing." Perhaps, the wearing of slippers had prompted her remark to Daniels about how an actress should descend a staircase. Greta Garbo departed from her usual portrait photographers for four photos "posed exclusively for Photoplay", her reconfirming herself as a fashion model as the two page layout "Garbo's first fashion sitting in five years" described in detail three gowns that Adrian had designed for the film The Painted Veil. The first of which was a gray silk teagown, with pleated organiza jabot and deep dolman type sleeves. The second article photograph was described as "the sports type of thing Garbo loves- nonchalance in the swagger lines of a white flannel coat" whereas the third included "a new version of the famous Garbo pillbox hat," and a corded felt with jade ornament. Richard Corliss writes, "Boleslawski's visual effects Phere are adept without being ostentatious- as when Garbo looks distractedly into a window, and the reflection shows a much more disturbed face."  John Bainbridge quotes director Richard Boleslawski, giving the impression, as elsewhere, that Greta Garbo approached acting in a professional manner, if not meticulous in regard to scene study, business-like in any event about the demands of the art, perhaps learned long before at the Royal Dramatic Academy in Stockhom. Boleslawski had said, "She was so completely thorough in her art that one found her almost as marvelous as the camera itself." Bainbridge goes on to descroibe her dependable punctuality while working for the studio and her being not only "letter-perfect in her lines" but that she would also know the lines of the actors that were to play alongside of her.

Photoplay magazine journalist Otis Wiles affirmed What It's Like to Work with Garbo, with the claim that " Herbert Marshall's intimate revelations about Greta Will Suprise You." The article explains that Marshall was scheduled to film on adjacent sets, and that while he was finishing The Outcast Lady, with Constance Bennet, Greta Garbo was beginning production of The Painted Veil. Marshall, thinking that the make up for one film was too dark for the other went over to what was to soon be his next assignment. Richard Boleslavsky had built an entrance way to the set on stilts that were four feet in height. " 'Miss Garbo was in her portable bungalow,' said Marshall. 'She was told I was on the set to do a test and she flew out of the bungalow. I wasn't kept waiting a second. She came to me smiling and with a very friendly hand extended toward me. She said, 'Marshall, there seems to be some nonsense about make up...If your make up is wrong I will change mine.' of course I wouldn't permit her to go to all that trouble, but the incident gives a clear insight into the kindly, cooperative charcter of the woman." Marshall at the time was renting the home of Director Edmund Goulding. Photoplay gives an account of one afternoon Herbert Marshalll returned after work to find Greta Garbo and another woman on the tennis courts of the estate, playing "skillfully and gracefully"; she had taken Goulding up on a standing invitation she had obtained.


Photoplay during 1935 almost couldn't have seemed more inaccurate, it having printed, "Garbo from all indications to make Hollywood her home on her return. She's going to bring her two brothers with her." Silver Screen toward the end of 1935 reported, "From Stockholm comes news that Garbo is busy these days finishing up a scenario based on the life of a saint. Her fondest dream has been to star in a picture with a religious theme, and the studio offering her none, she has written her own script." In regard to the mystery of Greta Garbo, Stockholm reported in Motion Picture Daily during early March of 1936, "Greta Garbo will leave here tommorow aboard the Drottingholm." More than two weeks later, in the same periodical, Gottenburg reported, "Greta Garbo is expected to sail tommorrow for the United States on the Gripsholm." The periodical soon ameYÿnded, "Greta Garbo, who arrived Sunday on the Gripsholm from Sweden is shifted to leave for Hollywood this afternoon." but with very little explanation spotted Greta Garbo in Chicago, "Greta Garbo and Berthrold Viertol had an exciting time here between the arrival of the Twentieth Century and The Chief. They went to the Field Museum and looked over the mummies."

