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

Biographer Norman Zierold has written that Garbo's plasticity made it possible for her to relect the fantasies of her screen audiences; in this sense she functioned as a recepticle for the emotions of others." In keeping with the Greta Garbo that was nearly unknown to movie audiences for her personal life offscreen and had lurked in the shadows of movie theaters as a recluse after her retirement as though she could at anytime be sitting right beside any of us during without anyone knowing during a movie house screening of one of her films while as spectators we made identifications with each interpellated nuance, I added, "These emotional structures are created within each particular film, often by subject and spectator positioning, the viewer and the film's other characters in relation to the body of the actress, as when her body within the frame creates space between two characters in front of the camera, isolating them near a specific visual motif, or when Garbo briefly moves into the emotion of solitude." But then clearly the relationship between character and landscape and its interaction with subject positioning and or spectatorial position can also differ widely from one director to another, as when comparing almost any of the films of Victor Sjostrom with those of Carl Th. Dreyer.
It began, "By contrast, the value of the silent film that Greta Garbo made in Hollywood is sentimental. The were melodramas made after Greta Garbo was discovered in Europe," and, after giving a brief filmography of the films with the description of The Kiss (Kyssen, Feyeder, seven reels, 1929) being "one of her most beautiful films in that it is one of her most melodramatic" it added that "each film can bee seen only for the being reminded of having first seen each of the films and the darkened room where the decades from the long past can flicker into intrigues and adventures." My Silent Swedish Film webpage, which covered from the turn of century to the advent of sound, was a Geocities webpage. It was also, while in part a filmography of silent film of the Swedish directors of Svenska Bio and Svenska Filmindustri,Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjostrom, John Brunius and Georg af Klerker, my biography of the actress Greta Garbo. On a sheet of revision tonight I added that "whether one person is watching an old Greta Garbo movie on television while the other is reading, waiting for the other to retire for the evening, with each film, and with each screening, Garbo, like Anna-Lena Hemstrom, who portrays an actress who gradually, surrendering to fantasy believes herself to be each of the characters Greta Garbo played on screen in The Perfect Murder (Det Perfekte Mord, (Eva Isaksen) reintroduces herself to us and in each different characterization is foremost a fashion model before us; Greta Garbo is in a close-up". And yet there is now something more mystical to the ghost of Garbo for any, and maybe every reviewer of of Eva Isaksen's suspense film knowing that in Stockholm, near the Calle Flygare theater, there perhaps may be a young actress named Ottiliana Rolandsson who has left a screening of the film Queen Christina with the words "I am Greta Garbo" slowly forming silently on her lips, and in her hands a copy of a play. I still have a love for silent film, which skyrocketed after having looked at The Last Tycoon and The Garden of Eden; Photoplay magazine of 1927 mentions Fitzgerald being in the process of writing an original screenplay for Constance Talmadge, it later reviewing his adapted work, "Fitzgerald's novel, with its unscrupulous hero, violates some pet screen traditions." The silent film is in fact a deepening of the novel as an art form. If I was not to be present that evening, I jotted down my having noticed that Harvard Film has a free series of screenings open to the public at the University, which if you rebegin this month, includes The Joyless Street (Die Freudlosse Gasse (G.W. Pabst 1925); my copy of the film I no longer have (my former mentor had a yardsale or something or other). Previous screenings have included Danish film star, Asta Nielsen Tragedy of the Street (Dirnetragodre, Bruno Rahn, 1927). Evidently, The Great Train Robbery (Porter,1903) was still being shown in theaters as late as 1926, added to the feature then playing, whereas it wasn't untill Hamlet (Gade, 1920) that sex symbol Asta Nielsen was introduced to mainstream audiences in the United States. Is it possible that when Greta Garbo visited the home of Basil Rathbone in the masquerade costume of Hamlet, it was a tribute, or nod, to Danish Silent Film star Asta Nielsen? What will not be seen at Harvard University, or at the Universities of Sweden or Denmark, is the 1922 film The Beautiful and the Damned directed by William A. Sieter/SydneyFranklin and starring Marie Prevost, if a film accurately reported as being unavailbable for screening, or or the 1926 film The Great Gatsby directed by Herbert Brenon and starring Lois Wilson- within the world of Lost Films, Found Magazines, there are no existant copies of either film, our knowledge of them and curiousity is left for stills taken during the time period. Although only its director, Leslie H. Hiscott, may know the whereabouts of The Missing Rembrant, die hard fans of Arthur Wotner and Ian Fleming can only wonder. In regard to the 1918 film Mania (Evyen Illes), not only can it be included in Lost Films, Found Magazines, but it has been restored by the National Film Inatitute (Filmoteka Nardowa), who when announcing its premiere wrote, "its contents pertain to universal truths". The film is notable for its starring Pola Negri and the set design to the film having had been being crafted by Paul Leni. It is imperative that the word film study be surplanted by the word film appreciation: it was in 1946 that author Iris Barry cautioned the readers of Hollywood Quarterly through the article "Why wait for Posterity" as to films quickly becoming lost and the need to preserve the "romantic" Greta Garbo film The Saga of Gosta Berling (Stiller, 1925) by saving the prints from deterioration. After explaining that the original two-color technicolor copies of the Black Pirate that had belonged to Douglas Fairbanks and Harvard University, respectively, were in a vault "at the point of final deterioration", and could only be duplicated in black-and-white form, she qualifies that the criteria for screening film need, as with "the early Seastrom films", only be pleasure. "What, really is the point of dragging old films back to light? First, I believe that it benefits the general esteem and standing of the motion picture industry as a whole; for if the great films of the past are not worth taking seriously and are not worth re-examination, then presumably neither are the great films of today. It would be unthinkable if the only books available to literary men and women should be no more than those published in the past year or so." To echo her by my now finding this during the centennial of the two reeler in the United States and of Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller having become contemporaries at Svenska Bio , the biography of actress Greta Garbo penned by the present author on Geocities webpage encompassed the long waiting period before what was to be the last film to be made by Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, which happenned to be during the centennial of the one reel narrative film, "Of the utmost importance is an appreciation of film, film as a visual literature. film as the narrative image, and while any appreciation of film would be incomplete without the films of Ingmar Bergman, every appreciation of film can begin with the films of the silent period, with the watching of the films themselves, their once belonging to a valiant new form of literautre. Silent film directors in both Sweden and the United States quickly developed film technique, including the making of films of greater length during the advent of the feature film, to where viewer interest was increased by the varying shot lengths within a scene structure, films that more than still meet the criterion of having storylines, often adventurous, often melodramatic, that bring that interest to the character when taken scene by scene by the audience."

I've also since returned to the downloading photos of Greta Garbo that were scanned from the original negative and e-mailed to me by an author who was who was an apprentice of Clarence Sinclair Bull. In that they were photos of Greta Garbo that were left over from the publication, please accept that I may have been the author to introduce those particular photos to Sweden from the vault in which they were kept. Vieira 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 carreer and what makes her cinematic legacy the exqisite thing that it is." But it is not only that, having resumed writing I recieved a reply from Norman Zierold, whose biography of Greta Garbo was publishes decades before that of the one written by Mark. A Vieria. My question was phrased,"I need a quote from correspondence on the silent film of Greta Garbo. How do you now feel about any of the particular films,i.e. The Divine Woman?" to which he replied, "No comment I can think of. Are you related to literary agent Sterling Lord?"

These two actresses were found with Swedish Silent Film actor Lars Hanson- Sofia Larssen's webpage on "Sweden's leading matinee idol of the silent era", was also a Geocities webpage before it closed. We we invited to "Also take a moment to drool over the many pictures in the gallery." From a guestbook entry on from a similar geocities page she was evidently then living in Sweden. Of particular interest was the Lars Hanson webpage written by Laurel Howard, also a geocities webpage. She writes that The Saga of Gosta Berling/The Atonement of Gosta Berling was meant to be a four hour film, "Because of the editing there are a lot gaps in the plot. It really is an epic film and needs length to show the full character and plot development...I think this film needs to be on the list for some major restoration." "Kubblapuppy" later writes about "Ketta" in "the horzontal love scenes" that brought The Flesh and the Devil to renown and created a continuing fame, or unique stardom, for Greta Garbo. Webpages like these were a catalyst for my page on Greta Garbo in that it part of a series of five pages on Svenska Filmhistoria, which began chronicling the history of Swedish Silent Film from the turn of the century and I was honored to include a screening of one of the most profound and powerful films directed by Victor Sjostrom before his coming to the United States.

Swedish Silent Film 1918-1924 swedish silent film 1909-1917

Swedish Silent Film

Peter Cowie writes of a voice that was described to Vilgot Sjöman as being 'so nice and gentle' it having 'a quite huskiness that makes it interesting'.

'Yes, this is Stiller's room, I know for sure.'
After Greta Garbo took off her glasses to show Ingmar Bergman what she looked like, her watching his face to measure the emotion of the director, she excitedly began discussing her acting in The Saga of Gosta Berling. When they returned to the room, one that had also been used by Molander, Bergman poeticly studied her face.
One of the smaller theaters, one with 133 seats, at Borgavagen 1, is named after Mauritz Stiller, another one with 14 seats named after Julius Jaenzon, cameraman for Svenska Bio. Biografen Victor, with its 364 seats is a permanent tribute to Victor Sjostrom and the 363 ghosts that at anytime may accompany him to, perhaps in search of a new Strindbergian theater known as filmed theater, step into the past.

Greta Garbo's entrance to Swedish Silent Film

Barry Paris chronicles that it was Kerstin Bernadette that brought Garbo to meet then vetern Swedish Film director Ingmar Bergman, his having requested it in order to have her return to the screen in his film The Silence. In 1965, Raymond Durgnat wrote, "Greta Garbo made her last film in 1941, but nearly twenty five years later there are still rumors of possible new films, and her name can still fill a cinema. Pages later, to his account of her nearly consenting to eloped with John Gilbert and it having happenned that "finally, she hid herself in a ladies lavatory", he added, "Years after his death, Garbo still spoke of him in the present tense: 'Maurice thinks...'.

Again in retrospect, The Silents Majority at one time offered a sprawling history of silent film for internet study, and in particular went so far as to feature the actual image of Botticelli's The Birth of Venus to catalog the silent film of Greta Gabo. Diane MacIntyre, in a web portal that was to feature articles by authors like Marc Wannamaker, writes "The silent films of Greta Garbo posses a quality of sophistication and romance that elevated motion pictures. She did not have to work her way up the ladder of stardom as many of her contemporaries. Like Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, Garbo seemed to be born a woman simply in need of a garment to compliment her loveliness.
To those either fascinated by her, or, bluntly, merely eroticlly stimulated by her body, one possible reason for this was alighted upon by the biographer Durgnat, "The obverse of Garbo's divinity was her shyness. There were few close ups of her during Gosta Berling's Saga because of her nervous blink." (He adds that it had continued into her filming with G. W Pabst, who speeded up the camera to adjust for it.) Garbo went to Rasunda to the Svenska Filmindustri studio to meet Stiller for a screen test to be filmed by Julius Jaenzon, whom she happened to meet on a train, a presage to her meeting Ragnar Ring years later. While waiting for the director to arrive, Swedish cinematographer Julius Jaenzon had told Garbo, "You're the loveliest girl I've ever seen walk into the place." She and Mona Martenson were to film The Saga of Gosta Berling (1924, ten reels).During its filming, Greta Garbo and Mona Martenson had stayed in the same hotel room together. The beauty of Mona Martensson is miraculous, a deep beauty that can only be seen as wonderous. In the Story of Greta Garbo, a 1928 interview with Ruth Biery published in Photoplay, Garbo relates of Mortenson's being in Hollywood and of her planning to later return to Sweden. Photoplay, while advertising that the article would appear in their next installment, viewed Garbo as tempermental. In the article, she talks about The Saga of Gosta Berling and of Stiller having given her 'the very best part for my very first picture.' If the reader of 1928 had found where in Photoplay it was continued, "This Star's Interesting Narrative was to include Greta Garbo having said, "I owe everything to Mr. Stiller" The actress related that, for one thing, they both spoke Swedish, as much as she thought that being in the United States and that it was where she could make films. Stiller had imparted to her, 'You must remember two crucial things when you play the role or for that matter any role. First, you must be aware of the period in which the character is living. Second, you must be aware of your self as an actress. If you play the role and forget about your self nothing will come of it.' Appearing separate to the hardcover Garbo biography written by John Bainbridge was his work published in magazine form, which read, "Garbo's Haunted Path To Stardom, A hypnotic Director made over Her very Soul." In it he gives an account of Stiller's first session with Garbo at Rasunda, where he had asked her to act in front of the camera, quoting Stiller as having said, "Have you no feelings? Don you know nothing of sadness and misery? Act, miss, act!" Stiller having instructed that there be closeups shot of Garbo, he is attributed as having afterward imparted, "She is shy." and having added, "She has no technique, so she can't show what she is feeling." During her Photoplay interview, Greta Garbo continued on the film remarking that,' Lars Hanson played my leading man...but there were no love scenes, not even a kiss.' About Lars Hanson, after having seen The Saga of Gosta Berling, Lillian Gish wrote, 'When I saw it I thought that he would be the ideal Dimmesdale.' Interestingly, actor Lars Hanson had been briefly mentioned in the United States in Pantomine magazine during March of 1922, in Out of the Make Up Box, On to the Screen, written by Helen Hancock. "Lars Hanson, who is one of the most versatile actors on the screen, and one of the most versatile artistic breakers of the hearts of the Swedish flapper, is an adept in the art of make-up." An appreciation of the film made by Hanson in Sweden was displayed by photos of Hanson not only as himself, but in greasepaint as men much older than himsself, it including stills from Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, Andre the Red and The Lodge Man. Helen Hancock had only months earlier in Pantomine praised Swedish Silent Film star Lars Hanson in the article How About those Viking Ancestors, A little Talk about Swedish Matinee Idols. The photo caption read, "He looks mild- but dare him to do something" It reads, "A star of the legitimate stage, where for a number of years he has has been one of the principal attractions at the Intima Theatre, Stockholm, this virile specimen of manhood is best known for his psychological characterizations." The author then praised Hanson for his doing his own stunts, acting on screen without a stuntman. During 1929, Photoplay Magazine reviewed the release of The Legend of Gosta Berling, "the only European film appearance of Greta Garbo before she was sold down the river to Hollywood..It need only be said that Hollywood has made The Glamorous One...You won't die in vain even if you miss this one." Greta Garbo was interviewed in Sweden during the filming of Gosta Berling's Saga by for the magazine Filmjournalen (Filmjournal) by Inga Gaate, who had interviewed Mauritz Stiller in 1924, Garbo in the article having praised Stiller for his direction and having referred to him as Moje. Greta Garbo appears on the cover of Filmjournalen 8, bareshouldered, in 1925. Stiller, incidently, had invited Sten Selander, a poet rather than actor, to Rasunda before his having decided upon Lars Hanson for the film. Jenny Hasselquist also appears in the film- Hasselquist was much like modern Swedish actress Marie Liljedahl in that she was a ballerina, her having been introduced to readers in the United States in 1922 through Picture-Play Magazine with a photograph it entitled The Resting Sylph. Sven Broman has quoted Greta Garbo as having said, 'We sat in a lovely drawing room and Selma Lagerlöf thanked me for my work in Gosta Berling's Saga and she praised Mauritz Stiller...She also had very warm and lovely eyes.' While filming Gosta Berling's Saga, Stiller had said, 'Garbo is so shy, you realize, she's afraid to show what she feels. She's got no technique you know.', to which the screenwriter to the film, Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius, replied, 'But every aspect of her is beautiful.' By the time Stiller had begun co-writing the script to Gosta Berling's Saga, he and Selma Lagerlöf had begun to disagree in regard to how her novels were to be adapted. Lagerlöf had asked that Stiller be removed from the shooting of the film before the script had been completed, her having as well tried to acquire the rights to the film to vouchsafe its integrity as an adaptation. During the filming Stiller went further; he then included a scene that had not appeared in either the novel or the film's script. While visiting Stockholm in 1938, Garbo had asked to view the film, her having said to William Sorensen, "It was the movie I loved most of all." Iris Barry briefly reviewed the film in 1926, "In Sweden, the creative impulse has not some much died down as been bled away" and from that context sees a film that, "shows a gloomy and unusual subject, full of sincere passion and conflict and with the fine somber, photographic quality peculiar to the Scandinavian cinema." There is an account of Mauritz Stiller having introduced Greta Garbo to author Selma Lagerlof and an account of Lagerlof having complimented Garbo on her beauty and her "sorrowful eyes." In particular, Sven Broman has quoted Greta Garbo as having said, "We sat in a lovely drawing room and Selma Lagerlof thanked me for my work in Gosta Berling's Saga and she praised Mauritz Stiller...She also had very warm and lovely eyes." Although far from being a playwright or sceenwriter, Selma Lagerlof flourished as a novelist during the silent film era, despite many of her novels having had having remained unfilmed, including the earlier Invisible Links (1894), The Queens of Kungahalla (1899) and The Miracles of the Antichrist (1897). After her contemporary, Swedish poet Gustaf Froding, had died in 1911, a year during which Lagerlof had published Liljecrona's Home (Liljecrona's Hem), Lagerlof went on to publish Korkalen (Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness, one of the most important novels included in the screen adaptations of the silent era as it appeared on the screen in 1920 directed by Swedish director Victor Sjostrom, in 1911, and Trolls and Men (Troll och manniskor. During 1918 she included the novel The Outcast (Bannlyst) and published a second volume to Trolls and Men in 1921. It was during the filming of Lagerloff's The Phantom Carriage that an ostrich farm that had fallen into desuetude in Rasunda was converted into the Svenska Filmindustri studio, and with that named Filmstaden. Lagerlof wrote the autobiographical novel Marbacka in two parts, her concluding the volume in 1930 and publishing The Diary of Selma Lagerlof in 1932.
It is not entirely marginal that there are also accounts that Nils Asther had met Greta Garbo in 1924, at the Dramatiska Teatern and that he had then proposed marriage to her, which she apparently declined- the autobiography of Nils Aster, Narrens jag (Fool's Way/The Way of the Jester) was published in Swedish, posthumously. If, in 1928, Ruth Biery was writing about Nils Asther in Photoplay Magazine in order to obtain information about Greta Garbo, she does in fact show him in a favorable light and was genuinely interested in the actor, "Nils Asther, like Greta Garbo, was trained in the small studios of Sweden. He was accustomed to accept acting as an art rather than a short cut to wealth, fortune or position." Like Greta Garbo, Mary Johnson travelled from Sweden to Germany. Mary Johnson had starred with Gosta Ekman in the first film directed by John W. Brunius, Puss and Boots (Masterkattan i stovlar) in 1918 for Film Industri Inc Scandia. The film was co-written by John W. Brunius and Sam Ask and was the first in which actress Ann Carlsten was to appear. The following year Scandia merged with Scandia to team Charles Magnusson with Nils Bouveng to run AB Svensk Filmindustri. Having been an actress for several films directed by George af Klerker, Mary Johnson was also that year to appear in the Swedish silent film Stovstadsfaror, directed by Manne Gothson and photographed by Gustav A. Gustafson. Appearing with Johnson in the film were Agda Helin, Tekl Sjoblom and Lilly Cronwin. Significantly, Johnson returned to the screen to act for director John W. Brunius and cameraman Hugo Edlund in 1923 for the film Johan Ulfstjerna in which she starred with Anna Olin, Einar Hansson and Berta Hilberg and, significantly, that same year for silent film director Mauritz Stiller and cameraman Julius Jaenzon in the film Gunnar Hedes Saga, in which she starred with Pauline Brunius, Stina Berg, Einar Hansson. The film was an adaptation of the novel Herrgarssagen.
By 1922, Danish Silent Film director Peter Urban Gad had finished directing what would be his last silent film produced in Germany, The Ascension of Hannele Mattern (Hanneles Himmelfahrt), actreess Margate Schlegel fulfilling the title role. If only to characterize Gad as an artist or intellectual, author Thomas J. Sanders writes, "Most emphatic was the prominent Danish author and director Urban Gad, who in early 1919 identified monumentalism, brutality and sentimentality as America's dominant film traits and advised German producers to focus on internal consisitency and substance."
In Germany, Marlene Dietrich by 1927 had begun to appear on the the screen in lead roles more often, her having that year starred in the film Cafe Electric (Gustav Ucicky). Not entirely ironically, while more and more films from Europe were becoming introduced to writers in the United States, two films from Germany that were filmed complicitly without subtitles yet still having a clear narrative development and depiction of plotline without expository or dialoge intertitle were being written about in the United States, Backstairs (1926), filmed by the stage director Leopold Jessner, a film about a young girl whose is in love and a mailman who witholds love letters written to her because he himself is in love with her, and Shattered (Lupu Pick,1921), scripted by Carl Mayer. Not only did Photoplay Magazine spy on Hollywood, but in 1929 it reported the release of Mata Hari: The Red Dancer, with Magda Sonja in the title role, the film directed in Germany by Fredrich Feher.

