|
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” (Cook), 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- included in the films made by D. W Griffith in 1908 is a stage to screen adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, with Florence Lawrence.
Among the literary adaptations filmed by Vitagraph in 1909 was Launcelot and Elaine.
In her autobiography, Lillian Gish discusses Griffith’s use of shot legnth in The Lonely Villa (1909) and his cutting between camera distances in The Lonedale Operator (1911). 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.”; which silent film author Nicholas A. Vardac reiterates by writing that it was from the films of Edwin S. Porter that D.W. Griffith acquired the technique of viewing the shot within its context as ”a syntax for the melodrama”. Two films directed by Eisenstien have been offered online through streaming video, the silent film The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and the silent film October (1927).
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. Bengt Forslund notes that the use of nature to provide the action of the scene with something that would render it more dramatic Gardner, particularly diring ”the lyrical love sequences between Lili Beck and Gösta Ekman, his having written, ”There is also an intentionally stereoscopic effect in the sets that is typical of all of Sjöström’s films, and that shows the amount of intuition Sjöström had for the new medium.” Often in the films of Sjöström, like in those of Bergman, the landscape ”in which his journeys take place are part of the journey.” (John Simon). Peter Cowie has noted that Swedish films were often shot on location and that Sjöström had ”revelled in location shooting and embarked on the most perilous of stunts for the sake of realism.” Birgitta Steene writes that ”it was Sjöström and Stiller (as well as Griffith) who began to shoot pictures out-doors”. David A. Cook writes, ”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.” Venerated Swedish film historian Forsyth Hardy compares the directors Victor Sjöström to each other by writing, ”Both turned instinctively for material to the works of Selma Lagerloff with their combination of ardent puritanism and a passionate love of nature. And both were sensitively aware of the virtue which the camera could draw out of inanimate objects.” Sjöström and Stiller can be compared while relating their influence upon the silent film of Finland, but it can be allowed that ”Victor Sjöström delved deeper into the mysteries of the landscape.” (Annitti Alanen) 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 that 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 space 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.
In addition to using close ups that could isolate the actor from what particular background that happenned to surround him or her, D. W. Griffith would establish the relationship between character and enviornment as well, particularly developing it through the use of editing and varying spatial relationships, as in his use of exteriors and the long shot in the silent film Battle at Elderbrush (1912).
In Kristianstad, Sweden the director Carl Engdahl pioneered with the film The People of Varmland (Varmanningarna) in 1909, photographed by Robert (Ohlsson) Olsson, it having been only the first adaptation of Fredrick August Dahlgren’s play. The film was produced by AB Svenska Biografteatern. That year Carl Engdahl and Robert Olsson also collaborated on the films The Wedding at Ulfasa (Brollopet Pa Ulfasa, 1909) and Tales of Ensign Stal (Franrik Stals Sagner, 1909). Carl Engdahl appears as an actor in all three films, as does actress Frida Greif. The Swedish actressess Kathie Jacobsson, Ellen Hallberg and Ellen Stroback all appear in both films Varmanningarna and Tales of Ensign Stal. Robert Olsson photographed The Wedding at Ulfasa for two directors, the second having had been being Gustaf Linden. The film starred the Swedish silent film actresses Ellen Appelberg, Lilly Wasmuth and Anna Lisa Hellstrom. In 1910, Olsson wrote, directed and photographed the film Emigranten, starring Oscar Soderholm and Valborg Ljungberg, and photographed the films Emigrant starring Torre Cederborg and Gucken Cederborg in her first appearance on screen, and Regina von Emmeritz och Kongung Gustaf II Adolf, starring Emile Stiebel and Gerda Andre, both directed by Gustaf Linden. Twelve years later, Gucken Cederborg was introduced to another actress who would soon be introduced to Swedish audiences, Barry Paris having written that when when she and actress Tyra Ryman walked into Pub with actor-director Eric Petschler, Greta Garbo, who worked there as a clerk, recognized them immediately.
Film historians have noted that Kristianstad, Sweden was home to another film, The Man Who Takes Care of the Villian (Han som clara boven), filmed in 1907. Produced by Franz G. Wiberg, the film has never been released theatrically.