     Photoplay provided a brief review of Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina during 1936, "The persuasive genius of Greta Garbo raises the rather weak picture into the class of art. Fredrick March is unconvincing as the lover for whom Greta sacrifices everything." It later rewrote its review, "This picture is really a weak and dull picture. yet the persuasive genius of Garbo raises it into the class of art. What should be moving seems dated, though the production is magnificient...But Frederick March seems stuffy." Film Daily reviewed the film not unsimilarily, "Greta Garbo in a sympathetic role that fits her admirably...with a fine appreciation of the poignant drama with all its subtle evaluations....Garbo has never appeared more hI'm uman and appealing." Motion Picture Daily's review of the film included the assessment, "The Tolstoi novel of Russia, containing as it does dramatic elements repeated time without end in many and far less distinguished pictures, make a fitting vehicle for the screen's leading tragedienne...Anna Karenina, slightly ponderous perhaps from the view of story, is nevertheless, a thoroughly worthwhile motion picture directed by Clarence Brown with pronounced ability." Picture Play magazine looked at the film as a remake, "So old that it served Garbo before she broke her silence and lapses into her present perfect speech. Then it was called Love. The new version is more interesting because it is more painstakingly done, speech giving it new refinements and subtleties. meticulous costumes and seetings complete a marvelous reproduction of St Petersburg society." Motion Picture Daily early in the year reported, "Basil Rathbone intends to leave for Hollywood in six weeks. He has turned down an offer by M.G.M. to appear in Anna Karenina with Greta Garbo and Frederick March. Rathbone is anxious to play the Sidney Carlton role in Tale of Two Cities, but he will most likely be signed by a company other than M.G.M." A month later it announced, "Reginald Denny goes in to Anna Karenina, which stars Greta Garbo at M.G.M." Basil Rathbone wrote of his aquaintance with Greta Garbo in his autobiography In and Out of Character- one of my copies mysteriously had the Players Cigarette Card featuring the actor from 1938 scotched taped to the inside cover, which, not unlike the persian slipper, the present author still keeps in my wallet- "I first met Miss Garbo in 1928 when Ouida and I were invited to lunch one Sunday." Rathbone and his wife had been present at the premiere of the film The Flesh and the Devil. There is an account that it had been Adrian that had designed the costume that Greta Garbo had worn to a party given by Basil Rathbone and Ouida Bergere during 1929. She had attended Mrs. Rathbone's affair as Hamlet. Of his starring in the film Anna Karenina with her he wrote, "And so upon the morning previously arranged I called upon Miss Garbo. The house, a small one, was as silent as a grave. There was no indication that it might be occupied." The atmosphere may not quite have been as conducive to a seance that Valentino would have attended as Rathbone may have made it out to be. Jane Ardmore's biography of Mae Murray, The Self Enchanted- Mae Murray: Image of an Era only briefly mentions Basil Rathbone or Greta Garbo but it is an account of off-screen Hollywood, there having been a diegetic and non-diegetic aspect to the extra-textual as well. Rathbone had starred with Mae Murray in The Masked Bride (Christy Cabbane, 1925, six reels). "Every fourth Sunday, Mae threw open her house for lavish entertainment...Jack Gilbert brought Greta Garbo. They were in love and radiant, but Greta worried about the studio, she was shy, there seemed such commotion, her energies were sapped. 'You should have a dressing room as I do, Darling," Mae had told her. Mae Murray would later be attending a birthday party for Rudolph Valentino given by Pola Negri. On learning that Greta Garbo had already had the film Mata Hari in production, Pola Negri deciding between scripts that were in her studio's story department chose A Woman Commands as her first sound film, in which she starred with Basil Rathbone. Of Rathbone, she wrote in her autobiography, "As an actor I suspected basil Rathbone might be a little stiff and unromantic for the role, but he made a test that was suprisingly good. In an article titled Hissed to the Heights- That's Rathbone, written during 1936, Motion Picture quoted the actor, "Before I played