A Man There Was
(Terje Vigen, Skådespel i fyra akter)

Victor Sjöström, Sweden, 1917

FEATURING
Victor Sjöström
August Falck
Edith Erastoff
Bergliot Husberg

Victor Sjöström became Sweden’s most prominent silent film director when he discovered the main advantage of location shooting for a marginal film industry in the far north: particular landscapes that could not be easily duplicated by other film industries. His film adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s epic poem Terje Vigen exploits the Scandinavian seascape, beginning the rise to international prominence of the Swedish film aesthetic, in which powerful landscapes form an unyielding backdrop for human action.

The Wind

Victor Seastrom, United States, 1928

FEATURING
Lillian Gish
Lars Hanson
Montagu Love
Dorothy Cumming

Victor Sjöström emigrated to Hollywood to work for MGM in 1923 and became Victor Seastrom, but he retained his trademark use of location shooting to signal the natural limits of human will. The Wind is a Western with a vengeance (it is set in West Texas, though shot in the Mojave Desert), but its relentless wall of wind and grit recalls the impassive naturalism of the on-location settings in the director's Swedish films.