Svensk Kinematograf was the production company that under N. E. Sterner had filmed six of the earliest films photographed in Scandinavia- Robert Olsson had photographed Pictures of Laplanders (Lappbilder), Herring Fishing in Bohuslan (Sillfiske i Bohuslan), Lika mot lika starring Tollie Zellman and Kung Oscars mottagning i Kristianstad in 1906 before working with Carl Engdahl. Also shown in Stockholm and Goteborg during 1906 was the film Kriget i Ostergotland. In 1911, Gustaf Linden, directed the film The Iron Carrier (Jarnbararen), photographed by Robert Olsson and starring Anna-lisa Hellstrom and Ivan Hedqvist. Similar to the early cinematography of Robert Olsson were the films shot by Ernest Florman, who wrote and directed the film Skona Helena (1903), which had starred Swedish actress Anna Norrie.
Another of Sweden’s earliest photographers was Walfrid Bergström, who was behind the camera between 1907-1911 in Stockholm for Apollo productions. In 1907 Bergström filmed Den glada ankan, one of the three films produced by Albin Roosval starring Carl Barklind and Emma Meissner and Konung Oscar II’s likbegangelse. Between 1907 and 1911, Bergstrrom would photographed Skilda tiders danser with Emma Meissner and Rosa Grunberg in 1909 and Ryska sallskapsdanser in 1911. During 1908, Svenska Biografteatern produced two short films with the actress Inga Berentz, Sjomansdansen, photographed by Walfrid Bergstrom, and I kladloge och pascen, photographed by Otto Bokman.
Charles Magnusson, who came to the United States, directed and wrote The Pirate and Memories from the Boston Sports Club in 1909 and Orpheus in the Underworld (Urfeus i underjorden) in 1910. Magnusson in 1909 had become the managing director of Svenska Biografteatern, which Julius Jaenzon become part of in 1910. Notably, while under N. E. Sterner of Svensk Kinematograf, Charles Magnusson had photographed Konung Haakons mottagning i Kristiania (1905), a short film of the King of Norway’s visit to Kristiania almost as though to presage that it would be there, rather than Rasunda that he would begin the Swedish Film industry, his also having directed the films Gosta Berlings land(Bilder fran Frysdalen, 1907), Gota elf-katastrofen (1908) and Resa Stockholm-Goteborg genom Gota och Trollhatte kanaler (1908). Konstantin Axelsson, in 1911, directed Hon fick platsen eller Exkong Manuel i Stockholm. Starring Ellen Landquist, the film was produced in Stockholm by Apollo and was photographed by Walfrid Bergstrom.
Like Charles Magnusson, Frans Lundberg produced short silent films in Sweden, the first two filmed in 1910. Stora Biografteatern, in Malmo, Sweden, photographed To Save a Son (Massosens offer), directed by Alfred Lind and starring Agnes Nyrup-Christensen, and The People of Varmland (Varmlandingarna), directed by Ebba Lindkvist, photographed by Ernst Dittmer and starring Agda Malmberg, Astrid Nilsson and Ester Selander. The following year Ernesr Dittmer would write and direct the film Rannsakningsdomaren, starring Gerda Malmberg and Ebba Bergman.
In Malmo Sweden, for Stora Biografteatern, Otto Hoy during 1911 wrote and directed the film The Spy (Spionen), starring Paul Welander and Agnes Nyrop-Christensen, the manager of Stora Biografteatern, Frans Lundberg. Paul Welander wrote and directed his first film in 1911, Champagneruset.
Carl Engdahl later appeared in the 1926 film Mordbrannerskan, directed by John Lindlof.