Karenin I was puzzled about the technique of film acting, and wasn't satisfied at all with what I had been doing. During the filming of Anna Karenina I watched Garbo and learned from her what I think is the secret of good screen acting; play your part with the least possible movement and the greatest possible mental projection. It is different on the stage. There your whole body is constantly exposed to the audience and you must have perfect coordination from head to foot....And Garbo has this power of mental projection to a superb degree...I first met her in 1928. I found her very intelligent and charming. I didn't meet her again untill 1935, when we were cast in the same picture. She wasn't the same person, she had changed. You know I think Garbo suffers a great deal for being typed typed. Her camerman thinks so too." "And now in Anna Karenina she becomes newly romantic." To the left of a portrait of Greta Garbo taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull, a caption read, "And on her return from Sweden, she may do Camille."
Screenland magazine made the fantastic announcement, "And here's another thing that concerns Miss Garbo. for years Fred Niblo has been trying to interest the financial powers at Metro in a story by Barney Glazer on the Emperess Josephine. unlike other yarns that mention Napoleon, he is to be, in this, a secondary character. it being women's day, the author feels the women of history should have their due. now it looks as though the deal will go through, and Greta will play Josephine." Screenland printed the article in August of 1930! M.G.M's own advertisements featuring Greta Garbo in Motion Picture Daily during 1937 told audiences, "Garbo and Boyer in Beloved. You'll hear plenty about it." During 1937 The Film Daily chronicled the interest Clarence Brown held in the script of Conquest, "Countess Walewska, M.G.M. Greta Garbo picture has literally become a 'Clarence Brown production'. Valuable tapestries, silver candlesticks and tableware that once graced the palaces of the Russian Czars, but which have adorned Brown's (Californian) ranch home are used as props in the picture." The magazine went on to explain that brown was a collector and had a letter in his library that was "the basis for one of the dramatic highlights of the vehicle," it having been written by a dying French Soldier. Motion Picture Herald, not entirely of a different opinion, reported that Greta Garbo had read the novel written by Waclaw Gastrorowski and asked Irving Thalberg before his death to adapt the romance  of Maria Waleska. The script assignment accordingly went to Bernard H. Hyman. it elaborated that there had been "intensive exploratory research" and that "hundreds of thousands of feet of film were photographed and several secret previews were held prior to its being shown to press audiences.". Ruth Waterbury announced that Garbo would soon appear in the film Countess Walewska wearing a new type of jockey a cap, which would have a "deep long bill hanging down in front." Of the script, Richard Corliss later wrote that it was, "a model of civilized wit, which Clarence Brown direct with a rigorous lack of style that seems almost personal. But there is little of Garbo to comment upon untill the last scenes." Picture Play magazine that year had published a portrait of Greta Garbo taken by Clarence Sinclair Bull captioned, "Divine Lady; Garbo as Marie Waleska in Conquest." It also had published an article by Helen Louise Walker with the subtitle, "Garbo casts a spell of silence over those who know her well. They cannot talk about her even when they try. Why is this?"
     During November of 1937, Life Magazine featured Greta GarboGreta on its cover. She was again in studio costume as she was often, if not exclusively, photographed. it announced that the front cover portrait of Greta Garbo as Countess Waleska in M.G.M's latest production Conquest" had been take by Clarence Bull. The article in between its covers showed photographs of her birthplace, the barbershop where she worked, a childhood photograph of her, a photo of her as a child at school and publicity photos from the film Peter and the Tramp taken with her in a bath suit, before going on to include her in publicity photos with her leading men from silent films made in the United States. The article was title with the heading," After Twelve Years Greta Garbo Wants to Go Home to Sweden, the recluse of Hollywood longs for the scenes of an unhappy childhood."