After the Saga of Gosta Berling was shot, Greta Garbo briefly returned to the Royal Dramatic Theater before being brought to Berlin for its premiere- Stiller was also with Greta Garbo for the premiere of The Joyless Street. In a Berlin hotel room, Stiller had said to Greta Garbo, "That's better. Put your feet on that stool. You're tired. A film star is always tired. It impresses people."

Garbo was to have made a second film for Pabst but declined. Before travelling to Turkey to film Odalisque from Smolna, Greta Garbo returned to Stockholm, appearing on the Swedish stage in the play The Invisible Man, written by Lagerkvist. Stiller had written the script to the film The Odalisque of Smolny and had brought Jaenzon, Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius and Garbo to Turkey only to have the film be left unmade. In the film, Greta Garbo was to portray a harem girl; there were rehearsals held of a exterior where Garbo was to meet her lover. There is a reference to the film made by Greta Garbo in a 1928 interview for Photoplay Magazine,
''We never started on that picture. The company went broke. Mr. Stiller had to go back to Germany to see about the money which was not coming. I was alone in Constantinople. Oh, yes, Einar Hansen,' she paused, 'the Swedish boy who was killed here in Hollywood not so long ago- was there too. He was to play with me in the picture. But I did not see him often.''
When interviewed in 1924, Stiller had said, 'You have to leave room for people's imagination. The film camera registers everything with such merciless clarity. We really have to leave something for the audience to interpret.' Irregardless of how accurate one clue about the film left behind by Photoplay magazine in 1930 may be its title, the magazine claiming that it would be rereleased in the United States under the title "When Lights are Red", "Garbo's supporting cast consists of Einar Hansen, the young actor who met with an accidental death in Hollywood several years ago and Werner Krauss. Garbo was exotic in those days, too, but not the calm, poises woman of the world she is today." Ake Sundberg quotes Greta Garbo as having said, "I saw Hanson seldom. He was so ashamed of his ragged beard that he hardly dared show himself." The actor was sporting the beard for the requirements of the script. In That Gustafsson Girl, written for Photoplay Magazine by Sundberg in 1930, Mauritz Stiller is attributed as having been the first European director to shoot in close-up, to shift the camera and to find "new, striking angles" "Constantinople had fascinated the Swedish girl, who had never been away from the cold countries." There would be a letter from Greta Garbo to Vera Schmiterlow sent from Constantinople. Stiller had, "written much of the story himself" and that there was a rewrite of the script required is seen as having contributed to the films having been left uncompleted.
Bengt Forslund notes that the filming of an adaptation of Anna Karenina had at
first been thought of for actress Lillian Gish, who in Sweden, Greta Garbo had seen in
the film The White Sister. In her autobiography, Gish wrote, 'I often saw the
young Garbo on the lot. She was then the protege of the Swedish director Mauritz Stiller. Stiller often left her on my set. He would take her to lunch and then bring her back, and
Garbo would sit there watching.' When refilmed, her Hollywood screen test would be filmed by Stiller and, purportedly spliced into the rushes of The Torrent, seen by director
Monta Bell, who then insisted the script of the film be given to Garbo. Garbo's second screentest had been photographed by Henrik Sartov, who later explained that the earlier test had lacked proper lighting and that a lens he had devised had allowed him to articulate depth while filming her. Cameraman William Daniels had photographed the earlier test. Lillian Gish relates a conversation between her and Sartov about Garbo where Gish asked him if he could photograph a screentest of Garbo, "Garbo's temperment reflected the rain and gloom of the long dark Scandinavian winters. At first Garbo was reluctant to accept the role in the film, although it was a large role that had been considered for Norma Shearer, Stiller having advised, 'It can lead to a better parts later.' to which she replied,
'How can I take direction from someone I don't know.' Monta Bell had directed Norma Shearer in the film After Midnight (1921). The production stills of Greta Garbo during the filming of The Torrent were photographed by Ruth Harriet Louise. It was on the set of The Torrent that author Sven-Hugo Borg was introduced to Stiller, who in turn then informed Garbo that he was her assigned translator while under Monta Bell's direction. In The Private Life of Greta Garbo by her most intimate friend, Borg relates that bell had turned to him and had said of her, "What a voice! If we could only use it. Of the film he notes, "Of course she was constantly with Stiller, spending every possible moment with him; but thought that when the camera's eye was flashed upon her, the picture would decide her fate began, he would not be there terrified her." Borg continued as the interpreter of Greta Garbo until 1929.
Bengt Forslund writes, 'Her first two films, The Torrent and The Temptress, both in 1926, were insignificant, but showed that she had appeal- the audience liked her.' The screenplays to the first two films in which Greta Garbo had appeared, The Torrent and The Temptress (nine reels) both had been adaptations of the novels of Vincente Blasco Ibanez, their having been titled Among the Orange Trees and The Earth Belongs to Everyone, respectively. The novels written by Vincente Blasco Ibanez also include The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse filmed after Blood and Sand, in 1921, and Marie Nostrum, filmed in 1926. Photoplay reviewed the film, "While this Vincente Belasco Ibanez story is crammed full of melodramatic action- much of it preposterous-Greta Garbo makes the proceedings not only believable, but compelling...Such a role strains at the probabilities, but Miss Garbo makes Elena highly effective. She is beautiful, she flashes and scintillates with singular appeal...The Temptress is all Greta Garbo. Nothing else matters." Charles Affron particularly looks to the entrances that Greta Garbo makes during the opening scenes of her silent film and notes that silent film director Fred Niblo, after taking the helm upon Stiller's leaving the filming of The Temptress, studies Garbo's beauty, her ethereality, by adding a second screen entrance of his own where Garbo, clasping flowers, is exiting a carriage- he then illustrates its use in Niblo's later film The Mysterious Lady (Den Mystika kvinna, 1928, nine reels) where Garbo, in the middle of watching an opera is seen by Conrad Nagel as he is making his entrance and then by the camera in a profile close shot. In the sequence, the camera is authorial in accordance with the action of the scene; Garbo's look is momentarily uninterrupted as Nagel, almost an interloper, is introduced into the scene by his entering the frame and by the camera nearing her as she is near motionlessly surveying the proscenium, the theater in the film a public sphere of address that envelopes its characters to where Garbo, and her act of watching becomes the subject of the cinematic address and the object of both Nagel's and the audience's interest. Affron writes that it may have been Stiller's keeping Garbo on the screen and in front of the camera that had been among the reasons for his being replaced on the set of The Temptress.
Author Mark A. Vieira was asked by Turner Classic Movies to provide audio narrative commentary to the film The Temptress for its The Garbo Silents collection, his on occaision quoting the actress during the film as well as his quoting from her correspondence. The Temptress begins with a blue-tinted exterior shot, Fred Niblo then cutting what seems to be an opera house during which there are lights from the cieling that sway back and forth across a costume dance. During the next scene Garbo in an evening gown that is folded like a robe enters a drawing room where there is a visitor that has been invited to dinner. During the dinner, there is an pullback shot over a table that is elaborately included in the scene, it having been designed almost as though the scene from a pre-code film in the plunging necklines of its tight clinging evening gowns in contrast most of the films scenes that seem bookended between the beginning and end of the film. After a series of exterior shots filmed by assistant director H. Bruce Humberstone, Lionel Barrymore is introduced in the film, Greta Garbo shortly thereafter reintroduced as the camera cuts away from her before it is finished panning up, it cutting back after an interpolated shot to finish panning from her waist upward, the camera slowly reflecting upon the unexpectedness of her being reunited with the other characters. Director Fred Niblo had apparently also taken over behind the camera for Lynn Shores during the shooting of The Devil Dancer (1927, eight reels), actress Gilda Gray having had been being on the set.
In a scene where Garbo is shown in an extreme close up sitting with Lionel Barrymore, author Mark A. Vieira choses to discuss that whereas previously close ups had often been used in silent film as being concerned with a different plane of action as other shots filmed from other camera distances, Niblo seems to include closeups into the characterization through a use of lighting and diffusion while filming. Irregardless of this, later in the film there is extreme close up of Garbo that is abruptly cut almost on a reverse angle right before her and her lover are about to kiss. The character movement of the two nearing each other is held, if only briefly, Garbo near stunning as the camera only briefly contains her within the frame. There in the film is a scene with a rainstorm and flood that, and although it was more than quite concievably added to the plotline for its excitement, is almost a haunting acknowledgement of the camerawork of either Mauritz Stiller or Victor Sjostrom in Sweden and the role of nature in Swedish silent film, in this instance an acknowledgement punctuated by Greta Garbo, who is seen right before the rain during a night exterior in the mountains, alone with her lover in a series of close shots, her then being only briefly seen in profile during the thunder and lightning and then again in one of the most beautiful evening gowns of the film, her shoulders bare as she is reading a letter.
While Garbo was finishing the The Temptress, Stiller, having written the script before the script department had reworked its plot, had begun shooting Hotel Imperial (1927, eight reels) for Paramount; she went to the preview of the film. Greta Garbo had said, 'Stiller was getting his bearings and coming into his own. I could see that he was getting his chance.' The conversation between the two actresses related in retrospect by Pola Negri may almost seem eerie, her account beginning with a telephone call from Mauritz Stiller, "May I be permitted to bring along a friend? She does not know many people here yet. Greta Garbo." After dinner Negri gave Garbo advice in creating for herself a unique personna, something individual, her going so far as to say, "Never be aloof or private" with Garbo adding the rejoinder without noting that they were both actresses that had worked abroad that they were in fact both remaining private while in Hollywood and Negri telling garbo that she would soon have to film without Stiller. Negri writes, "She held her head high. A look of intense interest was spreading over that perfectly chiseled face, making it the one thing that one would not have thought possible: even more beautiful." In a letter to Lars Saxon, Greta Garbo wrote, 'Stiller's going to start working with Pola Negri. I'm still very lonely, not that I mind, except occaisionally.'
Of Stiller's camerawork in the film, Kenneth MacGowan wrote, 'Hung from an overhead trolley, his camera moved through the lobby and the four rooms on each side of it.' In a brief review of the film R.E. Sherwood complimented Stiller on his use of camera postion and shot structure, but while praising Stiller as a director and the film's "visual qualities", which included "trick lighting" among its camera effects, which according to the author harken back to earlier "photo-acrobatics" from silent film director F.W. Murnau, Sherwood sees a lack of depth or meaning in the film's screenplay or its message as an organic whole in its having moment. Whether or not the United States can be viewed as imperial, as it is as seen by Dianne Negra, she writes about Pola Negri's character in Stiller's film, her almost connecting thematically the difference between Negri's role in the film and earlier vamp roles with the film's ending and its reuniting of Negri and her lover in a plotline similar to that of Sjöstrom's The Divine Woman (En Gudomlig Kvinna). 'The film closes with its most emphatic equation of romance and war as a close up of a kiss between Anna and Almay fades to the images of marching troops.' Mauritz Stiller, when invited to a private screening of Hotel Imperial for Max Reinhardt had said, 'Thank you. But if not for Pola, I could not have made it.'
Stiller also directed Pola Negri, and Clive Brook, in Barbed Wire (1927, seven reels) and Pola Negri and Einar Hanson in The Woman on Trial (1927, six reels). The year previous, Pola Negri had starred in the films The Crown of Lies (Buchowetski, five reels) and Good and Naughty (Malcom St. Clair, six reels). In her autobiography, Memoirs of a Star, Pola Negri describes her first meeting with Greta Garbo.'To tell the truth, I was also very curious about the girl...She smiled wistfully, as we shook hands...Through dinner she was resolutely silent...', her then giving an account of their conversation and of her having given Garbo advice.Mauritz Stiller's film Barbed Wire had a screening during Cinevent, held in Columbus, Ohio between May 27-30, 2005.
Fay WrayThe Street of Sin (1928, seven reels) starring Fay Wray and Olga Barclanova was begun by Stiller and finished by the director Joseph von Sternberg. It would be Stiller's last attempt to film in the United States before returning to Sweden in late 1927 and presently there are no copies of the film. Kenneth MacGowan writing about the film notes, 'The film was more distinguished for its players-Jannings and Olga Barclanova- than for its script by Joseph Sternberg. Sternberg's work on Stiller's film has been credited as having secured his position as the writer and director ofthe silent films The Last Command (1928) with Evelyn Brent and The Case of Lena Smith (1929) with Esther Ralston. During 1928, actress Olga Barclanova also appeared in the films The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, ten reels), The Dove (Roland West, nine reels), Forgotten Faces (Victor Schertzinger, eight reels), Avalanche (Otto Brower, five reels) and Three Sinners (Rowland V. Lee, eight reels). Three Sinners, with Warner Baxter was the second film to pair Olga Backlanova and Pola Negri, their both having appeared in the film Cloak of Death in 1915. During 1928, Fay Wray appeared in the films Legion of the Condemned (William Wellman, eight reels), The First Kiss (Rowland V. Lee). It was the year she began her lengthy first marriage to playwright screenwriter John Monk Saunnders. Pola Negri that year had starred in The Secret Hour (eight reels), directed by Rowland V Lee.
An emailed newsletter from Norway reported that Silent Film actress Fay Wray had died early during the month of August, 200 4. The silent film actress and first of the screaming screen feminists of the horror genre had appreared in numerous silent films before having been cast in Eric von Strohiem's The Wedding March (1928), beginning with the films Gasoline Love (1923) and The Coast Patrol (1925).
In 1927 alone, Einar Hanson appeared in the films The Lady in Ermine (seven reels, James Flood), The Masked Woman (six reels) with Anna Q. Nilsson, Fashions for Women (seven reels, Arzner) with Esther Ralston.
Glimpses of the Garbo of 1924, a year when in the United States Viola Dana and Jetta Goudal were starring together in the film Open All Night (six reels), can be seen in the letters between her and Swedish actress Mimi Pollock authenticated by author Tin Andersen Axell, letters on which his newest book is based. Leaving us again with something mysterious, the letters written by Pollack to Greta Garbo have been unseen by the public and are thought to be currently included in the collection of Scott Riesfield.
Among the events of 1924 was a visit by silent film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to Stockholm, Sweden. The two had that year appeared on the September cover of Motion Picture Magazine in the United States. There are accounts that while in Sweden, Pickford and Fairbanks sailed on the small vessel The Loris with Greta Garbo and Mauritz Stiller, their departing from Lilla Skuggan, and before arriving in Saltsjobaden, their passing where Charles Magnusson lived at Skarpo.
King Vidor in 1924 paired John Gilbert and Aileen Pringle in two films, Wife of the Centaur, with Kate Lester, and His Hour. Conrad Nagel would that year team with Aileeen Pringle for the film Three Weeks. Nagel would appear on the screen with Eleanor Boardman for the 1924 film Sinners in Silk (Henley) and then the following year for The Only Thing, directed by Jack Conway. Silent Film actress Norma Shearer, in 1924, was starring in Broadway After Dark (Monta Bell, seven reels) with Anna Q. Nilsson, The Snob (Monta Bell, seven reels) with John Gilbert, Empty Hands (Victor Fleming, seven reels), Married Flirts (Robert Vignola, seven reels) with Conrad Nagel and The Wolfman (Edward Mortimer, six reels) with John Gilbert. The next year she starred in Pretty Ladies (Monta Bell, six reels), one of the films that she had been given by being a contract player at the MGM studio, it having afforded her a cameo role. The film was based on a story by Adela Rogers St. Johns and had featured Conrad Nagel. Also that year Shearer appeared in the films Waking Up the Town (James Cruze, six reels), Lady of the Night (Monta Bell, six reels) and His Secretary (seven reels). She continued with Conrad Nagel the following year in The Waning Sex (seven reels) and appeared in Upstage (Monta Bell, seven reels). When an interviewer had asked Conrad Nagel if he had been in love with Norma Shearer, Nagel equivocated, 'Every man who knew or worked with her was in love with her. She had an unusual grace and tact, and she was very sensitive to other people's feelings.' Pola Negri appeared in two films directed by Dimitri Buchowetski during 1924, Men, with Robert Frazer and Lily of the Dust.
During January of 1922, Victor Sjostrom was already known in the United States as Victor Seastrom. Apparently he was then the object of the desire of the female spectator, which is reflected in the extratextual discourse of Helen Hancock, in Pantomine Magazine, who wrote, "We have kept Victor Seastrom untill the last. Because perhaps Mr. Seastrom might not like to be called a matinee idol- leaving that phrase to younger and perhaps handsomer men. But he is one, just the same...Of the heavy, rugged type, portraying men of strong emotions and virile personalites." She claims he was one of the foremost directors and a pioneer, and then compliments him on being an actor of the legitimate stage. Director Victor Sjostrom had left Sweden for Hollywood in 1922 upon the completion of the film The Hellship. During 1924 Carl Sandberg reviewed the film Name the Man (eight reels), his remarking upon Sjostrom's use of lighting, which, whether or not it may have had been a use of realism or naturalism, seemed underplayed to Sandberg and based on the enviornment rather than made more elaborate or as being artificial. "He was an actor, rated as Sweden's best, and his voice leads actors into slow, certain moods." The film stars Conrad Nagel and Mae Busch. Iris Barry is timely writing in 1924, imparting to the readers of Lets Go to The Movies, "Victor Seastrom, who had made swedish pictures before Germany had begun its work (and too good to be popular) went last and they had they idiocy to put him to turning one of Hall Caine's intensely stupid stories into moving pictures. He did the best he could and played about a bit with the Yankee studio devices."
1922 was a year during which Gustaf Molander's second film, Amatorfilmen, the first film in which actress Elsa Ebbengen-Thorblad was to appear, brought actress Mimi Pollack to Swedish movie audiences. Molander had made the film The King of Boda (Tyrranny of Hate, Bodakungen) in 1920. It was the first film to be photographed by Swedish cinematographer Adrian Bjurman and starred Egil Eide and Wanda Rothgardt. Karin Molander had in 1920 starred in two films by Mauritz Stiller, in When We Are Married (Erotikon) with Lars Hanson, Tora Teje, and Glucken Cederberg, and in Fiskebyn. She also that year appeared in the film Bomben, directed by Rune Carlsten. And yet Karin Molander would only later be mentioned to audiences in the United States, Photoplay Magazine noting in 1926 that she was no longer in Sweden and no longer married to Gustaf Molander, "With Lars Hanson came his wife, Karin Nolander, leading woman in the Royal State Theater of Stockholm and billed as 'Sweden's most beautiful woman' She hasn't appeared on the screen yet, but it shouldn't be long now with so many good Scandinavian directors over here."
Appearing on the screen in the 1920 Gustaf Molander film Bodakungen was Franz Envall, whom Greta Garbo mentioned in a 1928 Photoplay magazine interview with Ruth Biery, "Then I met an actor...it was Franz Envall. He is dead now, but he has a daughter in the stage in Sweden. he asked if they would not let me try to get into the Dramatic School of the Royal Theater in Stockholm."

