Confronting The Wind: a reading of a Hollywood film by Victor Sjöström

Abstract

Abstract This close reading of the film The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928), from Dorothy Scarborough’s novel, attempts to analyze the film’s construction of space, mapping the gradual merger between subjective and objective, corresponding to the heroine’s (Lillian Gish) increasing degree of psychic instability, and culminating in a violent storm at night, where all boundaries are being transgressed. Through references to Scandinavian landscape portrayal in the 1910s cinema as well as to Western or Gothic tropes, the image of nature in the film is examined. The essay finally compares the ending of the novel and the film, and discusses the reversal in terms of sexual politics.

Keywords: Victor Sjöström; silent cinema; landscape; space; dissolve; happy end; sexual politics

(Published: 31 December 2009)

Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 1, 2009 DOI: 10.3402/jac.v1i0.4641