Greta Garbo is reported to have mentioned to the press that Camille was too tragic a character, intonating a reluctance in regard to the studio's assignment. In Gabo Talks at Last- And Here is the Romantic Romantic Reason For Her Silence, printed in Photoplay during 1936, Jim Mason gives an account of meeting Garbo. "Garbo talked to me on the train that was bringing her to Hollywood...at first she refused to see me..she granted an interview that lasted twenty minutes...the longest exclusive interview she has given. 'I really want to find as much solitude as I can,' she said. 'I do not know why I should talk to people i do not know, but I am beginning to learn that it is necessary...They say I am difficult to talk to-Ah if you only knew how hard I've tried...Sometimes I become upset. When i arrive at a railway station and crowds force in and around me. I want to run...I can not say how long I will stay, a year, perhaps longer. I love it here, but I love Sweden, too. Its hard to say." It was then divulged to the readers of Photoplay that there were the remanants of a former romance, "The real reason for her change of heart is apparently George Brent."


The Camille of silent film actress Bernhardt remade by Greta Garbo was remade by several silent film actresses. The production of Camille (Kameliadamen, George Cukor,193) included screenwriter Frances Marion. Film Daily reported during 1936, "Greta Garbo has spent three full days this week in Adrian's studio going over designs for the costumes of her new starring production, Camille. During 1936, Photoplay related that Robert Taylor during the first week of filming had been without any contact with Greta Garbo, that he hadn't yet glimpsed her, his having been told that she was "making tests and couldn't begin work". Later that week, after his finally appearing on the set without out her, Photoplay directly quoted the actor, "'I thought this Garbo thing was a myth,' he mumbled." Later, it featured a two page fold of on the set photographs, "With these pictures, taken at the closely guarded set of "Camille", Photoplay proudly presents to you for the first time Garbo in color- and how lovely she is....Behind Cukor is Bill Daniels, Garbo's only camerman. Bill was rushed to the hospital twice during the shooting, but Garbo serenely waited for him. She will have no one else shoot her pictures." John Bainbridge quotes director George Cuckor as having said, "While we were doing Camille, Garbo didn't talk much to Robert Taylor. She was polite, but distant."
     Later during 1936, Photoplay added, "At M.G.M. we discover that Garbo and Robert Taylor are still making Camille- still on a sound stage that is hermetically sealed against visitors." Ruth Waterbury was so thrilled with her performance that while praising the actresses' enactment of the death scene, she sugIgested that Greta Garbo star in Marie Antoinette, "if Shearer decides not to make it." A photocaption in the article reads, "Garbo, entering her eleventh year as a star had to die- to live more glamorously than ever." It announced that she would appear as the Countess Walewska wearing. New type of jockey cap which would have a "deep long bill hanging down in front."