As an act of spectatorship, Iris Barry looked at film directors in the United States, "Seastrom, the Swedish director, is a man whom America has ruined. In Sweden, one cannot help feeling the cinema has steered its own sweet course irrespective of a desire to please the people at all costs...There has been much poetry and a great deal of fancy in Swedish films." Photoplay magazine featured a magnificient photo Victor Sjostrom during 1923 in which he is holding a megaphone while standing next to his camera and camera crew in a foot of water while on location, shooting a scene from the middle of a stream; it is the same photo that appeared in Screenland Magazine, which, during October of 1923, in addition to that featured cameraman Charles Van in a photograph, his having been on the set of The Master of Man. The title of the article, written by Constance Palmer Littlefield, was New Hope for the American
Photoplay. It described the film Mortal Clay directed in Sweden by Victor Sjostrom
as a film that was more artistic than commercial and anticipates the director's next film as there being on the screen "food for comparision", the soon to also be an adaption of the
writing of Sir Hall Caine with The Master of Man, directed in the United States by
Victor Seastrom. "But in Victor Seastrom lies hope. Since his coming to us from Sweden, he has been instrumental in organizing the Little Theatre movement of the screen." It notes that
Joseph Schildkraut was originally been slated for the lead role in the film untill his scenes were reshot with Conrad Nagel. Where the article is continued, to the back pages of the magazine issue, there begins an interview with Victor Sjostrom where he is asked about the size of Svenska Filmindustri, to which there is the account of his having replied, "'Well-," and this strong man actually faltered, choosing his words, so carefully, 'It is quite large." When describing the size of the studios themselves. Victor Sjostrom, the actor, almost deferentially reveals himself, Victor Seastrom, the film director while answering that not all of the studios at Rasunda were as large as Goldwyn's huge Stage Six, "'Maybe as large as this,' he waved his hand inclusively at the courtroom, which is not large as sets go" Cinematographer Charles Van Enger not only photographed the 1924 film Name the Man, directed by Victor Sjöstrom, but also that year photographed the films Lovers' Lane (Phil Rosen, seven reels) with actress Gertrude Olmstead, Three Women (Lubitsch, eight reels) with May McAvoy, Forbidden Paradise (Lubitsch, eight reels) with Pola Negri and Daughters of Pleasure (six reels) and Daring Youth (six reels), both directed by William Beaudine. King Vidor in 1924 paired John Gilbert and Aileen Pringle in two films, Wife of the Centaur with Kate Lester, and His Hour. Norwegian film director Tancred Ibsen, while briefly in Hollywood, worked on the set design to the Vidor film His Hour. Monta Bell that year directed John Gilbert in The Snob (seven reels).
There is an account of Rowland V. Lee having met Greta Garbo when she had first been introduced to the United States in 1925, "Jack Gilbert was all she wanted to talk about."
In Sweden, Karin Boye was publishing her second volume of poetry, Hidden Lands, her continuing in 1927 with the volume The Hearths. She had published her first work, Clouds two years earlier, a year when Swedish poet Birger Sjoberg had published Frida's Songs.
In 1925, Edmund Goulding began directing with Sun-Up Sally (six reels), starring Conrad Nagel and Irene and Sally (six reels), starring Constance Bennett, following the two films with Paris (six reels). Notably, Clarence Brown in 1925 directed Rudolph Valentino in the film The Eagle, which is of interest not only for its introduction of the pull-back shot, a tracking shot moving away from its subject similar to the present day zoom-out, but it was also one of the first films for which Adrain had designed the costumes, the other that year having had been being Her Sister From Paris.
Basil Rathbone, who co-starred with Greta Garbo, under the direction of Clarence Brown, in the sound version of Anna Karenina, wrote of his aquaintance with her in his autobiography, In and Out of Character. "I first met Miss Garbo in 1928 when Ouida and I were invited to lunch with Jack Gilbert one Sunday." Rathbone and his wife had been present at the premiere of the film Flesh and the Devil. Of his starring in film 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 the grave. There was no indication it might be occupied." Rathbone had also appeared in silent films- Trouping with Ellen (T. Hayes Hunter, seven reels) in 1924, The Masked Bride (Christy Cabanne, six reels), starring Mae Murray, in 1925 and The Great Deception (Howard Higgin, six reels) in 1926. Rathbone and his wife had been present at the premiere of Flesh and the Devil. Anna Karenina (1914), filmed by J. Gordon Edwards, had starred Betty Nansen. 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 Rathbone might be a little stiff and unromantic for the role, but he made a test that was suprisingly good.' Directed by Paul L.Stein, the films also stars Reginald Owen and Roland Young. Ronald Colman had begun as a screen actor in England as well with the films The Live Wire (Dewhurst, 1917), The Toilers (1919), Sheba (Hepworth, 1919), Snow in the Desert (1919) and The Black Spider (1920). Like Basil Rathbone, William Powell had also appeared in silent films, among those being Romola (Henry King, 1924 twelve reels) with Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and The Beautiful City (Kenneth Webb, 1925) with Dorothy Gish. William Powel also appeared with Fay Wray and Richard Arlen in the 1929 silent Four Feathers directed by Merrian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.
And like Rathbone, another Sherlock Holmes, Clive Brook who appeared in the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Basil Dean) and in the title role of Sherlock Holmes (Howard) in the film of 1930, was appearing in silent films during the early 1920's, including Woman to Woman (Cutts 1923) and Out to Win (Clift, 1923). As part of an interesting study, Clive Brook had appeared in the mysteries Trent's Last Case (1920), directed by Richard Garrick and based on the novel by E.C. Bentley and The Loudwater Mystery (1921), based on the novel by Edgar Jepson, before his appearing with Isobel Elsom in the 1923 film A Debt of Honor directed by Maurice Elvey. One of the first directors Philip St John Basil Rathbone had appeared in front of the camera for had been Maurice Elvey, who had directed the 1921 film, The Fruitful Vine, adapted for the screen from the novel. To complement the films made in the United States, Sherlock Holmes of 1916 starring William Gillette and Sherlock Holmes (nine reels) of 1922, starring John Barrymore, John Barrymore not only in the title role but also in a dual role as Moriarty, Maurice Elvey in 1921 directed actor Eille Norwood in the first 15 of 45 shorts in which he would star as Sherlock Holmes. In addition to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which would include The Empty House, The Solitary Cyclist, The Man With The Twisted Lip, A Case of Identity, The Copper Beeches and The Dying Detective, Elvey that year directed Norwood in The Sign of the Four and in the silent Sherlock Holmes film The Hound of the Baskervilles. Maurice Elvey had been earlier teamed with Eille Norwood in 1920 for two silent films, The Hundreth Chance, adapted from the novel, and The Tavern Knight, also adapted from the novel. George Ridgewell would direct Eille Norwood in 30 short films in which he would star as the consulting detective, The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1922) and The Last Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1923), among them being The Boscome Valley Mystery (1922) The Engineer's Thumb (1923) and The Cardboard Box . Like Holmes, counterpart Nyland Smith, portrayed Fred Paul, was extended into a second series of films, the British studio and director A. E. Coleby, after having completed The Mystery of Dr. Fu Man Chu (1923), which when completed ran to fifteen individual short stories, having added The Further Mysteries of Dr. Fu Man Chu to make the number of adventures twenty two. During 1924, the studio added a series of silent adventures entitled Thrilling Stories from the Strand Magazine.
Denmark had had its own early silent cinema with the Nordisk Film Kompagni, founded in 1906, and Swedish film historian Forsyth Hardy can be quoted as having written, "The Danes claim to have made the first dramatic film, in 1903." Most of its early narrative films having had been being directed by Viggo Larsen, they were for the most part "thrillers, tragedies and love stories" (Astrid Soderberg Widding) or "the social melodarama and dime novel that made a hit from 1910 onwards (Bengt Forslund). Mysteries like Pat Corner (Masterdetektiven) and Nat Pinkerton, The Anarchists Plot (Det Mislykkede attentat), both in which the director appeared on screen with Elith Pio, had appeared in Denmark not as early as 1909 but earlier, the Danish photographer Axel Graatjaer Sorensen having begun filming for Larsen in 1906 and having had continued solely for Larsen untill 1911, when he then began photographing first for Danish silent film director August Blom and then for danish silent film director Urban Gad under the name Axel Graatjkjae. Viggo Larsen by 1910, was in Germany, where he directed and starred with Wanda Treumann in Arsene Lupin Against Sherlock Holmes (Arsene Lupin contra Sherlock Holmes). In 1911 he directed the more successful Sherlock Holmes contra Professor Moriarty. In Denmark, Larsen had played Holmes to Holger-Madsen's raffles in both Sherlock Holmes Risks His Life (Sherlock Holmes i livsfare,1908) and Sherlock Holmes Two, both films photographed by Axel Sorensen. Einar Zangenberg played the armchair detective in Larsen's Sherlock Holmes Three and in Hotel Thieves (Hotelmystierne) in 1911, after which Zangerberg stepped behind the camera as director in 1912 to bring the photography of Poul Eibye to the screen in the films Kvindhjerter and Efter Dodsspriset, both with Edith Psilander, The Last Hurdle (Den Sidste Hurdle, in which he appeared on screen with Edith Psilander, and The Marconi-Operater (The Marconi Telegrafisten. Viggo Larsen would also direct the Sherlock Holmes films The Singer's Diamond (Sangerindens daiamanter (1908), starring Holger Madsen, The Gray Lady (Den Graa Dame, 1909) and Cab Number 519 (Drokes 519), in which Larsen would play the consulting detective with co-star August Blom. Before becoming one of the finest, and most prolific, of Danish silent film directors, August Blom also starred as an actor with Viggo Larsen in front of the camera of Axel Sorensen in the film A Father's Grief (Fadern (1909), directed by Larsen. Ole Olsen in 1910 produced Sherlock Holmes in the Claws of the Confidence Men (Sherlock Holmes i Bondefangerkler) for Nordisk Films Kompagni, in which Otto Langoni starred as Holmes with the actress Ellen Kornbech. Langoni appeared as Holmes under the direction of William Augustinus in the 1911 film Den Sorte Haette. Alvin Nuess would portray Sherlock Holmes in the films The One Million Dollar Bond (Millionobilgationen in 1911 and in The Hound of the Baskervilles (Rudolf Meinert) in 1914. The one reel film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or Held for Ransom directed in the United States by Stuart Blackton in 1905 and drawn from The Sign of Four, is thought to be a lost film. Harry Benham would later play Sherlock Holmes in in the two reeler Sherlock Holmes Solves the Sign of the Four, written and directed in the United States by Lloyd Lonergan.