 Forsyth Hardy notes that the early Swedish films of 1911 were films in which ”the camera remained static and the action was artificially concentrated into a small area in front of it.” Not quite apart from this and very much like the silent film included in Vardac’s account of the use of the proscenium arch in early cinema in Stage to Screen,the films directed by Anna Hofman Uddgren in 1911 were transpositions of Miss Julie and The Father (Fadren) ,the intimate theater of Swedish playwright August Strindberg. Cameraman Otto Bokman used two exterior shots during The Father, the film having starred Karin Alexandersson and Renee Bjorling. Miss Julie, a film that had had its Stockholm premiere at the Orientaliska Teatern, starred Karin Alexandersson and Manda Bjorling. Both plays were later to be filmed by Alf Sjöberg. Stiller had, in fact, been the manager of the Lilla Teaten and a contemporary of August Falk and Manda Bjorling had acted with him and Anna Flygare at the Intima Theatern. Uddgren also in 1911 directed Single a Dream (Blott in drom), starring Edith Wallen Sisters (Systarna), starring Edith Wallen and Sigurd Wallen and Stockholmsdamernas alskling, starring Carl Barcklind, Erika Tornberg and Anna-Lisa Hellström. Balif vid Molle (1911) was photographed by John Bergqvist. Also in Stockholm, the Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern, later managed by both Ingmar Bergman and Erland Josephson, was headed by Gustaf Fredriksson between 1904-1907 and then by Knut Michaelson between 1908-1910. Swedish Film Institue founder Charles Magnusson in 1911 directed The Talisman (Amuletten), starring Lili Bech. Victor Sjöström had had his own theater with Einar Froberg before his directing under Magnusson, it having been Froberg that had spoken to Magnusson before he and Sjöström had met. Swedish film director Gustav Molander had in fact been at the Intima Teatern from 1911 to 1913. The Blue Tower, where August Strindberg lived in Stockholm between 1908-1912 and where he wrote the play The Great Highway, is now part of The Strindberg Museum.
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 which 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.
The Great Train Robbery, produced by Edwin S. Porter, was made by the Edison Manufacturing Co. and is included in the 275 silent films of the Paper Print Collection. Also included in the collection is the early silent film The Little Train Robbery filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Co. in 1905. The Library of Congress also holds a collection of early animation, in which two films produced by silent film pioneer Thomas A. Edison are included, as well as Dinosaur and the missing link, produced by Edison and written by Willis O’Brien in 1917. 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. The Edison company released its last film as a studio, The Unbeliever (Alan Crosland, six reels) in 1918. Not Incidentally, the term ‘one sheet’ used to describe the standard size of movie posters begin with the Edison photoplay; it was a size of approximately 27 inches by 41 inches and often included a synopsis of the plotline of the film. The early silent films of Thomas Edison are also presently available from Kino.
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). The director at Biograph untill June 1908 had been Wallace McCutheon (Personal, 1904). The technique of crosscutting has been attributed to McCutheon (Her First Adventure, 1906; The Elopement, 1907); on occaision directors were beginning to hint at cutting on action by 1907 and were also beginning to link seperate scenes together, as when the same character appears in two scenes that are adjacent. If, within a cinema of attractions, narrative exposition had previously used a discontinuous style, one of filming a single action within what was then an autonomous shot, it would acquire as form a continuous style; when there were to be juxtapositions within narrative from shot to shot, they would be decisions of editing used for the advancement of plot. That intertitles were at first often explanatory shows the beginnings of a narrative within cinema. During an early scene of the silent Frankenstien (J. Searle Dawley, Edison, 1910), there is, in between scenes, an expository intertitle that uses of a close shot of a letter to develop character within the narrative, epistolary form used on the screen. A similar insert shot is used in the film Dash Through the Clouds (1912). Certainly by 1917 films made in the United States, and the films made by Sjöström and Stiller in Sweden had acquired a narrative transitivity, a chronological plot outline, more often than not their being characterized by their having a causal motivation of scene and its structure. 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. Griffith uses 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. In his biography of Victor Sjöström, Bengt Forslund exuberantly remarks upon the discovering of a hitherto unknown copy of Predators of the Sea (Sea Vultures, Havsgama, 1914), starring Richard Lund, Greta Almroth and John Ekman, and not so exuberantly on the unlikelihood of a copy of Victor Sjöström’s film The Divine Woman, starring Greta Garbo, being found in the future. 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.”
