Word: seastrom
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Wild Strawberries. 1958. Victor Seastrom is superb as an old man reliving his life through flashbacks in this allegorical Bergman classic...
Wild Strawberries. (1958). Victor Seastrom plays an old man reliving his youth in one of Bergman's best...
...such scenes Griffith cuts between the entirely separate emotional qualities and quantities expressed by the characters' faces, giving each a completely individual moral position. Splitting the drama's entire moral position. Splitting the drama's entire moral scheme into separate characters. he lets their conflicts play it out. Seastrom deals in shared emotions, unified atmospheres, and his characters' decisions are expressed in walking through rooms or in exteriors. Especially striking is a sequence with Dimmesdale in Hester's house trying to leave, drawn to stay. Seastrom sustains the involvement of the characters in their particular setting- with its details...
...Indeed, Seastrom made a remarkably calm film from a rather violent novel. largely by establishing and developing unified situations. The opening sets the scene and its characters in one long track along the village street. moving back as Puritans walk to church. To establish a social milieu Griffith would have cut between different characters. their homes, their personal peculiarities. Seastrom needs only one long shot that shows the Puritan villagers in a characteristic action and place. He uses the setting strongly and gives us masses of people never developed as characters. This leaves the drama far fewer contending moral...
...Griffith. He builds a drama of natural behavior in a specific social, rather than ideal, setting. Griffith's abstractions and idealization disappear and with them the need to assault the audience with quick cutting to put across the characters' emotions. A much more direct realization of his material characterizing Seastrom's work. makes this work simply a powerful rendition of a story of thwarted love...