The whereabouts of Greta Garbo in 1936 was in most ways far from being kept entirely in secret; according to Photoplay Magazine, garbo owned a villa in Nyokoping, Sweden and was celebrating her thritieth birthday. During 1937, it confidently mentioned, "Garbo will make another picture instead of a trip to Sweden." The Swedish Film Institutute (Svenska Filminstitututet), which provides an extensive cataloging and data asking of the history of Swedish Film production from its early silent beginnings to the present, is thorough in its filmography of Greta Garbo, thorough enough to have listed her being included in the film The Romance of Celluloid (Celluloidens romantic), made in 1937. Eliza Shallert of Motion Picture Magazine contributed the article With Thalberg Gone Will Garbo Retire? Her reasoning began with the death of Thalberg. "Her latest production of Camille was started by him, although carried to completion by others."
 Her review of the film touted a more intense Greta Garbo, "When Camille is released, audiences will behold a Garbo more beautiful than at any time in her career. And they will see A Garbo so frail, that breathing itself will appear an effort.."
It was only after my recently revisiting the Gothic Hammond Castle, built on the Massachusetts Coast in 1929, that I read that it was a "secret hideaway" of Greta Garbo. More publicity has been given to it by moderns who persist in their claim that it is haunted and has a Swinging Chandelier, but the visitor to the vista of Norman's Woe, which provided the location to Longfellow's poem The Wreck of the Hesperus, will be informed that the swimming pool in its courtyard, which is encased in a glass canopy and houses a statue of St. Mark, was often used by John Barrymore. It was the favorite room in the castle of Greta Garbo when she visited with Stockowski. Nor was I aware, it also being seemingly omitted from fan magazines, that it is has become public knowledge that Greta Garbo owned a oceanfront estate across Gloucester Harbor on Dolliver's Neck also built by the Hammond family, erected in 1935 and sold before 1950, which she used during the summer. but interestingly, it was in Picture Play Magazine in A Woman Alone, published in 1937 during the release of Greta Garbo in the film Conquest, that journalist Helen Louise Walker depicted Greta Garbo as mysterious rather than eccentric while reported that she was without owning a home in Hollywood an inhabited only rented dwellings. "She does not care what is inside the house. Apparently she never moves a vase or changes the angle of a chair or the position of a picture. The astonished owners return to find everything as they left it, not one telltale detail to prove that one of the world's most glamorous woHmen has been living there. Nothing is marred-Greta Never giving parties- no china has been broken, everything is spotless...Just now Greta is occupying th Niel Hamilton house in Brentwood...She employs a butler-houseman...and she changes servants rather often. Once a pair of trusted servants betrayed her trusted confidence- and took money for it." Walker related in the article, "'At first they hung spangles on her,' Adrian told me.'They considered her a sort of decorative prop. I saw that she was like a tree, with roots deep in the earth. You must never put an artificial jewel or imitation lace or fur on Garbo'" It seems understandable that Adrian may have only consented to interviews with caution, while on the other hand eagerly seeking them out when available. As a margin note, John Gilbert performed in Boston in a theater still open for performances of classical music which has no lingering blythe spirits other than Charles Dickens.
Ruth Waterbury writing in 1938 for Photoplay added interest to the unreachable, nonavailable Greta Garbo, an untouchable star in the firmament, he having scheduled with M.G.M. make up man Jack Dawn, "First of all, he didn't think much of the way my hair was done...a grand girl named Olga came along to do something about that...I had heard she was Garbo's hairdresser so while she worked on me head, I worked on Olga trying to get Garbo information from her...well, she got further than I did." During 1938 Motion Picture Daily printed the announcement, Garbo-Stockowski to Wed, "Greta Garbo and Leopold Stokowski will be married," the location was planned as being in Europe. "It was stated her today by the M.G.M. office and Wallace Berry will be the best man. No date was given." Within weeks it recanted with, "Garbo today denied to the press that she was married to Leopold Stockowski or intended to marry him." Garbo Unhurt in Mishap drew the eye of the reader of Film Daily during 1938 to a report received from Stockholm by newcable. Leopold Stockowski apparently had been behind th...
28 Aug 04:35

The Cat and the Canary (Paul Leni, 1927)

by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
08 Aug 00:20

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by Scott Lord on Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film,
Not only were silent films remade in Hollywood, Anna Christie, Anna Karenina and Camille all films that had originally been silent before having been remade with Greta Garbo, but the "grammar of film" or syntax of film technique, how scenes are constructed through shot structure evolved, or was perhaps developed from earlier silent film.