Were I a projectionist in Denmark, due to the scarcity of early film available today and how seminal early Danish silent film may be to the study of the origins of the mystery and detective film, I would enthusiasticly arrange a screening of the silent film Dr Nicholson and the Blue Diamond (Dr. Nicholson og den blaa Diamant, starring Edith Psilander, recently donated by the Danish Film Institute for public internet screening. What seems remarkable about the film is its running time, which is an hour. Among the early danish narrative films of Viggo Larsen were The Black Mask (Den Sorte Maske (1906), Revenge (1906), Anarkistens svigermor (1907), with actress Margrethe Jespersen, The Lion Hunt (Lovejaten (1906), The Bankruptcy (Falliten, 1907), and, The Magic Bed (Tryllesaekken (1907); it is thought that 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 during the film The Robber's Sweetie (Rovens Brod, 1907), starring Clara Nebelong.

Roman Novarro, who had starred with Greta Garbo in Mata Hari under the direction of George Fitzmaurice, in 1924 appeared in two films directed by Fred Niblo, Thy Name is Woman and The Red Lily. In 1925 the actor appeared in the films The Midshipman (Christy Cabanne, eight reels) and The Lovers Oath (six reels). Novarro is quoted as having said, 'It wasn't enough for her to satisfy the director. Often -despite his OK- she asked for a scene to be retaken because she didn't think she had done her best.'
Between the films The Primitive Lover (Sidney Franklin, seven reels, 1922) and The Lady (1925), Frances Marion had written the screenplays to The French Doll (1923), Song of Love (Chester Franklin, eight reels, 1924), based on the novel Dust of Desire and starring Norma Talmadge Secrets (Frank Borzage, eight reels, 1924) and Tarnish (George Fitzmaurice, seven reels, 1924).
Technicolor and artificial lighting were used in tandem for the first time in 1924 by director George Fitzmaurice to bring Irene Rich, Alma Rubens, Betty Bouton and Constance Bennett to the screen in the film Cytherea (eight reels). Screenland magazine noted that the scripts filmed by Fitzmaurice were often submitted by his wife, and that Ouida Bergere, more frequently remembered, or referred to, as the lover of Basil Rathbone, "was a successful actress before she began to write for pictures." The present author almost found it of more personal interest that there was an author named Faith Service that wrote for Motion Picture Classics more than anything. During 1920 it featured a portrait of the film director George Fitzmaurice and his relationship to the screenwriter, but also included a fictionalized version of the script to the silent film On With the Dance, its scenario written by Ouida Bergere. Faith Service regularly appeared in the magazine as an author that adapted the photoplay into the short story, with the subtitle "fictionalized by permission" or "told in story form, her having typed out the plots to the films Victory Miss Hobbs, Remodeling a Husband and The World and His Wife and She Loves and Lies, it being to the present author fascinating that the stills to films that now may be lost appear next to their transposition into a differeton art form. That year Gladys Hall fictionalized the scenario to the film Way Down East, condensing its charactizations into a handful of pages, the spectator of 1920 reading what would soon be on the screen in front of them, perhaps while viewing the star as a commodity within the extra-textual discourse of the fan magazine but with the familiar art form of the magazine short story installment. About the director Fitzmaurice, the Motion Picture Classics published, "For Fitzmaurice owes his remarkable ability to attain beautiful pictures- admirable in light, shade and grouping- to his early training as a painter, Maurice Tourneur owes his skill in the same field to the same source......En passme it is interesting to note the commraderie of Fitzmaurice and his wife, known to the scenario world as Ouida Bergere. 'We work together on every production,' explains the director." Faith Service was also distinguished as having been published in Photoplay magazine.

During 1925, Victor Sjostrom, brought Lewis Stone and Alice Terry to the screen in the film Confessions of a Queen. With him was a cinematographer that became widely used on the back lots of the silent films of the decade to turn flicker into fantasy, Percy Hilburn, his having worked with several directors, notably Reginald Barker, George Melford, Fred Niblo and Monta Bell. Sjostrom's film was written by Agnes Christine Johnson, adapted from a novel by Alphonse Daudt. In Sweden, Par Lagerkvist that year published the novel Guest of Reality (Gas hos verkligheten). It is an account of the events of his childhood an his claim of his reluctance to accept religous ideals. In Sweden, Olaf Molander directed Lady of the Camellias (Damen med kameliorna, 1925), starring Ivan Hedqvist and Hilda Borgström and photographed by Gustav A. Gustafson, which, in 1926 he followed with Married Life (Giftas), starring Hilda Borgström and Margit Manstad, also photographed by Gustav A. Gustafson and in 1927 with Only a Dancing Girl, which he wrote and directed. Gustaf Molander in 1925 directed the film Constable Paulus' Easter Bomb (Polis Paulis' Easter Bomb). William Larsson that year directed the films Broderna Ostermans huskors and For hemmet och flickan, with Jenny Tschernichin and Elsa Widborg in what would be the first film in which she was to appear. John W. Brunius in 1925 directed the film Charles XII (Karl XII), photographed by Hugo Edlund and starring Gösta Ekman, Pauline Brunius and Mona Martenson. Its screenplay was written by Hjalmar Bergman and Ivar Johansson. Many of the scenes of Brunius' film were shot on the actual historical locations and battlesites, it having had been being one of the most expensive films to have been made in Sweden up untill that time. Gosta Ekman had earlier been seen as leading man in the United States, as a "romantic type" In Pantomine magazine it was surveyed that, "he plays the impudent, but loveable adventurer to life and his slender blonde figure lends itself most admirably to graceful interpretations of this kind." Photoplay magazine saw Ekman in a similar way, describing him in 1923 as "the Swedish shiek" (the Swedish Valentino) and predicted his soon aquiring famem in the United States, as it did that year with Sigrid Holmqvist. Photoplay reported, "Arriving with him from Stockholm was Edith Erastoff, the wife of Victor Seastrom, the Swedish director who is now working for Goldwyn. Miss Erastoff played opposite Mr. Ekman at the Stockholm Theater....'A beautiful boy,' says director Seastrom, 'Too beautiful- but he is a great actor and never hesitates to conceal his good looks for a character part which demands make-up.'" The magazine that year speculated that "in all probability" Ekman woulod appear on screen in a version of "Three Weeks", concievably opposite actress Theda Bara. In Sweden, in 1925 Ragnar Ring directed the film Tre Kroner (1925), following the next year with the film Butikskultur. Ett kopmanshus i skargarden starring Anna Wallin and Anna Carlsten was written and directed by Hjalmer Peters, its photographer Hellwig Rimmen.
Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer in 1925 filmed Thou Shalt Honor Thy Wife (Master of the House, Den Skal Aere Din Hustru), which the director co-wrote with Sven Rindholm. Photographed by Goerge Schneevoigt, the films stars Astrid Holm, Karin Nellemose and Mathilde Nielsen. In his book Transcendental Style in Film, the director Paul Schrader (Autofocus) characetrizes Dreyer's early film by their use of mise-en-scene, likening them, in their use of interiors and 'revelatory guesture', in particular to the Intimate Theater of Strindberg. Dreyer, in a foreward to a collection of four of his screenplays, writes, 'I am convinced that presenlty a tragic poet of the cinema will appear, whose problem will be to find, within the structure of the cinema's framework, the form and style appropriate to tragedy.' During the film Master of the House, Dreyer stylisticly uses the iris shot while cutting between close and medium interior shots, including and iris shot filmed over the shoulder of a character exiting through a doorway and an iris shot of her entering again later in the scene, and , more notably, the director during the middle of a scene uses iris shots while cutting between a close up and a medium closeshot; during the latter a second character, that of the protagonist's wife in the film, can been seen entering the frame of the shot from the right of the irised screen and then reentering during the length of the shot. Husband and wife are both shown in intercut iris closeups during a dialouge sequence within the middle of a prolonged interior scene, the exceptional beauty of the actress held by the camera as her eyes silently wait for her husband to speak. In his biography of Greta Garbo, Raymond Durgnat quotes "the austerest of all film directors", Carl Dreyer, although the quote seems superfluous or decorative to the essay, as having said, "Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land no one can never tire of exploring." The context was that Garbo, being a film star, was an object of art.
Early Danish sound film director Alice O'Fredricks appeared as an actress in two Danish silent films in 1925, Sunshine Valley (Solskinsdalen) with Karen Winther, directed for Nordisk Film by Emanuel Gregers, and Lights from Circus Life (Sidelights of the Sawdust Ring/Det Store Hjerte) with Ebba Thomsen, Margarethe Schegel and Mathilde Nielsen, directed by August Blom. She had appeared a year earlier with Clara Pontoppidan in a film produced by Edda Film, Hadda Padda, directed by Gudmundar Kamban and also starring Ingeborg Sigurjonsson. Gudmundur Kamban in 1926 for Nordisk Film directed Gunnar Tolnaes, Hanna Ralph and Agnete Kamban int the film Det Sovende Hus
In Germany, Scandinavian film director Svens Gade positioned actress Asta Nielsen in front of the lens in Hamlet (1920). Directing in the United States in 1925, his films included Fifth Avenue Models adapted from the novel The Best in Life by Muriel Coxen, Siege and Peacock Feathers (seven reels) with Jacqueline Logan; in 1926 they were to include Watch Your Wife (seven reels), Into Her Kingdom (seven reels) with Corinne Griffith and Einar Hanson and The Blonde Saint (seven reels), adapted from the novel Isle of Life by Stephen Whitman and starring Lewis Stone and Ann Rork. Gade would later become a scenario writer rather than director, one instance being Symphony for Universal, directed by F. Harmon Weight.
During his absence from Europe, Dadaist Hans Richter photographed avaunt-guard silent film during 1925, including Ghosts Before Breakfast, and Filmstudie. Richter is not specificlly referred to in the 1922 issue of Vanity Fair Magazine that published legend Tristan Tzara with the article Some Memoirs of Dadaism, an account of the movement which has undertaken to free French art from its classical rigidities, but as a chronicle of the Tzara's 1920 return to Paris it explores Dadaism as an international endeavor while introducing Dadaist meetings, which were to include Paul Eluard, Andre Breton (A Tempest in a Glass of Water), Louis Aragon (The Glass Syringe), and Hans Arp (Clean Wrinkles), as Dadaist Theater, and therefore Dadaist Festival. If it is seen that Modernism in art was removed from cinema, also writing in Vanity Fair was Edmund Wilson, who wrote The Aesthetic Upheaval in France, the Influence of jazz in Paris and the Americanization of French Literature and Art. "For the younger artists in France have competely thrown overboard the ideals of perfection and form, of grace and measure and tranquility, which we Americans are accustomed to think of as their most valuable possession."
Audiences in 1925 viewed Mary Pickford in the silent film Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, nine reels). Among the films in which flapper Clara Bow appeared in that year were Eves Lover (Roy Del Ruth, seven reels), The Scarlett West (John G. Adolphi, 9 reels) and The Keeper of the Bees (James Meehan, seven reels). During 1925, Sally of the Sawdust (ten reels) and That Royal Girl (ten reels) would both team W.C. Fields and Carol Dempster. Both films were directed by D.W. Griffith.
n regard to D.W. Griffith still filming during the 1920's and Thomas Ince having been part of Triangle, it may have been that the photodramatists of the silent era in the United States had by 1925 seen a transformation. In a volume entitled Modern Photoplay Writing, published in 1922, Howard T. Dimick wrote, Thus the present era might be called the era of the detailed synopsis, which has evolved out of the era of the scenario." It concludes his thought from the previous sentence, "The modern playwright submits his story in the form of a detailed synopsis, amounting in length to a short story, casting the dramatic form, establishing the events, developing the characters, introducing the atmosphere, but minus all dialogue and moralizing not pertinent to the demands of the mechanism it is intended for, the camera." He adds that previously the scenario had been submitted to set the dramatic form and that the synopsis would not be able to veer from the dramatic line as developed, whereas in a more modern era, the synopsis had become a dramatic form of continuity. In a slightly earlier volume, Scenario Writing Today, published in 1921, Grace Lytton crawled to page 146 before adding the chapter Writing the Brief Synopsis or Outline and discusses the part played by the scenario editor, "Your brief synopsis is your card of introduction to the scenario editor...An outline of the plot is really all that is indispensible." Interestingly, she adds to the synopsis and scenario, continuity, but claims that, "The continuity will be written in the studio and if you send it one it will probably not be used" while optimisticlly claiming continuity writing, the adding of a full developed novel like description after the scenario and synopsis, to be a valuable thing to study in that its practice imporved scenario writing.
A director that had worked with Griffith, Jack Conway, who had himself dropped out of highschool, would direct Jack Pickford in the 1926 film Brown of Harvard with Mary Brian, Mary Alden and Francis X Bushman. Ever since, there have been various murders and questionable characters surrounding the University. Sometimes sinister, it often boil down to that as a University, it has its own unique way of whether it does or doesn't know whom is attending, and or whom isn't. Conway was also to direct the film Soulmates that year. In the United States, in 1926, Dorothy Gish would begin filming with Herbert W. Wilcox, under whose direction she made the films Nell Gwyn (1926) with Randle Ayerton and Julie Compton, London (1927), with John Manners and Elissa Landi, Tip Toes (1927) with John Manners and Mme. Pompadour (1927), written by Frances Marion and starring Antonio Moreno. It was in 1926 that Lillian Gish, while filming La Boheme (King Vidor, nine reels) with John Gilbert, had met Victor Sjöström. The cameraman to the film had been Hendrik Sartov.
There is an account of Victor Sjostrom's shooting the exterior scenes to the film The Scarlet Letter in which during the film he climbed down from a platform after Swedish silent film director Mauritz Stiller had announce that he was there, Stiller then saying, "This is Garbo." Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller had met in Stockholm the day before the shooting of the 1912 film The Gardner/The Broken Spring Rose was to begin at the studio in Lindingo, Bengt Forslund later chronicling that "Sjostrom didn't know Stiller befroe they became associated at Svenska Bio, but he was aware of his reputation." Photoplay reviewed the 1926 film, "Hawthorne's classic and somber study of the New England conscience has just been somberly translated to the screen. Lillian Gish wears the red letter of sin with her stock virginal sweetness failing to grasp the force of Hester Prynne's will power and intelligence...The camerawork has been perfectly handled but the puritans have been seen with a slightly Swedish eye by director Victor Seastrom. They are dour rather than high minded fanatics....Take your handkerchiefs and the older children"

The present author uploaded one google.video, as a test film, it covering only the first four minutes of the film, but it was one of those directors that become a favorite on reputation, rather than the availability of the entire catolog of film, he being James Kirkwood, who was married to silent film actress Gertrude Robinson before marrying Lilla Lee.
During 1926 Frank Capra would direct Harry Langdon in The Strongman (seven reels), his having written the screenplay to Langdon's film Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (1926, six reels). During the middle of the twenties, comedy was also being created by Buster Keaton, who in 1923 appeared in the silent film Balloonatics. Keaton also appeared in the silent short, The Paleface, silent comedy The Blacksmith and the silent film short The Boat.
In the United States, Fox Studios in 1927 continued their films of the Great West, pairing Tom Mix with Dorothy Dwan in The Great K and A Train Robbery (Lewis Seiler, five reels).

