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Fragmented Pieces: Writing the History of the Lost Hollywood Films 117 In mapping out intertextual references from a limited Swedish political context with the Branting-inspired caricature, as well as from different literary contexts – Selma Lagerlöf, Eugene O’Neill – this archaeological work places Sjöström’s lost films or film fragments within the much larger context of global cinema in the 1920s, incorporating very different social, political and cultural issues. The intratextual references, most notably in the development of the use of dissolves but also the insights in the conditions of daily production work, that may be traced from cutting continuity scripts as well as from the Daily Production Report in the case of The Masks of the Devil, give evidence of another kind. They speak of the cultural passages provided by cinema, down to the smallest details in the system of production, but on the other hand also of the unity of textual space and of cinematic devices allowed for within the system. In all these fragmented pieces, one important factor remains constant: they are all more or less stories of depravity which, all to different degrees, might challenge the norms of the Hollywood system, with the auto-censorship that took place by its very establishment. Of course, they may share this feature with other films by Sjöström or films made during the period, but the interdisciplinary intertextuality mapped out by the analysis would also allow for the construction of a different look, one which – following Giuliana Bruno – would reclaim “marginality and difference”, thus revealing “discontinuous, diverse, and disqualified areas”. 55 However, the consideration of these fragments from the Hollywood years unavoidably leads to a further question: what knowledge do we actually have of Sjöström as a director, considering the fact that most of his early films for Svenska Bio are also lost? The only answer to this rhetorical question would lie in another question: given that we have no actual knowledge in detail, apart from the necessity to rethink both spectatorship and authorship within a general transnational panorama of cinematography, is it at all possible to give a statement on Sjöström’s work as a whole? In the light of Bruno or Cherchi Usai, this should perhaps rather be regarded as the wrong question. However, Sjöström’s particular discourse in the Foucauldian sense of the terms – in the intersection between archaeology and history – should be possible to trace, not least given the different openings that his work as a director offers in all directions, and thus construed “as a distribution of gaps, absences, limits, and divisions”. 56 Also, in the light of Bruno’s visual and cultural archaeology, a mobile theory of spectatorship is required, as well as an epistemological topography, in the form of a grand panorama, which may include both narratological aspects and intersubjective dimensions of a general revision of realism, not least called for by Bruno herself. The panorama of Sjöström’s lost films or film fragments from the American period puts this question
118 Transition and Transformation on its edge. The answer must be as fragmented as are the films. If it is at all possible to discern an authorial mark of Sjöström as director, beyond “remanufacturing the missing part of a text in the name of an originary authenticity that would emanate from authorship’s intentionality”, this would indeed be a case in point. 57 The films, or their contexts, however, offer at least some kind of preliminary conclusion, where certain stylistic markers and thematic details do give a framework for further investigation, within the general context of a larger cultural history. This points at least to a larger framework of alternative practices within the general field of Hollywood authorship.
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