Vitagraph during 1919 had advertised its onscreen images as being "As brimful  of Appeal, of Allurement, of Unexpectedness, of Radiance and Feminine Witchery as- Girls Themselves" as it brought actress Corinne Griffith to the screen in The Girl Problem,  under the direction of Kenneth Webb.
     It has been suggested that characters were to become unique to each studio, an early for. Of branding, in that way the star system having precedence to genre, which would be established gradually. At a time when the screen was readying its sales for a post-war audience, director Sidney Franklin, sometimes credited as Sidney A. Franklin, was showcasing Norma Talmadge in morality scripts, or marital melodramas, typical of the period, although during 1919 he would waver on genre formula and try for star power, directing Talmadge in the the six reel adventure "Heart of Wetona". The Norma Talmadge Film Corporation had in fact begun during 1917 with the five reel film "The Panthea" directed by Alan Dwan and featuring Eric Von Strohiem as an actor starring with Talmadge.
--------       1919 was a year readying for a new decade with D.W. Griffith at Artcraft directing The Girl Who Stayed Home, (six reels) photographed by Bitzer and starring Robert Harron, Carol Dempster, Richard Barthelmess and Calir Seymore and it was a year with Thomas Ince heading the production of Dorothy Dalton in Extravagence. . D.W. Griffith appears to have sought the combination of moralizing and character interest again by unspooling, unraveling the 1919 drama "Scarlet Days" starring both Carol Dempster and Clarine Seymore while perhaps targeting audience reception and identification by also directing Lillian Gish in the film "True Heart Susie" (six reels) with Robert Harron and Kate Bruce. And yet Paramount was advetising Elsie Ferguson in Counterfeit and Ethel Clayton in More Deadly Than the Male.
D.W. Griffith during 1920 cast Lillian Gish in "The Greatest Question" (six reels), photographed by G.W. Bitzer, as well as "The Idol Dancer" (six reels) with Clarine Seymore and Kate Bruce and "The Love Flower" (seven reels), starring Carol Dempster. During 1921, Carol Dempster again starred under the direction of D.W. Griffith in the silent film "Dream Street".
-------------  During 1921actress Alice Lake, with the film Uncharted Seas (Wesley Ruggles) knudged in between the battle for covergirl transpiring between Viola Dana and May Allison, both for Metro Pictures Corporation. Priscilla Dean stayed on the periphery of the dogfight with her film Reputation for Universal Jewel Deluxe. 
     Cecil B. DeMille during 1921 expanded the genre of romantic melodrama directing Conrad Nagel with Dorothy Dalton and Mildred Harris in the film "Fool's Paradise". DeMille during 1921 directed Agnes Ayers and Kathleen Williams in "Forbidden Fruit", adapted from a story written by Jeanie Macphearson, the story a remake of an earlier film, "The Golden Chance", DeMille had directed in 1915 with actress Cleo Ridgely. Motion Pocture News during 1922 wrote,"Cecil B. DeMille's name immediately conjures up a very definite and distinguished type of screen entertainment: lavish, intimate, satiric, daring, broad in scope and fine in detail, artistic in execution yet with strong box office appeal and exploitation angles...The name of DeMille soon becomes identified rather closely with society drama, but in "Forbidden Fruit" he showed that his genius was by no means confined to one strata of society."
     First National in 1923 published its Great Selection First National First Season brochure of the films it had released during 1922 with a preface explaining that with the aesthetic value of its film was the box office value and it supported the practicality of the exhibitor entering into membership while the studio in fact owned the theater. in their Franchise Plan. "Every First National Picture will have a cast of famous actors. Keep your eyes open and let your patrons know they are with you. It will mean an added box-office attraction." One of the "biggest box-office certainties of the year" was Madge Bellamy in Lorna Doone. It also showcased Norma Talmadge in The Eternal Flame and Costance Talmadge in East is West, it also including Katherine MacDonald in Three Class Productions, Heroes and Husbands, The Woman Conquers and White Shoulders. Hope Hampton was featured in The Light in the Dark. First National annouced, "Louis B. Mayer out to put John Stahl productions on top." Among these were The Dangerous Age, One Clear Call, The Woman He Married and Rose o the Sea (Fred Niblo). "First National Franchise holders can look foward to a series of superb attractions from the studios of Louis B. Mayer, one of the Circuit's earliest producers. J.G. Hawks, "former editor and supervisor of production for Goldwyn" was assigned to Mayer, as was actress Anita Stewart.
----------------"The Beautiful and the Damned", adapted from the novel written by Scott Fitzgerald by screenwriter Olga Pritzlau, it having been only one of her numerous screen credits beginning from 1914. The film starred Charles Burton with actresses Marie Prevost and Louise Fazorda.



From the advertising of 1927 for the film White Gold, actress Jetta Goudal seemed a sensation. The direction of William K Howard was reviewed as "distinctive". The Film Daily wrote, "His method of creating atmosphere appropriate to the action, while not relatively new, is most effective. The monotonous creaking of a rocker, the dreary routine of the sickening desert heat, all these and more,creating detail, makes his efforts outstanding." The photoplay was scripted by Garret Fort with scenario writer Marion Orth.
     Photographer Oliver Marsh during 1927 would be behind the camera lens to film Norma Talmadge in "The Dove" (nine reels), director Roland West adapting the play written by Willard Mack for the screen. That year Norma Talmadge left her autograph, and footprint, in cement in front of the pagoda of Graumann's Chinese Theater, in Los Angelas, along with those who would include her sister Constance, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and Norma Shearer.

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