The author Ian Conrich sees the film made in the United States by Universal Studios between 1923-1928 as being horror-spectacular, full legnth films that, along with the films of Douglas Fairbanks, tried to near the large-scale production standard of D. W. Griffith. Griffith had already by 1922 promised audiences entering the dark of the silver-nitrate screen's public sphere of reception One Exciting Night, a film purportedly built more for atmosphere and devices that would gradually become standard in mystery film than for plot twists and complications, its emphasis having been on trap doors that lead to hidden passageways known only to ghostlike persons. After starring in the film, Henry Hull was interviewed by Picture Play magazine and said, "But on the screen without my voice and without artificial disguise, what would I be. i wondered. 'But we don't photograph the face,' Mr Griffith assured me, 'we photograph the thought, the soul.'" Carol Dempster, who appears in the film was known to audiences as having been paired with John Barrymore in the film Sherlock Holmes. By 1923 Silent Film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau had already made The Haunted Castle and Nosferatu, his continuing with Phantom and Driven from Home. The former cast Lil Dagover with Frieda Richard, and actress who filmed under the direction of several, in not numerous, silent filmmakers and appeared in Robert Dinesen's film Claire (Die Geschichte eines jugen madchens, 1924). Whether or not pertinent to every Nosferatu-Vampyr hollywood tale, if the idea of a precise, fully descriptive shootingscript intiated by silent film director Thomas Ince can be rediscovered from the photoplay, paricularly if it can be reconcieved passed any nouveau roman or nouvelle vague notion of film poetry only as an avaunt guarde act, it is interesting, without feeling that Griffith worked entirely without a script or that Ince wrote novels in the form of picture plays, that author Kenneth Macgowan associates Murnau with his camerman Karl Fruend and scriptwriter Carl Mayer in a way that makes theirs a reinterpretation of the ideas of keeping a shootingscript and of adding within it cameramovements that popularized the use of cameramobiltiy. "Mayer's scripts were detailed. They indicated every shot...In order to visualize action nad movements as he wrote, he used a camera viewfinder, a device that shows what ones shot will cover." From these script camera instructions Freund added subjectivity, reinterpreting the shootingscript with point of view. Still, it is certainly evident that by 1927, the horror film and art film would merge in eerie, atmospheric silent film essay on shadowplay and the black and white tones of mood and suspense, Paul Leni's The Cat and the Canary.
To add to the mystery of silent film director Rubert Julian, the sound remake of the film The Cat and The Canary entitled The Cat Creeps (1930) is lost. Stills from the film show actress Helen Twelvetrees in the lead role. From a screenplay adapted from the novel by the Universal/Jewel script department, director Rupert Julian in 1925 would throw swirling silver shadows across the screen waiting untill Mary Philbin would remove the mask of the Phantom of the Opera. Behind the mask and costumed in red during the tinted sequences, silent film actor Lon Chaney not only filmed on the famous Phantom of the Opera backlot, but he also appered in front of the camera at MGM, where he that year starred with Gertrude Olmsted in The Monster (Roland West, seven reels) and with Mae Busch in the silent film The Unholy Three (Tod Browning, seven reels). Mary Philbin later appeared in the 1928 silent Drums of Love (D. W. Griffith, nine reels) and in the 1929 silent The Last Performance (Paul Frejos, seven reels). Before becoming known to audiences as the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, Clive Brook would appear with Jetta Goudal under the direction of Rupert Julian during 1926 in the film Three Faces East. Upon being invited to follow a story that began in Victorian-Edwardian London, 1925 Silent Film audiences were also that year thrilled by the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle as they were led by Challenger on an expedition into The Lost World through the magic lantern silent film. In 1925, Bela Lugosi had appeared on theater marquees starring in the film The Midnight Girl (Wilfred Noy, seven reels), with Lila Lee and Garreth Hughes. Lila Lee would appear under the direction of Scott Pembroke in the film The Black Pearl (1928,six years). Although two years earlier, he had appeared in the film Silent Command (J. Gordon Edwards, eight reels), it may be noted that Bela Lugosi appeared of the screen under the direction of F. W. Murnau while in front of the lens of Karl Fruend in the silent film Dr. Jeckell and Mr.Hyde/The Head of Janus (Der Januskopf, 1920), filmed in Germany. Lugosi would in 1929 on screen appear under the direction of Tod Browning with Conrad Nagel in The Thirteenth Chair, a mystery made more spine tingling by the appearances of actresses Lelila Hymas, Margaret Wycherly, Helene Millard and mary Forbes. That year, The Last Warning, from the play by Thomas F. Fallon, would conclude the career of film director Paul Leni. Not only is it uncertain from where magician Harry Houdini screened silent film in 1927, but the name of his director is shrouded in a cranking up of the kem light, he being listed as producer of his silent film. When he appearred in the the film The Grim Game (1919), serial "cliffhangers", adventure films much like the Danish melodramas and silent Sherlock Holmes, were still being made, the title of his being The Master of Mystery. He continued with the silent film Terror Island (1920), The Soul of Bronze (1921), The Man From Beyond (1922) and Halldane of the Secret Service (1923).

Silent Film: Lost Film, Found Magazines

There were 478 silent films made in Sweden; of them only 192 still exist, although there are copies of fragments from a number of them. Added to that, countless Danish silent films produced by Ole Olsen for Nordisk Films Kompagni are "presumably lost": the Danish Film Institute notes that approximately 1600 silent short and feature films were made whereas only 250 films presently exist, Not the only webpage concerned with the preservation of Silent Film, the lost films webpage from Berlin show clips and stills from fifty silent film that it claims are "unknown or unidentified". Bengt Forslund penned a brief paragraph about the silent film The Divine Woman (En Gudomlig Kvinna, 1928), directed by Victor Sjostrom under the name Victor Seastrom, "This was written 35 years ago and even at that stage all prints seem to have vanished. There is not much hope of finding one today since Garbo's films have been the subject of more research than those of most other stars.". Lon Chaney is quoted as having said, "I told Garbo that mystery served me well and it would do as much for her." Forslund reflected upon the exisiting early silent film of the Swedish director, "Even more regrettable is that out of the 31 films directed by Sjostrom during this period, only three have survived, and out of the other 8 films in which he acted, not a single one remains." Not only is the film in which Victor Sjostrom directed Greta Garbo lost, Sjostrom, while in the United States was to direct the first feature released by Metro Goldwyn Mayer, He Who Gets Slapped, (seven reels 1924), starring Lon Chaney, Jack Gilbert and Norma Shearer. An earlier film starring John Gilbert and Norma Shearer, The Wolfman, directed by Edmund Mortimer in 1924, is among the myriad of films now thought to be lost. Included among them are The Dark Angel (George Fitzmaurice, 1924) pairing Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman, The Chinese Parrot (1927, seven reels), adapted for the screen from the pen of Earl Der Biggers by Paul Leni and starring Marian Nixon and Florence Turner and Four Devils, filmed in the United States by F. W Murnau in 1928 and starring Janet Gaynor and Nacy Drexel. Photoplay, while providing a still from the film, saw The Four Devils as the "long awaited successor" to Murnau's Sunrise and as a source of a plot summary to the film, it alludes to the film's tone, "the final shot implies a happy ending. The film will probably be cut to eliminate the over drawn scenes before it is released." One film thought to be non-existent before preservation attempts is a film which introduced actor Nils Asther in his first appearance onscreen, a Lars Harsnon film directed by Mauritz Stiller in 1916, The Wings (Vingarne)- it was remade, or re-adapted rather, as a silent by Carl Theodore Dreyer. A year earlier, in the United States, Valda Valkyrien had appeared in the film The Valkyrie (Eugene Nowland), which irregardless of how possibly faithful it was to Norse Saga and The Elder Edda and its being elected to the Hall of The Dead, the film is now thought to be lost. Loves of An Actress (Rowland Lee,1928) in which Nils Asther starred with Pola Negri and Mary McAllister, as a matter of fact, is a lost film. If all that exists of The Chinese Parrot is a still photograph, the caption from Photoplay Magazine, cautioned that, alhtough mysteries were not meant to be divulged, the adaption had not kept faithful to the Earl Der Biggers plotline.
In regard to Lost Films, Found Magazines, Photoplay reviewed the film London After Midnight, "Lon Chaney has a stellar role in this mystery drama and the disguise he uses while ferretting out the murderer is as gruesome as any has ever worn...Chaney plays a dual role."
Of Silent film director Tod Browning, Iris Barry wrote, "Browning has a peculiar gift for managing dramatic suspense, only rivaled by some of the Germans, though achieved by methods less dramatic than theirs." Lon Chaney would return to the screen in 1926 in the films The Blackbird (Tod Browning, seven reels), The Road to Mandalay (Tod Browning, seven reels) and Tell It To the Marines (George Hill, ten reels). In 1927, Lon Chaney starred in front of the camera of silent film director William Nigh to portray Mr. Wu (eight reels), the film co-starring Renee Adoree and Gertrude Olmstead. It was a year in which Rupert Julian, director of Phantom of the Opera was collaborating with screenwriter Garret Fort on the film Yankee Clipper to showcase actress Elinor Fair.

Screenwriter Frances Marion had written the early revision to the photoplay The Mysterious Lady, which was rewritten by screenwriter Bess Meredyth. During the time in between it had been elaborately reworked by Danish film director Benjamin Christenson. Upon first arriving in the United States, the Danish silent film director Benjamin Christenson had sold the scenario to The Light Eternal, his remarking later that 'writers were let loose on my script and altered the whole tone and message'. The first film Christenson had directed in the United States, The Devil's Circus (1926, seven reels) with Norma Shearer and Charles Emmet Mack, had had a script which he had written himself. The Haunted House (seven reels) with Thelma Todd, Montague Love and Barbara Bedford, Mockery (seven reels), starring Lon Chaney, The Hawk's Nest (eight reels) with Milton Sills, Montague Love and Mitchell Lewis were to follow in 1928.
Today, there are no known existant copies of the 1929 film The House of Horror (7 reels) for which Thelma Todd returned to the screen to film under the direction of Benjamin Christensen. Nor are there existant copies of the silent films The Haunted House and The Hawk's Nest; untill they are found and or restored, the films made in the United States by Benjamin Christenson continue to lurk within the shadows of the silver screen theaters, and although many of the theaters, with all their granduer that introduced the films are also gone, particularly in Boston, the detectives of film can find them in the world of Lost Film, Found Magazines with each newly discovered poster, still or full page advertisement. As you may have noticed, my public domain copy of Haxan is fickle: please accept the above copy and allow me to add for good measure an embeded copy of The Phantom Carriage (Korkarlen/The Phantom Chariot, 1920, also listed as 1921), thus allowing the two directors to be screened together. When shown in the United States during 1922 under the title The Stroke of Midnight, the film was reviewed by Photoplay Magazine as being, "Drama from the Swedish- so drab and grim in its realism tha one longs, almost, for a bit of unassuming splapstick to liven it up...Impressive, but depressing." Picture-play Magazine in 1922 reviewed the film, "It is a Swedish film and full of gloom. But the strong point of 'Midnight' is not the gloom, but its ghost story." it continued to note that the film "will send shivers up your spine" the reviewer conceded that they "had to sit through reels of endless dreary moralizing." When asked about Victor Sjostrom, Ingmar Bergman had told Torsten Manns, "His films meant a tremendous lot to me, particularly The Phantom Carriage and Ingeborg Holm. Adapted from the novel by Selma Lagerlof, directed by Victor Sjostrom from his own screenplay, the film was photographed by Julius Jaenzon. Einar Lauritzen wrote, "The double exposures in the graveyard scenes and in the scenes with the phantom chariot are beautifully executed, and, as always in Julius Jaenzon's photography, the interplay of light and shoadow is superb. Peter Cowie has noted that during the scene, "Occaisionaly as many as four images are superimposed on a single frame." During 1920, Victor Sjostrom had veered from Selma Lagerlof and had adapted, that is to say wrote and directed, a story by Franz Grillparzer, his relying upon Swedish camerman Henrik Jaenzon behind the lens to film The Monastery of Sendomir (Klosteret i Sendomir/The Secret of the Monastery, starring Tora Teje, Renee Bjorling, Jenny Tschernichin-Larsson and Erik A Petschler.

Photoplay magazine in 1927 reviewed a unique foreign film, "A story of the City of the future, weirdly imagined, technically gorgeous, but almost ruined by terrible acting and awful subtitles. The settings are unbelievably beautiful; the mugging of the players unbelievably bad." In the United States, a newer version of theSilent Film Metropolis is currently being presented by Kino International. Karl Freund was the film's cameraman. Apparently, possibly as a lietmotif or metaphor for cranking up the kem and its dusty archive of sprockets and outdated take up reels once a tradition at Harvard, the University overlooked the dilapitated condition of the Fogg Art Musuem and screened actress-machine Brigitte Helm in the Silent Film at its Film Archive during September along with the film Sunrise (Murnau).

Norwegian actress Greta Nissen would star in two films directed Roaul Walsh in 1926, The Lucky Lady and The Lady of the Harem. Also that year she appeared in The Love Thief (John McDermott) with Norman Kerry and The Popular Sin (Malcom St. Clair).
The Black Pirate, swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks, brought the silent film audiences of 1926 the romance of the high seas. At Pickford Fairbanks Studio, William Beaudine had just then completed filming Mary Pickford in the film Scraps. Director Marshall Nielen by then had also had his own studio, where he was directing the film The Sky Rocket
In Sweden during 1926 Klerker directed the film Flickorna pa Solvik, starring Wanda Rothgardt. Photographed by Hugo Edlund and written by Ivar Johansson, Tales of Enging Stal (Fredirk stals sanger) was that year directed by John W. Brunius. Edvin Adolphson and Mona Martenson were teamed by Erik A. Petschler in the 1926 film Brollopet i Branna, photographed by Gustav A. Gustafson. The film also stars Emmy Albiin. Sigurd Wallen in 1926 directed the film Ebberods bank, the assistant director to the film Rolf Husberg. That year Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius directed his first film, which he also scripted, Flickorna Gyurkovics, starring Betty Balfour, Karin Swanstrom, Stina Berg and Lydia Potechina. Mordbrannerskan (1926) directed by John Lindlof, photgraphed by Gustav A. Gustafson and starring Vera Schimterlow and Brita Appelgren, was the first film in which the actress Birgit Tengroth was to appear. Screenwriter Ester Julin in 1926 wrote and directed the film Lyckobarnen, photographed by Henrik Jaenzon and starring Marta Claesson.
Contemporary to Victor Sjostrom's use of symbolic narrative, Swedish poet Birger Sjoberg during 1926 published the volume Cries and Wreaths (Kriser och kransar in which scandinavian landscape is used within mood images to envelope its symbolism. Landscape to thematicly depict emotion that needed to be expressed through the symbolic had been used earlier in the poetry of Vilhelm Ekelund.
Silent Greta Garbo

Greta Garbo photographer William Daniels in 1926 was cinematographer to the films Altars of Desire (seven reels), under the direction of Christy Cabanne and starring actresses Mae Murray and Maude George and Bardley the Magnificient under the direction of King Vidor. Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were to attend the premiere of the film Bardley the Magnificient together. Silent film scriptwriter Dorothy Farnum ran magazine advertisements announcing her having had written the screenplay to the film.
1926 was also the year that Greta Garbo, John Gilbert and Lars Hanson would film an adaption of the novel The Undying Past, bringing to the screen its plotline untill its emotional concluding scene at the Isle of Friendship during Flesh and the Devil (Atra, Clarence Brown). When reviewed by Photoplay Magazine it was seen that it was "a picture filmed when the romance of Jack Gilbert and Greta Garbo (see Jack's story in this issue) was at its height. It saw the performance of Greta Garbo as "flashing" whereas that of John Gilbert was delivered by one who "does overshade some of his scenes". Of her off-screen romance with John Gilbert, director Clarence Brown, who had introduced the two to each other, had said, "After I finished a scene with them I felt like an intruder. I'd walk away to let them finish what they were doing.' Brown has also been quoted as having said, "Those two were alone in a world of their own." Writing about Greta Garbo, Richrad Corliss quotes film director Clarence Brown as also having related that he would "direct her very quietly" and never "gave her director above a whisper."
In Sweden, during 1926 author Selma Lagerlof watched filmstrips of the adaptation to the screen of her novel by Victor Sjostrom as Seastrom in the United States, the scenario having been drawn up by Agnes Christine Johnston. All seven reels of the film are presently considered to be lost.Norma Shearer, who had starred under Victor Sjostrom's direction in Tower of Lies with William Haines had said that Sjostrom "was more concerned with the moods he was creating than the shadings he would have injected into my performance." When reviewed by Photoplay Magazine, the film was seen as "a worthwhile picture spoiled by a too conscious effort to achieve art. Consequently, a human story suffers from artificiality." When further reviewed by Photoplay, it was added that, "If the director had been as concerned with telling the story as he was thinking of symbolic scenes, this would have been a great picture. As it is, Victor Seastrom was so busy being artistic that he forgot to be human. The emotions are of those of the theater, not of life." Actor William Haines later was to tell Photoplay Magazine, "But then it is strange, too, that I have worked here for several years on the same lot with Greta Garbo and have never met her." On Sjostrom, Author Iris Barry observed, "He has a genius for the rural. In Tower of Lies he has redeemed himself on exactly these lines. Also witness the love scene in He Who Gets Slapped, the only really attractive part in that rather tedious picture."
Danish film director Carl Th. Dreyer was in Norway during 1926 shooting the film The Bride of Glomdal (Glomsdalsbruden), photographed by Einar Olsen and starring Tove Tellback. The Norwegian Film Institute during 2007 announced the restoration of the film The Bridal Procession (Brudeferden i Hardanger), also filmed in Norway in 1926; the film stars the very beuatiful actress Ase Bye and was directed by Rasmus Breistein. To flashback to 1921 and the Danish actress Asta Nielsen, the last volume of poetry written by Vilhelm Krag, Viserg of Vers had appeared in Norway in 1919, and with it are two novels, Stenansigot, from 1918, and Verdensbarn, from 1920. Vilhem Krag then adapted his work Jomfru Trofest for the screen in a script co-written by the director Rasmus Briestein. Interestingly enough, Asta Neilsen waited untill having returned to Germany to appear in the film Hedda Gabler under the direction of Franz Eckstein, but not before her having made the film Felix with Rasmus Briestein. The film was based on a novel written by Gustav Aagaard and photographed by Gunnar Nilsen-Vig, who would later go on to photograph for the directors John Brunius and Tancred Ibsen. It was a fertile time period in Scandinavia for literary adaptations that should have brought the name of the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset to the forefront with film going audiences in the United States. In 1920 Sigrid Undset published the first volume of her Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, Krasen, followed by the volumes Husfrue and Korset, in 1921 and 1922, respectively. They had been preceded by a volume of essays, Et kvindesynspunktina, in 1919.