Swedish film historian Forsyth Hardy can be quoted as having written, ”The Danes claim to have made the first dramtic film, in 1903″. Denmark had had its own early silent cinema, the Nordisk Film Kompagni having had been founded in 1906, most of the early narrative films for the most part ”thrillers, tragedies and love stories” (Astrid Soderberg Widding), or ”the social melodrama and dive novel that made a hit from 1910 onwards” (Bengt Forslund), were directed by Viggo Larsen, who directed The Black Mask (1906), Revenge (1906) and The Magic Bed (Tryllesaekken, 1907) in Denmark : 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. Among the films produced by Nordisk Films Kompagni in 1906 was Bonden i Kobenhavn (Hunting of a Polar Bear), directed by its manager, Ole Olsen. Having established the Biografteatret, Copenhagen’s first movie theater, Ole Olsen established its first production company in 1906, Ole Olsen’s Film Industry, which that year filmed Pigeons and Seagulls (Duer og Maager). Ole Olsen also produced the 1906 films The Funeral of King Christian IX (King Christian IX’s Bisaettelse) and The Proclamation of King Fredderick VIII (King Frederick VIII’s Proklamtion). There were thirty one silent films produced by Ole Olsen that were given to the Royal Library during the year 1913 to begin the Danish Film Archive. Peter Elfelt donated twenty silent films a year later, making him, with Ole Olsen and Anker Kirkeby, one of the original founders of Det danske Filmmuseum. Many of the silent films made by the Nordisk Films Kompagni, although produced by Ole Olsen, still have an unattributed director, one example of this being the film Rouges (Gartyve), filmed in 1906. Vitriolic Drama (Vitrioldrama), Violinist’s Romance (Violinistens Roman), Rivalinder (A Woman’s Duel/The Rivals), Gelejslaven, Tandpine, Knuste Haaband and Kortspillere were also filmed by Nordisk Films Kompagni during 1906. In 1906 Louis Halberstadt for Nordisk Films Kompagni directed the film Konfirmation, photographed by Rasmus Bjerregaard, it having been the first Danish silent film in which Greta Garbo co-star Jean Hersholt (The Rise and Fall of Susan Lennox) was to appear.
Viggo Larsen was quite possibly the first director to cut from one long shot of a scene to its reverse angle, a long shot of the scene from an opposite angle (Rovens Brod, 1907). The Danish photographer Axel Sorensen began filming for Larsen in 1906 and continued solely with Larsen untill 1911, when he began photographing first for Danish director August Blom and then for Danish director Urban Gad under the name of Axel Graatkjae. One film photographed by Axel Sorensen that Viggo Larsen is particularly noted for directing is The Lion Hunt (Lovejaten, 1907). In the year 1906, the actress Margrethe Jespersen had starred in the films Anarkistens svigermor (Larsen), Knuste hab, Caros dod, Haevnet (Larsen) and Fiskerliv i Norden (Larsen). In 1907, the actress Oda Alstrup was directed by Viggo Larsen and photgraphed by Axel Graatkjaer Sorensen for Nordisk Films in Camille (Kameliadamen), Den glade enke, Trilby (Lille Trilby), and in Aeren tabt-alt tabt and Handen (Haanden), both of which she had starred in with actress Thora Nathansen. Clara Nebelong appeared with her in the film Roverens brud. Among the films directed by Larsen in 1907 were A Modern Naval Hero (En Moderne Sohelt) and Once Upon a Time (Der var engang) with Clara Nebelong, Gerda Jensen and Agnes Norlund Seemann, both of which he appeared in as an actor. Actress Clara Nebelong also that year appeared in the films Vikingeblod and From the Rococo Times (Rosen), also directed by Viggo Larsen and photographed by Axel Sorensen. The Artist’s Model’s Sweetheart (Den Romersk Model) is among the films credited as having been directed by Viggo Larsen in 1908. Viggo Larsen in 1908 directed actress Lili Jansen in several films photographed by Axel Graatkjaer Sorensen, including Lille Hanne, Peters Held, Urmagerens Bryllup and The School of Life (Gennem Livets Skole), which also starred Thora Nathansen. Viggo Larsen that year also directed Mathilde Nielsen and Pterine Sonne in the film The Capricious Moment (Capriciosa). In 1909, Viggo Larsen directed the film Child as Benefactor (Barnet som Velgorer). Emmanuel Tvede directed only one film in Denmark, Faldgruben, and yet in it was future star Emilie Sannom in one of her first screen appearances, Danish actress Kate Fabian also having appeared in the film.
