Word: seastrom
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...LEARNING that The Scarlet Letter, made in 1926 stars Lillian Gish. one begins wondering why it wasn't a project of D.W. Griffith's. The resulting film certainly would have differed radically from the one Victor Seastrom did direct...
...remarkable change of tone and import from Hawthorne's to Seastrom's Scarlet Letter can be traced in the distance between Seastrom's and Griffith's drama. One notices it first in Gish's acting. Her hands, which in Griffith persistently fluttered toward face and breast, are held in more tightly or used actually to grasp people. Seastrom gives their pure emotional energy a real application: Gish's gestures, rather than only expressing her spirit. become actions with physical and specific ends...
...sequence Gish. as Hester Prynne, pursues Lars Hansen (Arthur Dimmesdale) to and fro in an attempt to make him talk to her. Griffith would have depicted his decision by cutting to their two faces: Seastrom cuts to their feet walking along the country road. The physical aspect of the decision, the characters' actions in their real setting, takes over from Griffith's spiritual. abstract tendency. Yet Seastrom's acting style remains melodramatic. If anything Lars Hansen is cruder than Griffith's heroes: his gestures are slower and broader. Where Griffith would concentrate on the face. Seastrom gives us the whole...
Died. Victor Seastrom (Sjoestroem), 80, Swedish actor and director, who crowned a lifetime's devotion to movies of power and art (including a Hollywood stint in the '203, where he directed He Who Gets Slapped, The Scarlet Letter) with his winsome portrayal of the memory-haunted old doctor in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries; after long illness; in Stockholm...
...motion picture is the only art peculiar to the 20th Century. As an art it is practically unknown and unstudied. Many who are well acquainted with modern painting, literature, drama and architecture are almost wholly ignorant of the work of such great directors as Pabst, Pudovkin, or Seastrom and of the creative stages in the development of men like Griffith and Chaplin. Yet the films which these and other men made have had an immeasurably great influence on the life and thought of the present generation. . . . The 'primitives' among the movies are only 40 years...