Silent film was almost to an end. In 1927 alone, Alice Terry appeared in the films Lonesome Ladies (Joseph Henaberry), Notorious Lady (King Baggot), also starring Lewis Stone, An Affair of the Follies (Milland Webb), written by June Mathis, and The Prince of Headwaiters, also starring Lewis Stone (John Francis Dillon, seven reels). Roman Navarro that year appeared in the film Road to Romance (seven reels). During a year that he appeared with Delores Costello on the cover of the Scandinavian periodical Filmjournalen, John Barrymore in 1927 would begin what was to quickly become the only then whispered of crescendo of the silent film period, whith the film The Beloved Rogue, a year when Warner Oland appeared under the direction of Alan Crosland and with Delores Costello in A Man Loves (ten reels), starring Barrymore, and again in the film Old San Francisco (eight reels). Photographer Oliver Marsh that year would be behind the camera lens Norma Talmadge in the film The Dove (nine reels), director Roland West adapting the play written by Willard Mack for the screen. W. S. Van Dyke that year brought Wanda Hawley to the screen in the film The Eyes of Totem, also starring Ann Cornwall. Included among those chosen to be covergirl for Photoplay Magazine during 1927 were actresses Olive Borden, Arlette Marchal, Lois Wilson, Mae Murray and Mary Brian. Actresses chosen by Screenland magazine in 1927 to grace its cover included Marie Provost, lya De Putti,Anita Parkhurst, Gilda Gray and Jetta Goudal: Each month Cal York wrote a page entitled Girl on the Cover; in regard to any personal favorite covers to Photoplay Magazine of the present author, so far there are two, both from 1926, Marion Davies and Alice Joyce. While author Deebs Taylor explains that 'it' as typified by Elinor Glyn was sex appeal, he also writes that silent film actress Clara Bow had brought the excitement of the flapper to the screen a year before her having been given the role in the 1927 film It (seven reels) during her appearance in the film Mantrap (Victor Fleming, seven reels). She appeared on the cover of Filmjournalen Magazine in 1927 and in 1929. Photoplay Magzine covers for the year 1928, featured the actresses Corinne Griffith, Marion Davies, Evelyn Brent, Billie Dove, Ruth Taylor, Ester Ralston and Eleanor Boardman. Clara Bow is a particular instance of Lost Films, Found Magazines; a highly publicized silent actress that was often written about, if not written about in within the extra-textual discourse of fan magazines as one the earliest forms of film criticism, with the expectation that modern novels that had not yet been filmed would soon be brought to the screen, Clara Bow apprearred in several films that have only been seen due to recent efforts to preserve them. Parts of silent films are missing- among the films featuring Clara Bow either still incomplete, but restored, or restored in their entirety are Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), Maytime (Gasnier, 1923), Poisoned Paradise (Gasnier, 1924), Black Oxen (Frank Lloyd, 1924) and the 1925 film My Lady of Whims. Without the films, all that is left are magazine advertisements where the screen star cordially invites our consumership, not only our consumership as spectators for the advertised product, but as spectators for the fantasies of 'a now by gone era', the look of the female directed to a time only preserved as being seldom seen on the silent silver screen, once captured by the moving camera and now guessed at through the pages of magazines.
1928 saw actress Loretta Young as she appeared in her first two films with silent film actress Julanne Johnston, Marshall Neilan having directed both actresses in Her Wild Oat (1927, seven reels), with Colleen Moore and Martha Mattox and Joseph Boyle having directed both actresses in The Whip Woman (1928, six reels), with Estelle Taylor, Lowell Sherman and Hedda Hopper. She had been acting under the name Gretchen, which was changed at the suggestion of Mervyn Leroy, and, according to the webpage of the estate of Loretta Young, at the suggestion of Collen Moore.
John Gilbert that year made the films The Show (Tod Browning, seven reels), Twelve Miles Out (Jack Conway, eight reels). John Gilbert also appeared that year with Jeanne Eagles in the film Man, Woman and Sin (seven reels), which Photoplay reviewed as being of interest because the actresses and actor were paired together but concluded, "Miss Garbo needn't worry over Miss Eagles.", it thinking that the film and the part played by the actress was tailored in order to substitute for Garbo. "Director-and author-Monta Bell knows his city room. After that the film disintegrates into cheap melodrama." The following year John Gilbert appeared in Four Walls, made with him by director William Nigh, (eight reels), and actress Vera Gordon.
"Came the talkies- came Gilbert's unfortunate and subsequently not-so-good pictures...I believe unquestionably that Jack Gilbert would have made a great motion picture star after the talkies. I believe with a little study, a little direction, a good deal of careful help and selection of stories and directors, he might have survived them as well as his beloved Greta Garbo" It was during the summer of 1935 that Adela Rogers St. Johns predicted "his bitter destruction", her writing the article What Defeated Jack Gilbert for Photoplay magazine. It might be noticed that she is in no way maudlin, but rather morbid, if not eerie. "It would be easier to bear if it had been Jack's fault. But it wasn't. Never." And yet it was six months before the actor's death; as she surveys his marriages and pronounces his love for Greta Garbo as having been all-consuming, she approaches the "beautiful letters" of literature; she is hauntingly like those actresses that had buried Rudolph Valentino, "Amid the glitter of Hollywood there have been many tragedies, but none more poignant or more heartbreaking than Gilbert's."
John Gilbert would make only one film after having been reunited with Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, The Captain Hates the Sea (1934). There is one account that the role in Queen Christina was first going to be offerred to Lord Olivier and was given to John Gilbert at Greta Garbo's insistence.
Actress Emily Fitzroy, who appeared with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in the 1927 film Love, had that year appeared in the films Married Alive (Emmett Flynn, five reels), with Margaret Livingston and Gertrude Claire, Orchids and Ermine (Alfred Santell, seven reels) with Colleen Moore, Hedda Hopper and Alma Bennet, One Increasing Purpose (Harry Beaumont, eight reels), with Lila Lee, Jane Novak and May Allison, and Once and Forever (Phil Stone, six reels), with Patsy Ruth Miller and Adele Watson.
Greta Garbo Silent Film

In 1927 Greta Garbo had written, 'I could not believe that what I saw when I was first taken to the Metro-Goldwyn Mayer lot was a studio. I found that it covered acres and acres of ground and boasted some twenty stages, each one of which was larger than our entrie studio in Sweden.' The quote is from an article printed in Theatre Magazine entitled 'Why I am a Recluse.' and it either smooths out the extatextual discourse surrounding her on-screen sphinx-like image or was only partly written by Garbo for the studio publicity department; she had earlier renounced her 'vamp roles' in order to film melodrama- in any event Greta Garbo herself relished reading fan magazines no matter how taciturn she had been. In the article, she explains the difficulty involved in acting in the United States, 'My country, Sweden, is so small. It is also so quiet...During my first picture, Ibanez's Torrent, it was exactly as if I had to learn the making of motion pictures all over again. I was just beginning to learn the language... Now of course, things are easier for me. The second picture, The Temptress, I found less hard. The Flesh and the Devil fairly spung along, and now Love is going easier still. The studio does not seem as large as it did.'
Sven-Hugo Borg writes about his having observed John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, "They were cast as Lovers in Love (Anna Karenina) and out of that picture came not only another screen triumph for Garbo, but the flowering of what I believe to have been the only real love of her life." He continues, "I believe, with all my heart, that John Gilbert is the only man who ever touched the deep wells of passionate emotion which lie buried deep in the breast of Garbo." He alludes to Garbo not wanting to have married John Gilbert and of her keeping the details of the romance from Stiller. The magazine The Film Spectator in 1928 noted, "There is one clever feature in Love, the close-up debauch in which Metro presents Jack Gilbert and Greta Garbo. In many places the closing title to one sequence serves as an introductory title to the sequence that succeeds it. There is a fade out after the title, 'Then I will see you at the grand duke's ball tonight'; and a fade in on the ball without any furthwer explanatory title."
Photoplay added, "Greta Garbo's pet hobby is Swedish fan mail." Two magazines of which copies may have belonged to her during 1928 were issues that featured Greta Garbo as a covergirl for Motion Picture Classic and Greta Garbo as a covergirl for Screenland in 1927- in regard to magazine art and the actress as model, the magazine cover as modern canvas, Greta Garbo was on the cover of six issues of the magazine Screenland: February 1927, May 1928, November 1929, June 1931, June 1934, and November 1935. Interestingly, while readers were awaiting her picture on the cover of the June 1931 issue, which included the caption "A New Slant on Garbo", her name appeared on the caption of each preceding issue, irregardless of who the actress covergirl for that month was. The cover to February's issue had read "Garbo Menace", April's had read "The Real Garbo", and July's had read "Etching of Garbo"- the most beautifully erotic cover of Marlene Dietrich during March of 1931 had had, below the portrait of the German actress, the words "Dietrich's Shadow on Garbo's Path." Actress Greta Garbo, while still fairly new to Hollywood, appeared on the covers of Photoplay Magazine for May 1928, August 1929, August 1930, January 1932 and January 1933. During the four short years between 1934 and 1938, Greta Garbo appeared on seven covers of the magazine Film Pictorial. It is now beyond asking if James Quirk's Photoplay is literature, it was, for the most part art, and if about the cinematic art, it was painterly. During 1928, it happenned to read, "The plans for Brown to direct Greta Garbo in "Java" have been shelved and he will now direct John Gilbert and Miss Garbo in "The Sun of St. Moritz." Garbo, incidently had declined a role in the silent film Women Love Diamonds (Edmund Goulding, seven reels,1927), it not having met with her approval; the film was to star Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lionel Barrymore and Owen Moore. "And there I met him for the first time, except to nod to him, John Gilbert. He has such vitality, spirit, eagerness. Every morning at nine o clock he would slip to work opposite me...When I finished The Flesh and the Devil, they wanted me to do Women love Diamonds. I could not do that story....Finally, they call me and say they have a story. I read it and went out and asked what part I was to play and they said the little part. Aileen Pringle and Lew Cody were to play the big parts...and was ready to play the little part in the picture when Miss Pringle said sh would not do it."

For Photoplay, Agnes Smith in 1927 wrote on Greta Garbo, "He worked with her in a picture called Flesh and the Devil. He proclaimed his intention of marrying her. As for Greta, she seemed to enjoy the rush.

And then, when everyone was all set for another Hollywood wedding, Greta walked out....John Gilbert sticks to his story...She is a wonderful woman. A delightful woman. And the most fascinating woman in pictures. 'She is,' says Mr. Gilbert, "a mountain of a girl. She is a statue. There is something eternal about her. Not only did she baffle me, but she baffled everyone at the studio.'" In Sweden, Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius continued directing with Youth (Ungdom), starring Ivan Hedqvist, Marta Hallden and Brita Appelgren. Erik A Petschler in 1927 directed Hin och smalanningen, photographed by Gustav A Gustafson and starring Birgit Tengroth, Ingrid Forsberg, Greta Anjou, Jenny-Tschernichin-Larsson, Helga Brofeldt, Emy Bergstrom and Emy Albiin. Gustaf Edgren in 1927 directed The Ghost Baron (Spokbaronen) starring Karin Swanström and photographed by Adrian Bjurman, which was followed by Black Rudolf (Svarte Rudolf, 1928) starring Inga Tiblad and Fridolf Rhudin, both films having been written by Sölve Cederstrand. The assistant director to the film Black Rudolf had been Gunnar Skogland, it having been the first film in which the actress Katie Rolfsen was to appear. Gustaf Molander directed Sealed Lips (Forseglade lappar) with Wanda Rothgardt, Mona Martenson and Karin Swanström and His English Wife (Hans engelska fur), with Margit Manstad, Wanda Rothgath, Lili Dagover and Margit Rosengren in what was to be her first appearance on screen in 1927. In 1928 he continued with the film Sin (Synd) starring Lars Hanson, Ragnar Arvedson and Ellisa Landi and Woman of Paris (Parisiskor), with Ragnar Arvedson and Karin Swanström and photographed by Julius Jaenzon. When reviewed in the United States, it was written that His English Wife/ Discord was a film in which 'the acting is of the school that believes in tapping fingers and clenched hands' and when Sealed Lips was reviewed it was written that 'the direction goes back to the stand-gaze-and-hark acting of the old days.' His English Wife was the first film to be photographed by Ake Dahlquist.
Also in Sweden the novel Raskens, written by Vilhelm Moberg appeared in 1927 and was followed in 1929 by the novel Langt fran landsvagen. Pa (The Triumph over Life. The poet Bertil Malmberg in 1927, as an attempt to approach the ideal of beauty, beauty in itself with a sublimity that seemed in hope that beauty could have the power to save man, penned the volume The Veil) (Slojan, his following it in 1929 with The Wind (Vinden). Swedish novelist Eyvind Johnson saw the close of the silent film period in continental Europe, writing City in Darkness (Stad i morker) in 1927, and as expatriate to Sweden following it with City in Light (Stad i ljus, 1928), Remembered (Minnas, 1928) and Commentary on a Falling Star (Kommentar till ett starnfall, 1929). Novelist Elin Wagner reflected back on the continent with The Five Peals (De Fem parlolorna) in 1927.
Brunius directed the film Gustaf Wasa, from a screenplay by Ivar Johansson, in 1928. In 1928 Adolf Niska contributed the film Stormens barn, starring Jenny Hasselquist and Torsten Bergstrom. Theodor Berthels that year directed the film The Poetry of Adalen (Adalens poesi) starring Hilda Borgstrom and Jessie Wessel. The 1928 film Erik XIV was written and directed by Sam Ask, it having starred Sophus von Rosen, Eva Munck af Rosenchold, Lisa Ryden Prytz and Gösta Werner.
The screenplays to The Kiss (Kyssen, Feyder, seven reels) and Wild Orchids were both written by Hans Kraly during a year in which he had also written Eternal Love (Lubitsch, nine reels), Betrayal (Lewis Milestone, eight reels), The Garden of Eden (Lewis Milestone), starring Corrinne Griffith and Lowell Sherman, and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney. Kraly also in the United States had earlier penned the screenplays to Rosita (Lubitsch, 1923, nine reels), Black Oxen (Frank Lloyd, 1924, eight reels), Three Women (Lubitsch, 1924, eight reels), Forbidden Paradise (1924) and Her Night of Romance (Sidney Franklin, 1924, eight reels). In Germany, Kraly had written the scripts to the films of Danish director Urban Gad, including the 1913 film The Film Star (Die Filmprimaddonna, starring Asta Nielsen. Opposite Greta Garbo from the first scene of The Kiss onward was actor Conrad Nagel.
Norma Shearer in 1928 appeared on theater marquees in The Actress (Sidney Franklin, seven reels), a film photographed by William Daniels, The Latest from Paris (eight reels) and A Lady of Chance. Silent film actress Vilma Banky was seen on the screen in theaters across the United States during 1928 with Ronald Colman in Two Lovers (nine reels), directed by Fred Niblo and in The Awakening (nine reels), directed by Victor Fleming.