In Denmark Viggo Larsen had played Sherlock Holmes to Holger-Madsen’s Raffles in both Sherlock Holmes Risks His Life (Sherlock Holmes i livsfare, 1908) and Sherlock Holmes Two. Both films were photographed by Axel Sorensen. Einar Zangenberg would play the armchair detective in Larsen’s Sherlock Holmes Three. Larsen would also for the Nordisk Films Kompagni direct the Holmes’ films The Singer’s Diamonds (Sangerindens diamanter, 1908) starring Holger Madsen, The Grey Lady Den Graa Dame, 1909) and Cab Number 519 (Drokes 519), starring August Blom with Larsen as the consulting detective. Viggo Larsen would soon thereafter travel to Germany, where he directed and starred with Wanda Truemann in Arsene Lupin Against Sherlock Holmes (Arsene Lupin Contra Sherlock Holmes, 1910) before directing the even more successful Sherlock Holmes contra Professor Moryarty (1911). Alwin Nuess, a Danish actor who had starred as Sherlock Holmes in One Million Dollar Bond (Millionobilgationen/The Stolen Legacy) and in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1914, Rudolf Meinert), would also go to Germany. In Denmark actor Otto Lagoni would portray Sherlock Holmes for Nordisk Films Kompagni, starring with Danish silent film actress Ingeborg Rasmussen in Den Sorte A Haand (Mordet i Bakerstreet) and with Poul Welander in Den Forklaedete Barnepige (The Bogus Governess). Otto Lagoni also during 1911 appeared under the direction of William Augustinus in the Sherlock Holmes film Den Sorte Haette. Einar Zangenberg would in 1911 appear as Holmes in the Danish silent filmHotelthieves (Hotelmysterierne.)
In addition to Nordisk Films, during 1910 the Regina Kunst Kompagni briefly produced films in Denmark, notably the first three films in which actress Clara Weith Pontoppidan had, as Clara Weith, starred, Elskovsleg, Djaevelsonaten, and Ett Gensyn, in which she starred with actresses Annegrette Antonsen and Ellen Aggerholm. Director Axel Strom directed Clara Weith in the film Dorian Grays Portraet, in which she starred with Valdemar Psilander as well as his having directed Johanne Dinesen in the film Den doe Rotte. Danish silent film actress Emilie Sannon also starred on screen for the Regina Kunst Kompagni, her having starred in the film Doden.
The versatility of Asta Nielsen, directed by her husband Urban Gad, was especially shown from film to film. The Abyss begins with a shot of the actress Asta Nielsen as Magda and her boarding a train as though it were a whistle stop. It continues with exterior longshots, untill the two characters are seen at an outdoor coffee table. There is a cut to an interior where she is seen in full shot opening a letter, the camera distance well behing the Vitagraph nine foot line, particularly for an interior filmed in 1910. Seated, the next shot shows her at a closer angle, filmed higher than her as she is reading the letter. It then cuts to a train station and then a series exterior full shots of her arriving in the country. The scene then shifts to an outdoor circus and an exterior full shot during which she dances. The storyline becomes dramatic, or sensational in its being melodramatic, where she flees with the circus, much like in the Greta Garbo film The Rise and Fall of Susan Lennox. There is in the film a near panning shot following characters as a horse drawn carriage parks near the exterior of a building, the camera then cutting to the interior where she is recieving guests.
