silver nitrate notes

The Wind and Lillian Gish on the Mojave

23 sep 2014

Victor Sjöström (1879-1960), the Swedish director who would later play the lead role in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, made The Wind (1928) at MGM in his final American film as director. The cinematographer was John Arnold (1889-1964), an MGM staff DP who had worked with Sjöström on his earlier American pictures. The lead was Lillian Gish in what would also be her last silent film for the studio.

The film was shot on location in the Mojave Desert. The premise is that a young woman from Virginia (Gish) marries a rancher in the West Texas wind country, where the wind blows continuously through the long dry summer and is reputed to drive women mad. Over the course of the film, the wind drives the protagonist mad. Sjöström and Arnold needed the wind to be visible. They produced it with a fleet of airplane propellers and industrial fans positioned around the actors and the cabin set.

What Arnold does with the wind is photograph it as an object. Most films before The Wind had treated wind as a kinetic force registered through the movement of leaves or clothing. Arnold and Sjöström shot the wind itself by adding fine sand to the air and lighting the sand with side light so that the wind appears as a visible plane of sand suspended at an angle in the frame. The technique is what we now call atmospheric cinematography. The Mojave Desert provided the basic ingredients; Sjöström pushed the air with fans until the visible quantity of sand was enough to register on his stock.

Gish's performance, like Murray's in The Crowd, is the centre of the film. She had been a professional actress for fifteen years and was at the height of her craft. The final sequence, where she descends into hallucination and digs through the sand for a body she may have buried, is one of the great single performances in American silent cinema.

MGM had not wanted to make the film. They had cut it heavily before release, removing what they took to be the original ending (a more downbeat one). The studio cut survives. Sjöström returned to Sweden the year after.

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sources
[1] Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life. Scribner, 2001.
[2] Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade's Gone By.... University of California Press, 1968.
[3] Pensel, Hans. Seastrom and Stiller in Hollywood. Vantage, 1969.
[4] Gish, Lillian. The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me. Prentice-Hall, 1969.