Apparently some of the scenes in which Eva von Berne had appeared were refilmed after the shooting of the film Masks of the Devil (Victor Seastrom, 1928, eight reels) had concluded. New to film, Eva von Berne was to star opposite John Gilbert under the direction of Victor Sjostrom. Photoplay magazine lent acclaim to the film with, "A creditable effort to delve into the minds of a group of strange, Continental characters. The fans may not like John Gilbert as a sinister character, but he is always a great actor. She (Eva von Berne) has a difficult role even for an experienced actress". Bengt Forslund surmises that the use of double exposures to depict interior monolouge was Victor Sjostrom's interest in directing the film. Sven Gade was asked to revise Frances Marion's adaptation of the novel before it went to Monte Katterjohn. "I have the feeling that Sjostrom took the assignment for almost the same reason he had done Kiss of Death; the plot gave him an excuse to play around with the technical side again." Important to modern authors, Movie Makers magazine, a journal for semi-professional or amateur cameramen, published in 1929 the shot structure from a scene from Masks of the Devil in Central Focusing, Technical Reviews to Aid the Amateur, it putting the film making of Victor Sjostrom on to paper as one of the forerunners to modern film criticism and theory, "Cinematics: In several instances, the camera is used to depict a character's inner thought or impulse in addition to thought and action which he conventionally expresses. In those cases the cinema becomes the all seeing eye of a narrator who penetrates the minds of the characters as well as show their surface reactions, In this case the technique used is as follows: first a medium shot or semi-close shot of two characters in conversation, then a close up of the face of one of them which dissolves into a scene showing him reacting as he really feels. This scene then dissolves back to a semi-closeup of the two characters talking together, fitting in smoothly," As a magazine article from a publication swamped with advertisements for "home projectors", it comes a half-century before the study of semiotics and film narrative. Interestingly, the same issue reviewed the film Uneasy Money (Berthold Vietral) in regard to plot complications, inanimate objects and story-line as the expression of human emotions. In a later issue it looks at the moving camera, flashback narrative and double exposed titles, the use of an image with inter-title, in the film Night Watch (Lajos Biros) looks at the overuse of the moving camera in The Street of Illusion (Kenton), "the camera pauses before a door, opens it, goes through a hall, enters a curtained arch, then another curtained arch, passes to a man and then gives a close up of him." It almost reevaluates the criticism of Stiller's and Dreyer's use of the moving camera from the perspective of 1929. Also, a double exposure of a seance scene is pointed out in the film Unholy Night. In regard to the art of Victor Sjostrom, its is of interest to glance at the article Magic Shadows-what double exposure is doing for the art of the screen, an article written by Edwin Shallert for Picture Play magazine in 1923. While discussing double exposure and "higher artistic imagination" he discusses the narrative use of "dual roles", superimposing one actor on to a split screen and looks at trick photography in the photplay Earthbound (1920, T Hayes Hunter), starring actress Caroline Desborough, along with the later film All Soul's Eve, both belonging to "spiritistic pictures". "Double exposure in its attempt to suggest to the mind some new and yet unseen dream or actuality, may delight with novel humor, may charm with a visible poetry or perhaps even for a second or two inspire thoughts of the sublime."
In a Photoplay article entitled, "They Think Alike, both "Sphinxes" Greta Garbo were drawn into parralell by Cal York. In the article Garbo and Chaney are both quoted as they were to trade complimentary remarks. "Of Chaney, Garbo has said, 'His work intrigues me. He is an artist, a creator of illusions. I think he is a magnificent character actor." Chaney is quoted as having returned with a compliment for Greta Garbo, "Garbo is the Bernhardt of the screen" and there is the quotation, "Chaney recently declared, 'She is the greatest feminine personality I have ever seen in the theater and film.'" Greta Garbo, as had Lillian Gish, had asked that Sjostrom direct. Of Greta Garbo he had said, "She thinks above her eyes. Certain great actors posses what seems to be an uncanny ability to register thought- Lon Chaney was one- Garbo is another. They seem to literally absorb impressions...Garbo is more sensitive to emotions than film is to light, (and) you see it through her eyes." The Divine Woman (En Gudomlig Kvinnaeight reels), one of the three films directed by Victor Sjostrom in 1928, was photographed by Oliver T. Marsh, who had photographed the silent film Camille using panachromatic film. The earlier films of Greta Garbo had been filmed on orthochromatic film. Austin Lescarboura, author of Behind the Motion-Picture Screen seems timely in divulging, "Scenery is no longer painted in the prevailing tones of blue and brown, but in full real life values. Costumes are quite as colorful. As a result, orthochromatic registry is correct." Victor Sjostrom's film The Divine Woman was based on the play starlight by Gladys Unger, who had also written an early revision of the screenplay. The final rewrite of the screenplay was given to Dorothy Farnum, the titles written by John Colton. The film took six weeks to shoot. Silent film director Victor Sjostrom had remarked after filming, "I and Metro's own scriptwriter, Frances Marion, wrote the story eight times before it was accepted. By that time, nothing remained of the original material." While there are several accounts that would keep the researcher on tenterhooks written by biographers in regard to a synopsis of the film, and each of those only adding to the mysterious eroticism belonging to the silent films of Greta Garbo, this film in particular displaying her in a more girlish promiscuity with a playfullness rather than an the more distant Garbo, the script itself now lingers as a ghost or phantom as Garbo filrts with the movement of onswcreen shadows; to this Bengt Forslund adds that there were further revisions after the completed script was approved and the ending was made more tragic. John Bainbridge wrote that the film had been "well recieved", that Sjostrom spoke "glowingly" of Garbo's work in the film and also of Stiller's having had an interest in directing it. Bengt Forslund hints that the script itself had been Stiller's idea as a way for him to return from directing at Paramount. Forslund, in his book Victor Sjostrom: His Life and Work writes, "One recogzines that the story could not be helped, but clearly Sjostrom was trying to do something different with Garbo, to make her a softer, more easy-going woman than she appeared in her earlier films." Biographer and actor Fritiof Billquist quotes Sjostrom as having said, "She never once came to the set without having prepared herself thoroughly down to the last detail, and if one gave her directions, she accepted them, gladly, even though she was a big star even then."

The fragment of Greta Garbo in The Divine Woman showcases the interior editing of Victor Sjostrom. Garbo and Lars Hanson are filmed from behind a dining table in a stationary medium full shot, a brief insert shot included in the sequence. The insert shot of the clock acquires the qualities of a similie and trope as it is repeated, much like the isolated metaphors in Wild Strawberries(Bergman) and Cries and Whispers (Bergman). They are filmed in a series of alternating closeups while seated at the table. On Garbo's later delivering the line of dialouge, "I'd give up the whole world for you, "Sjostrom dissolves to another insert shot of a clock, using the oject, and the motion of an inanimate oject within the image, to punctuate the events driven by the characters, spatial-temporality illustrated through lietmotif. For film detectives that look to piece together the scirpt details from magazine articles, the clock also appears in the 1928 review of the film in the bi-weekly The Film Spectator and it is put into relation with Lars Hanson's dialog as he relates to Garbo that his time with her could be limited, but it then chides the actor and actress for their not seeing the seriousness of their existential engagement and involvement with their circumstances. In a second later review it pointed out, "Greta garbo establishes the fact that in The Divine Woman that it is all right for young Parisian washerwomen to have plucked eyebrows." For Greta Garbo, in the role of Marianne, it is not a choice between Lucien (Lars Hanson) and Legrande (Lowell Sherman); her mother's lover, brings her to acclaim on the stage when Lucien has to return to his conscription. Despondent, she leaves the theater, but then Lucien finds her again. He takes her to South America where they can begin again. (One rewrite of the continuity script has the character's names as being 'Marah', who is introduced by a dollyshot, her apparently coming to Paris from the province of Auverone. When reviewed in the United States, it was deemed that, "Mr. Seastrom reveals in sharp contrasts...When the actress tries to end her life because of her love for Lucien, Mr. Seastrom introduces the idea of having a group of sympathizers, some with a boquet of flowers, filling a doorway while Marianne is unconscious on her bed." Photoplay reviewed the storyline,"Marianne, as they have called the Divine Sarah is brought to Paris as a suprise present to a wordly wise mother who does not wish to openly acknowledge an eighteen year old daughter. She is gawky, untutored, ugly. Thrown upon her own resources she falls in love with a soldier. Chance introduces her to the stage. The conflict between her and her love for the stage and the man is the theme of the story. Watching Marianne make love; watching her suffer in poverty; glory in applause;rage at the unkindness of Fate-makes it well worth your while to see this picture." It continues, "How an ugly duckling becomes a great actress." The portraits of Greta Garbo published in Photoplay during the first run of The Divine Woman were taken by Ruth Harriet Louise. In an atricle entitled Love Stories, Photoplay during 1928 used a still photo from The Divine Woman that the present author was unfamiliar with as having had been published elsewhere,but added a photocaption to a still of Lars Hanson on the floor with Garbo putting her cheek next to his while nearly laying on top of him during an embrace that read, "By nature we are polygamous or polyandrous. Such love scenes between Greta Garbo and Lars Hanson are a pretty safe way of satisfying that desire to philander." There is another movie still later that only add to whether the photocaption is incorrectly, or hurriedly, used, "Because we are curious about love, because we are always seeking the perfect love affair, the screen romances of Vilma Banky and Ronald Colman have a constant fascination for us. In his Film Essays and Criticism, a valuable introduction to film, Rudolf Arnheim gives Greta Garbo only a two page "portrait", but it is from 1928 and may be more than a cursory glance, his writing, "On cat's feet, her coat pulled tightly about her and her hands folded in her lap, Greta Garbo passes censorship." Arnheim sees Greta Garbo as erotic, as an erotic object. Elevated later, to Bela Belazs, author of Theory of the Film in which she would attain, or become, Heroes, Beauty, Stars and the Case of Greta Garbo, she would "bear the the stamp of sorrow; and loneliness." Bela Belazs takes a thoughtful pause of appreciation before adding his own melancholy, "Greta Garbo's beauty is a beauty which is in opposition to the world of today."

During 1929, Swedish author Harry Martinsson published his first volume of poetry, The Ghost Ship (Skokskepp), it followed in 1933 by the novel Cape Farewell (Kap Farval).
Written by Solve Cederstrand and photographed by Hugo Edlund, Konstgjorda Svensson (1929) ,with Brita Appelgren, Ruth Weijden, Rolf Husberg and Weyeler Hildebrand, was directed by Gustaf Edgren. Also appearing in the film were Karin Gillberg and Sven Gustasfsson, the brother of Greta Garbo. Photoplay in 1929 featured a photo of the couple, its caption reading, "It's in the old Garbo blood, for Greta's brother is an actor too!! His name is Sven and he is shown rocking the boat in a scene from "The Robot", a new Swedish film. The young lady is Miss Karin Gillberg, another argument for better ship service to Scandinavia." In 1929 Edvin Adolphson directed his first film, it having been the first film made in Sweden to include sound, The Dream Waltz (Sag det i toner), co-directed by Julius Jaenzon and starring Jenny Hasselquist and Eric Malmberg.
Along with the films he made with Greta Garbo, before his returning to Sweden, in the United States, Lars Hanson made the films Captain Salvation (eight reels), photographed by William Daniels and Buttons (George Hill, seven reels). On that return to Sweden, Photoplay Magazine recorded, "Contentment meant more to Lars than money. He writes that he is happier that he has ever been in the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm.
Photplay Magazine published, "Wild Orchids will do much for Nils Asther. Here is the role that will push the young Swedish actor up closer to stardom." Before co-starring with Garbo, in 1928 alone, Nils Asther had appeared in the films Laugh Clown Laugh (Herbert Brenon, eight reels) with Lon Chaney and Loretta Young, The Cardboard Lover (eight reels), The Cossacks (George Hill, ten reels) with John Gilbert, Dream of Love (Fred Niblo, six reels) photographed by William Daniels and Oliver Marsh and starring Warner Oland, Adrienne Lecouvrer, and The Blue Danube (Paul Sloane, seven reels) with Seena Owen. Photoplay magazine in 1930 went so far as to claim that the reason that Nils Asther was not returning to Sweden was his marriage to Vivian Duncan, but it then added that "talkies" and the advent of sound film was the responsible for his at first having been thought to be retired from film and that that might soon be reversed by his on-screen appearance. Asther had met Vivian Duncan on the set of his first film made in Hollywood, Topsy and Eva. Clarence Brown and photographer Oliver T. Marsh would rejoin Nils Asther and Lewis Stone, adding Robert Montgomery, to adapt the novel Letty Lynton for the screen in 1932.
Of Nils Asther's performance in The Single Standard, Photoplay published in 1929, "Nils Asther measures up to the requirements of a Garbo lover. Greta gives a splendid interpretation of the woman of today at war with herself." The periodical had that year whispered that Anna Christie would be Greta Garbo's first sound film, but that she would be making The Kiss first and that Lon Chaney was then still waiting for a dialog director; it claimed that sound film had stopped the career of Nils Asther and it meanwhile praised the voice of Ronald Colman in the film Bulldog Drummond. As early as 1928 Ruth Beiry had speculated in Photoplay Magazine with the article "Will Nils Asther Retire?" After having dinner with the actor she wrote, "There is no doubt he is restless, unhappy yearning for the outlet for his work as he learned it in Europe." Asther told her, "Over here i feel I am wating my time..I want to have something to say about my stories. I want to work hand in hand with my director. I want to think about my part and then do it." He continues, "Life is too short There is so much to be accomplished...I would like to play with Von Strohiem. He would have so much to teach me."
Danish Silent Film director Robert Dinesen would film his last two films in Germany, both lensed by the photographer George Bruckbauer, Der Weg durch die Nacht (1929) having starred Kathe von Nagy and Margarethe Schon, and Ariane im Hoppegarten (1928), having starred Maria Jacobini. Nordisk film at that time made only one film, The Joker (Jokeren, directed by George Jacoby. It had made more than 350, although short, films during the year 1914.

Among the silent films mentioned as having been notable by Eisenstien, author and Silent Film Director, were Six Girls Behind Monastery Walls (Hans Beherndt, 1927), The Awakening of a Woman (Fred Sauer, 1927) and The Green Manuela (1923, E.A. Dupont). It literally more important that he was aware of The Portrait of Dorian Gray (Vsevolod Meyerhold,1915) and Yakov Protazonaov's Father Sergius (1918). His first film was The Wise Man, which he directed in 1923. Author Raymond Spottiswoode adds the silent film of Russian director Alexander Room to noteworthy screen essays, particularly Bed and Sofa (1927) and The Ghost that Never Returns (1929), his remarking that the camera in a revolt against stage technique selected "guestures and facial expressions which a theater audience might have overlooked," and it can be asked if during complicated setups and successive shots whether the camera of silent pioneer D.W. Griffith intentionally or unintentionally does. That Lars von Trier has had one of his works referred to as a Dogumentary is a silent nod to not only Vilgot Sjoman, but to silent film poet Dziga vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) and the constructivist principle of filming the life-fact and shooting life unawares. Vladimir Petric, in his book Constructivism in Film surveys the films of Vertov and his affinity to poetry, that explaining where the editing of his film might differ from the often handheld edting of the new, and yet slowly fading, avant-guard Dogme, that "montage could create life facts" following "the constructivist principle of an ideational justaposition of different materials to produce a more meaningful structural whole" and "the constructivist principle that a film is unified by the cinematic integration of its numerous components, each aspect acquiring meaning through its integration with the other elements and their relation to the photographed events." On the surface, or when looked at quickly, this would seem to bring about a narrative cinema, and at times it may. Interestingly, as Dogme was beginning to dissipate as a movement, one director advised holding the camera steady, thereby avoiding unnecessary, or obtrusive movement, irregardless of its being handheld. If Spottiswoode neglects to mention that Alexander Room was that year the director of Russia's first sound film, it had only been a documentary.

As the silent era was coming to a close, Douglas Fairbanks would appear in the film The Iron Mask, directed by Silent Film Director Allan Dwan. Alfred Hitchcock in 1928 would direct one of his only Silent Films, The Farmer's Wife. John Ford, who's first sound film The Black Watch appeared on theater screens a year later in 1929, had by then directed several silent films, including The Girl in No. 29 (1920), Little Miss Smiles (1922), Thank You (1925) and Mother Machree (1928).
Photoplay Magazine announced, "This is Greta Garbo's last picture before she departed for Sweden" It claimed that the role created by writer John Colton had played by Garbo in Wild Orchids had been previously considered for Lillian Gish."
While in during 1928 Sweden, she had come across the actress Vera Schmiterlow, whom she had known well and whom she had hoped would venture to Hollywood and also while in Sweden had renewed her acquaintance with the actress Marte Hallden. Lars Saxon, who twice published Greta Garbo in his magazine Lektyr, and who corresponded with her while she had been in the United States at MGM, met her as she was travelling. It was also while in Sweden that she had first met Gösta Ekman, who greeted her by saying , 'But you're so ordinary.' Later she visited Ekman's dressing room to thank him for the use of his seat at a theatrical play that Stiller had directed when it had first began its run. Ekman was purportedly in hope of sharing the Swedish stage with her in a theater run of Grand Hotel.