The Black Dream (Dem Sorte Drom), filmed the folling year is remarkable in Gad’s use of silhouette. Asta Nielsen appears in the film with actor Valdemar Psilander. In Denmark, Urban Gad also directed actresses Emilie Sannom and Ellen Kornbeck, among the films Gad directed for Nordisk Films in 1911 two having been When Passion Binds Honesty (Dyrekobt Glimmer), in which both actresses appeared with Johannes Poulsen and Elna From, and An Aviator’s Generosity (Den Store Flyver, 3 reels), which had starred Christel Holck. Also that year Gad directed the films Spansk Elsker, and Sydens Born in Denmark. 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). Asta Nieslen also continued in 1911 to appear under Gad’s direction in the films The Traitoress (Die Verraterin), Hot Blood (Heisses Blut), In Those Large Eye Glances (In dem grossen Augenblick).
The first Finnish narrative film, Bootleggers (Salaviinanpolttajat), was given to the Swedish director Louis Sparre, the film photographed by Frans Engstrom in 1907. Jaenzon filmed The Dangers of a Fisherman’s Life- An Ocen Drama (Fiskarliv ets farer-et Drama paa havet), an early Norwegian silent film under the direction of Hugo Hermansen. The first two Finnish directors, Erkki Karu and Teuvo Puro, are particularly noted for their use of nature as a background and landscape to complement the thematic, and yet Sylvi (1913) has been particularly likened to the film Ingeborg Holm, directed by Victor Sjöström. Peter Cowie notes that Karu’s The Logroller’s Bride (Koskenlaskijan morsian, 1923) has an exterior landscape scene that had been filmed by using six different cameras; the director later remade the film as the first Finnish film to include sound. The film Tukijoella (Log River) continued the influence of the Scandinavian film directors upon the silent cinema of Finland in their being a relation shown between the characters of the film and its background landscape, it having appeared in theaters in 1928. Also directing in Finland in 1913 was playwright Kaarle Halme who brought the films (The Bloodless Ones/Verettomat) and The Young Pilot (Nuori luotsi) to silent film audiences who had previously looked to the theater; the photplay, although quickly a new form of literature to convey the dramtic, and melodramtic, was still in Finland before 1919 contained within static camera angles without the frequent use of editing to complicate plotlines and character relationships, characters often shown in full figure, at the same camera distance, as at Vitagraph studios in the United States.
Peter Lykke-Seest, who had founded the first Norwegian film studio, the Christiana Film Company, was a screenwriter for Victor Sjöström (and Mauritz Stiller) before his directing The Story of a Boy (Historien om en gut) in 1919.
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 Sjöström later would in fact use intertitles to act as retrospective first person, voice over narrative. As well, narrative would no longer need to be only linear in regard to its structure and the syntax of film could include transitions between scenes; technique, in part could become the attraction.
Technique would become the ordering of images within an arrangement of shots that would bring seperate compositions into a relation within narrative- the film technique that would later be described by Christian Metz as consisting of syntagmatic categories, technique that would avail questions regarding whether a segment would be autonomous, chronological, linear, narrative or descriptive, continuous and whether it would be organized, was beginning to be decided. Metz in fact had viewed the narrative function in cinema as being what had brought about its development, it being more than possible that the techniques developed by Ince and Griffith were the exingencies of narrative form.
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.”
Sjöström had said, ”At one time, Moje was without any doubt in love with Garbo, and she with him.” and she had reiterated that if ever she were to love anyone it would be Mauritz Stiller, the director who had taken her to see her first motion picture in the United States, The Lady Who Lied (1925, eight reels) with Lewis Stone and Nita Naldi. Fredrick Sands quotes Victor Sjöström as having said, ”For a certain time at least Stiller was in love with her and she with him. They told me so themselves.” Stiller, after having met cameraman Julius Jaenzon, had begun directing for Svenska Bio in 1912 with Mother and Daughter (Mor och Dotter), in which he acted with Anna Norrie and Lily Jacobsson and then in the same year The Black Masks (De svarta maskerna), in which Sjöström acted with Lili Bech and the film The Tyrannical Fiancee (Den Tyranniske Fastmannen), in which he starred with Agda Helin. Produced by AB Svenska Biografteatern, the film The Black Masks, is a circus movie in regard to its subject. It has been noted that the film is exceptionally edited, its numerous, varied scenes, ”a constantly changing combination of interiors and exteriors, close-ups and panoramic shots.” (Forsyth Hardy). Greta Garbo later had met Jaenzon on a train to Rasunda, Sweden after a screen test for Stiller. Waiting for Stiller to arrive for the screentest, Jaenzon had told Garbo, ”You’re the loveliest girl I’ve ever seen walk into this place.”
Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller had met in Stockholm the day before the shooting of the film The Gardner (The Broken Spring Rose) at the studios in Lindingo was to begin. Bengt Forslund chronicles that, ”Sjöström did not know Stiller before they became associated at Svenska Bio, but he was aware of his reputation.” It had been early in 1912 that Magnusson had met with screen writer Erik Ljungberger who gave Magnusson Victor Sjöström’s name and who telephoned him for Magnusson. Victor Sjöström that year wrote and directed The Marriage Bureau (Aktenskapsbryan) with Victor Lundberg and directed A Secret Marriage (Ett hemlight giftermal) with Hilda Borgström, Smiles and Tears (Lojen och tarar) with Mia Hagman, a film written by Charles Magnusson and photographed by Julius Jaenzon, A Summer’s Tale (En Sommar Saga) and Lady Marion’s Summer Flirtation (Lady Marion’s sommarflirt, photographed by Julius Jaenzon and starring Hilda Borgström.
That year Paul Garbagni directed both Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller with actress Astrid Endgelbrecht in the film Springtime of Life (In the Spring of Life, I livets var), adapted from the novel The First Mistress by August Blanche- almost as soon as Swedish cinema had begun, it had begun adapting the novel to film; the significance of the cinema of attractions would now be in the shot, the placement of the shot within the scene, display relegated to frame compositions.
Eric Malmberg that year directed the films Oceanbreakers and Stolen Happiness (Branningar eller Stulen lycka) with Lily Jacobsson, Tollie Zellman and Victor Arfvidson, Det grona halsbandet with Lilly Jacobsson and Agda Helin and Samhallets dom, with Lily Jacobsson, Agda Helin, Tollie Zellman and actress Lisa Holm in the first film in which she was to appear, as well as Agaton and Fina (Agaton och Fina), and Two Swedish Emigrants in America (Tva svenska emigranters afventyr i Amerika), both photographed by Julius Jaenzon, also with Lily Jacobsson. John Ekman directed Swedish actress Stina Berg in her first appearance on the screen in the film The Shepherd Girl (Saterjantan), photographed by Hugo Edlund for Svenska Biografteatern. The Last Performance (Dodsritten under cirkuskupolen), Musiken makt, starring Lily Jacobsson, Jupiter pa jorden, with Axel Ringvall, and Tva broder with Birger Lundstedt and Eugen Nilsson, were filmed by Georg af Klercker. Algot Sandberg that year directed the film Farbror Johannes ankomst till Stockholm.
In Malmo, Sweden, for the Danish film producer Frans Lundberg and Stora Biografteatern, Paul Welander in 1912 contributed the films The Pace That Kills (Broder och syster), The Circus Queen (Circusluft), and two films photographed by photographer Ernst Dittmer, The Boa Constrictor (Ormen), The Flirt (Karlekens offer) and Princess Charlotte (Komtessan Charlotte), starring Phillipa Frederiksen and Agners Nyrup-Christensen, Welander also that year having starred with Ida Nielsen in The Bonds of Marriage (Karleksdrommar) a film made by Frans Lundberg. Charles Magnusson would direct The Green Necklace (Det grona halsbandet) and The Vagabond’s Galoshes (Kolingens galosher), both photographed by Julius Jaenzon. Jaenzon that year was the photographer and director of the film Condemned by Society.
1912 was also the year that Hjalmar Söderberg, often considered the nearest contemporary to Strindberg, published the novel The Most Serious Game (Den allvarsamm leken) and the one act play Aftonstjarnan. The first publication to appear written by Par Lagerkvist, People (Manniskor), a collection of short stories was also printed that year as well.
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.