Photoplay Magazine announced, "Rumor has it that Clarence Brown and Dorothy Sebastian are married." Of her playing against Greta Garbo in A Woman of Affairs, Sebastian was thought to "present an interpretation brief, but classic". It reviewed the performance of John Gilbert as his having played, "the difficulot role of lover with dramatic repression." It went on, "Miss Garbo's interpretation is all the greater because she puts it over without a single clinging dress or a single Garbo slink."
Mordant Hall, writing in 1929, recounts his having a purported assignation with the "Hollywood Hermit, "Soon the door of Miss Garbo's apartment was flung open and the sinuous figure of the alluring actress appreared as if from a ray of sunlight. In a low-toned voice that suited her bearing, she greeted the caller, whose eyes fell from her face to a bouquet of flowers on a table and then to the carpet. 'Won't you sit down?' she asked." he continues to describe her pink silk sweater and black velvet skirt, claiming that of all her films, A Woman of Affairs was Greta Garbo's favorite. She evidently recounted preparing for a role on the Stockholm stage and having memorized the lines and having studied the part but had later decided against appearing in the theater. "She repeated, 'Delighted to have met you."
Greta Garbo Complementing this, Lewis Stone has been quoted as having said, 'She was Garbo, and that said it all. No one has ever created such an impression.', whereas Edmund Goulding is quoted as having said, 'I don't believe that Garbo's astounding success depends on any mystery. She has movie sex appeal, if I may say so, but her success depends more on her unique ability to work and her will to achieve absolute concentration before the camera.' He added, 'For all her enormous success, she is just the same as when we worked together in Love; only perhaps a little more shy and solitary.' Garbo had been slated to film Ordeal with Lon Chaney under the direction of Marcel de Sano, it having been left unmade.What is meant to be fascinating is that after being deemed, or deigned a recluse, when it was announced that she was in a position to consider retirement, interest in Greta Garbo went to a depth that reached Greta Gustasfson and biography about the actress appeared; magazines were still interested in publishing stills Garbo had posed for in Sweden during the the film Peter and the Tramp and, after his death, were still probing into her affection for John Gilbert and Garbo's intention of marrying him in Mexico. In the 1937 article, After Twelve Years Greta Garbo Wants to Go Home to Sweden, readers in the United States discovered, "in 1936 she bought an estate outside Stockholm. Having finished Conquest she will go there to spend a few months, or many." Greta Garbo appears on the cover of the magazine quite possibly only by dint of the photo being in costume from the set of the film.
Greta Garbo had appeared in the film Peter and the Tramp (Luffar-Peter, 1922 five reels) with Gucken Cederborg, Tyra Ryman and its director, Erik Petschler. With Greta Garbo, also listed as being in the film Luffar Peter is Mona Geifer-Falkner. The first film Mona Geifer-Falkner had appeared on the screen in had been Alexander den store (1917), directed by Mauritz Stiller. Eric Petschler gives an account of his having given Garbo the address of Mauritz Stiller and of her having not only having tried to see him twice before they were to meet at the Royal Dramatic Academy, where she was to study under Gustaf Molander, but of his having arranged a third meeting where Stiller had asked for her telephone number. Petschler had then introduced Garbo to the director Frans Enwall. Before directing Greta Garbo, Eric A. Petschler directed the film Getting Baron Olson Married (Gifta ort Baron Olson, 1920), starring Gucken Cederborg and Varmlanningarna (1921), the first film in which Rosa Tillman was to appear. Ragnar Ring directed the short film Paul U Bergström AB Stockholm(1920)-Greta Garbo appeared in the short film, also titled Herrskapet Stockholm ute pa inkop, it also being the first film in which the actress Olga Andersson was to appear, as well her having appeared in the short Reklamfilm PUB Greta Garbo (1921), both films photographed by Ragnar Ring. In 1923 Ring directed Helene Olsson in the film Har Ni nagot att forakra.
Directing A Modern Hero in the United States with cameraman William Rees in 1934, G. W. Pabst, the director of Greta Garbo's second feature film, had entered into the directing of sound film with the films Westernfront 1918 (1930), Die Greigroschen Oper (1931) and Kameradschaft (1932). His actress, Louise Brooks, whom in 1929 he had directed in the films Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl (Das Tagebuch einer verbrenen), was during that same year introduced to the sound film by being paired with William Powell in The Canary Murder Case.
While A Cottage On Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith) includes a dialog intertitle written by the director reading,"Will you come with me to a talkie tonight?", Vampyre, Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer's use of the vampire, in the form of Jullian West, as thematic context, was filmed almost silently, with sound added, in Germany in 1932. The film was based the plotline of ,among other vampire tales, In a Glass Darkly, written by Sheridan Le Fanu. Dreyer's choice of cameraman was Rudolph Matte. Film critic and author David Bordwell, on his webpage Observations on Film Art, recently provided a link to the web written by the Danish Film Insitute on the film of Carl Th. Dreyer it covering the directors brilliant silent film career as well as his longevity into the sound era. While Danish film director Benjamin Christensen had by 1913 had begun directing with his first film, Sealed Orders (Det hemmelinghstulde X), a melodrama that, irregardless of its belonging to or being typical of the genre of the early Danish spy film, had included the use of montage in his editing, Carl Th. Dreyer had in fact begun rather as a writer, contributing the screenplay to the film The Brewer's Daughter (Byggerens datter, 1912), directed by Rasmus Ottesen and starring Emmanuel Gregers. He was to write every screenplay that he was to direct.
After her having appeared with Edvin Adolphson in the film Brollopet i Branna (1927), directed by Erik Petschler, Mona Martenson in Norway starred with Einar Tveito in People of the Tundra (Viddenesfolk) (1928) written and directed by Ragnar Westfelt for Lunde-film, in Germany starred with Aud Egede Nissen in the film Die Frau in Talar, in Norway starred in the film Laila (1929) directed by George Schneevoigt for Lunde-film from a script adapted from a novel by Jens Anders Friis, and in Denmark starred in the film Eskimo (1930), also directed by George Schneevoight- it had not only been Greta Garbo and Victor Sjöström that had made the transition from silent film to sound. As did Edvin Adolphson, who directed the film When Roses Bloom (Na Rosarna sla ut) in 1930, starring Sven Garbo. Greta Garbo had visited her brother, Sven Gustaffson while in Stockholm. The film was co-scripted by Gosta Stevens and also stars Swedish actresses Karin Swanstrom, Margita Afren, and Anna-lisa baude. Marie Hansen was given her first appearance on screen with the film. The Private Life of Greta Garbo, published in Photoplay during 1930, is, much like the biography of Greta Garbo written by Norman Zierold, an enjoyable, if not charming, read, it including a brief mention of Sven Garbo, "At one time Miss Garbo's brother, Sven, who has been quite successful abroad both on stage and screen, wanted to come to Hollywood. He even sent tests of himself to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer."

Among the unrealized scripts written in Hollywood by Hjalmer Bergman was a synopsis for an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's work Bygmester Solness, to be directed by Victor Sjostrom. Before Bergman had returned to Sweden, Sjostrom had decided against filming an adaptation of the novel The Tree of Knowledge, written by Edwin C. Booth. The scripts of Tancred Ibsen in Hollywood were left unrealized while he worked on set construction during 1924, his not only having worked on the set design of Victor Sjostrom's film Tower of Lies, but on the set of silent film director King Vidor. He would later direct the first Norwegian sound film, The Big Christening (Den sore barnedapen,1931), Ibsen would rejoin Sjostrom in Sweden, directing him in the 1934 film Synnove Solbakken.

Swedish film continued through into sound fairly well considering that Sjostrom, Stiller, Lars Hanson,and Greta Garbo had left Sweden, particularly when compared to early Danish Silent Film.
Mordant Hall claimed to conduct an interview with Greta Garbo, during which it was attributed as her having said, "If they want me to talk, I'll talk. I'd love acting in a talking picture when they are better, but the ones I've seen are awful. It's no fun to look at a shadow and somewhere out of the theatre a voice is coming." Writing in 1929, the author added, "There is no longer any Swedish coterie in hollywood, for Victor Seastrom is no longer there. Lars Hanson is back in his native land, to which lesser lights have flown." After returning to Sweden in hope that it was there that his daughters would be raised, Sjostrom appeared with Lars Hanson and Karin Molander in a short 1931 beauty contesst film, Froken, Ni linkar Greta Garbo, where Eivor Nordstrom was chosen to be most like Greta Garbo. Its photographer was Ake Dahlquist. With Per-Axel Branner for an assistant director and actress Karin Granberg in the first film in which sshe was to appear,Juilius Jaenzon photographed and directed the fil Ulla, My Ulla, during 1930, while Victor Sjostrom returned to the screen with Brokiga Blad, in which he cast Lili Ziedner. John W. Brunius directed two films during 1930, The Doctor's Secret (Docktorns Hemlighet) and The Two of Us (Vi Tva), in which Edvin Adolphson appeared as an actor with Margit Manstad, Marta Ekstrom and Anna-Lisa Froberg, the film having been the first in which the actress was to appear. Swedish cinematographer Harald Berglund in 1930 began filming under the direction of Ragnar Ring on the film Lyckobreven. Danish film director George Schneevoigt continued the beginning of early Danish sound film the following year with the film Pastor of Vejlby (Praesten i Vejlby). The first Norwegian sound film, The Big Chirstening (Den store Barnedapen) was also the first film directed by Tancred Ibsen. Tancred Ibsen had been in Hollywood with the director Victor Sjöström as a scriptwriter, although none of his scripts were brought to the screen. Tancred Ibsen would rejoin Sjöström in Sweden, directing him in the 1934 film Synnove Solbakken.

Among the photographers that began the era of early sound film in Sweden was Martin Bodin. It is almost endering that Pauline Brunius appeared as an actress in front of his camera under the direction of Gustaf Edgren in the 1934 film Karl Fredrick regerar while Brunius was directing what would be his last film, False Greta.
Suomi-Filmi of Finland produced its first sound film in 1929, The Supreme Victory (Korkein voitto), directed by Carl von Hartmann. The photography was found to be too expensive and the making of sound films was postponed while silent films were continued to be made. Finnish author and film director Jorn Donner was later to write, 'I have a difference of opinion from that of those historians who proclaim the eternal value of a mass of pictures from the teens and twenties. I reject the theoreticians, such as Rudolf Arnheim, who characterize talking pictures as a corruption.' Where Jorn Donner shows an appreciation of film is in his viewing it as a literature, his seeing the silent film as a point of departure within the freedom, or sensitivity, of the artist, Donner's particular appreciation of film seemingly that of an appreciation of the film having an audience that recieves what the film conveys thematiclly and a spectator that not only is positioned in a relationship to the subject, but that is connected to the author of the work by the characters and what they symbolize; Donner seemingly views filmmaking as a readership, one that within film history can only become more modern. The spectatorial address of the silent film was one that used the intertitle, scene construction often based on whether explanatory titles were being used to carry the narrative and establish the expostition, or whether the amount of dialouge needed by the scene could be accomodated by the use of dialougue intertitles: the advent of sound had brought about the transition from photoplay, as a literature, to screenplay.
Two actors that have now become legendary for their having worked together with Sjöström in his film The Wind (eight reels), silent film actress Lillian Gish and Montague Love, were teamed together for the early sound film His Double Life, under the direction of Arthur Hopkins. Two actors that were paired together after the beginning of the use of sound in film were Nils Asther and Fay Wray, their appearing in Madame Spy, directed by Karl Fruend in 1934.
As the silent era was approaching nearer still to its close, The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929), directed by Rowland Lee, pitted silent film actor Warner Oland against O.P. Heggie. Jean Arthur co-stars in the film. Warner Oland would become a nemesis by continuing in two sequels, The Return of Dr. Fu Man Chu (Rowland V. Lee, 1930) and Daughter of the Dragon (Lloyd Corriton, 1931). The first Charlie Chan film, The House Without a Key is lost. Based on the novel by Earl Der Biggers, it appeared in 1926 as part of a two-reel serial with Betty Caldwell and Carry Egan with George Kuwa appearing on as the sleuth. The review of one of the first "all-talking" or "talkie" motion pictures in which Warner Oland had starred in during 1929 while at Paramount explains the script and plotline centered around a foriegn film director, "No doubt you read the thrilling mystery in PHOTOPLAY. Perhaps you were among the many thousands who took part in 'The Studio Murder Mystery Contest' In any event you will still wnat to see 'The Sudio Murder Mystery" because it is a corking mystery melodrama with plenty of dramatic kicks and suprises. The story deals with the murder of a prominent actor in a big studio at midnight."
We will not reveal the real murderer here, either.
A 1929 issue of Photoplay Magazine reported, "Lon Chaney has overcame his microphone phobia. One of his first talkies will be "Cher-Bibi", by Gaston Leroux. It then pealed with the announcement, "Snow storms, trainwrecks, and floods" were in fact promised, "with Lon Chaney at the throttle of the locomotive, with the film, "Thunder". In Chaney Talks!, Harry Lang lends insight to what lay behind Hollywood legend, the extratextual discourse that enveloped stage performer and screen character, while writing for Photoplay Magazine, "'I'll tell you frankly,' said Chaney, sitting back with his inevitable cap and his not so often seen horn-rimmed specs on, 'that my first talking picture is going to make me- or break me! Inside, I mean; in here...' He tapped his breast."

Photoplay in 1930 noted, "At the end of every picture Greta Garbo gives an entire day to new portraits. She takes it seriously...She will be photographed on in the only in the clothes she wears in her pictures...One Garbo belongs to the public, the other is a private individual. To keep in the sustained mood she likes to have sad music played on the phonograph. To end the silent era two months before Greta Garbo's last silent film, The Kiss (Jacques Feyder), Clarence Sinclair Bull became her gallery photographer. Author Mark A. Viera writes, 'She liked him because, like Clarence Brown, he spoke softly, if at all.' When Geocites closed, the still photographs scanned from the orginal negatives that Mr. Vieira sent via yahoo e-mail to the present author, and the two letters he wrote were transferred to my google blog. They include a still photograph of Greta Garbo in The Kiss left over from his editorial decision. Apparently he owned more photographs than he needed to publish and sent the unused ones to me. Please accept that I may have been the author to introduce the photos to a Swedish readership, years after they were unearthed.
Before his having met Greta Garbo, the photography of Clarence Sinclair Bull had been published in periodicals under the name Clarence S. Bull. During 1922, Picture-Play magazine ran his portraits of Helen Chadwick and Claire Windsor; in 1923 his portraits of Mae Busch and Mabel Ballin. His portrait of Colleen Moore had appeared in Screenland Magazine in 1922.
In 1930 Katherine Albert penned the article, Is Jack Gilbert Through? for Photoplay Magazine. She outlined Jack Gilbert's power of script approval, notifying his 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 "self-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 be one of the sensations of the next few months in the picture world." George Marion, who starred with Greta Garbo in the film, had also played the same role, that of Anna's father Kris, in Thomas Ince's earlier silent version, starring Silent Film actress Blanche Sweet. In addition to his having filmed Anna Christie, in 1929 Greta Garbo photographer William Daniels was cinematographer to the films Their Own Desire and Wise Girls (Kempy (eleven reels), both directed by E. M. Hopper. Other romances that actor Charles Bickford had appeared in before filming with Greta Garbo were to include South Sea Rose and Dynamite; to end the silent era he had co-authored the play The Cyclone Lover. Film historian and theorist Leo Braudy has written, "The lighting that William Daniels created for Garbo's early silent films rendered her more erotic than any spoken dialouge." That is not to say that that is the extent of his contribution to film history; Daniels had been trained on several of Von Strohiem's important films, beginning with Blind Husbands in 1919 and continued in Hollywood passed the 1939 film Ninotchka untill 1970.

Greta Garbo Postscript

Photoplay magazine qualified iteslf in 1935 by quoting its own prediction in its August 1930 issue that had announced, "There is quite a definite rumor that garbo's next picture will be 'Camille', by telling its readers that it would again print the exact same thing. The whereabouts of Greta Garbo was in most ways far from being kept as secret during 1936; according to Photplay Magazine, Garbo owned a villa in Nyokoping, Sweden and was celebrating her thirtieth birthday. During 1937 it confidently mentioned, "Garbo will make another picture instead of a trip to Sweden". The Swedish Film Institute (Svenska Filminstitutet), which provides an extensive cataloging of the history of Swedish silent film from its earliest beginnings to present, is thorough in its filmography of Greta Garbo, thorough enough to list her having been included in the film The Romance of Celluloid (Celluloidens romantik), made in 1937.

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