The year of 1912 was to mark the first film with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, An Unseen Enemy, along with the Mary Pickford film A New York Hat, the first photoplay written by Anita Loos. Within the short scenes of the film, Mary Pickford is shown in to the right of the screen in medium close shot trying on a hat, her hands and bended elbows in frame. Griffith cuts on the action of her leaving the frame to exterior shots. In a later scene, Griffith positions her to the left of the screen, and, his already having shown time having elapsed between the two two scenes, then brings the ensuing action back to the right of the screen frame. As an early reversal of screen direction, or screen positioning, there is the use of scene editing in between the complementary positions of showing her in the same interior. During the film, the actress is, almost referentially, often kept in right profile, facing the right of the screen’s frame.
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, Laugh and Live, is available online from sunrisesilents.
Having directed The New Cook, 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. It is often acknowledged that Thomas Ince was the first director to use a shooting script. 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). Stiller had directed Sjöström in his first roles as an actor in For sin Karlekskull (Because Her Love), When Love Kills (Nar karleken dodar) in which he starred with Georg af Klercker, The Child (Barnet) and, coincidently, The Vampire (Vampyren/The Nightclub Dancer),in which he starred with Lili Bech. 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 direct Wilhelm Gluckstadt began directing in 1912 with the film The Blue Blood (Det blaa Blod), scripted by Stellan Rye and starring Elina Jorgen Jensen, Grethe Ditlevsen and Gudrun Houlberg. That year Wilhelm Gluckstadt also directed the exceptionally beautiful Danish film actress Eimilie Sannom in the films Konfetti, De to brodre and Zigeunerorkestret. Exceptionally pretty Danish film actress Ebba Thomsen first appeared on the screen in 1912 under the direction of Robert Dinesen in two films, Den glade Lojtnant and Lystrallen. Danish film director Aage Brandt during 1912 would direct Vera Brechling in A Death Warning (Dodsvarlet)
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 silent film director Carl Th. Dreyer had in fact begun as a writer, contributing the screenplay to the film The Brewer’s Daughter (Bryggerens dattar, 1912), directed by Rasmus Ottesen and starring Emanuel Gregers. He was to write every screenplay that he was to direct. Tom Milne, who begins his volume on Dreyer with an account of his having seen the director at a screening of Gertrude, quotes him as having said, ” I know that I am not a poet. I know that I am not a great playwright. That is why I prefer to collaborate with a true poet and with a true playwright.” Dreyer continued in 1913 by writing the screenplays to The Baloon Explosion (Balloneskplosionen), directed by Kay van de Aa Kuhle, Chatollets hemmelighed, directed by Hjalmar Davidsen, Hans og Grethe, directed by Sofus Wolder, and The War Correspondent (Krigskorrespondent), directed by William Gluckstadt and starring Emanuel Gregers,Grethe Ditlevsen, Ellen Tegner and Emilie Sannom. In 1914, Dreyer scripted Down With Your Waepons (Ned Med Vaabnene), directed by Holger Madsen and photographed by Marius Clausen.
Danish film director Benjamin Christensen, however by 1913 had begun directing with his first film Sealed Orders (Det hemmelinghstulde X), a melodrama that had included a use of montage in its editing, followed by 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 Swedish 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 something 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.”
Much like it being that the films of Bergman ”concern interior journeys: journeys into the soul of the character, or into the souls of two related characters” (John Simon), that Ingeborg Holm was a contemporary drama is particularly a matter for aesthetics, as was the observation that there may have been the photoplay of intimacy, the photoplay of action or the photoplay of splendor. 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.
|
When asked about 
(photo:cinemateket) Directed by 
scottlord’s shared items 
?Bookmark this on Delicious.gif){kind=small}
?Bookmark this on Delicious
?Bookmark this on Delicious.gif){kind=small}
?Bookmark this on Delicious
scottlord’s shared items 
?Bookmark this on Delicious.gif){kind=small}
?Bookmark this on Delicious.gif){kind=small}
?Bookmark this on Delicious
scottlord’s shared items 
When asked about
?Bookmark this on Delicious
scottlord
