"The Wind" is a strong case for the visual power of silent cinema. Made in 1927 when the talkies were entering the picture and its release delayed until the end of 1928 when the death of silent pictures were assured, few films illustrate so well what silent cinema could do and what could literally not be done in the early talkies. What especially struck me upon this viewing of "The Wind" was just how well its eponymous visual force of sand-sweeping gales are framed. And, not only because John Arnold's cinematography, shooting in the Mojave Desert and the airplane-propeller-blowing practical effects look terrific, but also how the wind is framed narratively and reflexively. Besides the superimpositions, window motif and that of the final boundary between the domestic and the frontier of the open door, one bit of business especially caught my attention, the stereoscope. We first see these 3D-photographic contraptions in a scene where children are playing with them and showing them to Lillian Gish's Letty protagonist. The second and last time they appear is when Montagu Love's heavy, Roddy, gazes lasciviously upon Letty's photographic representation and then her real self.
Bo Florin ("Confronting The Wind: a reading of a Hollywood film by Victor Sjöström") is right that the key theme of "The Wind" is "collapsing the boundaries between subjective and objective, inner and outer space," which alone on a formal level makes for an architecturally interesting picture, but a lot more may be read into natural and human forces attacking Letty from the outside and the effect thereof on her inner, psychological breakdown. From the beginning, on the train and with Roddy offering Letty some forbidden fruit, so to speak (and he literally calls over the train's fruit vendor), the winds of Western Texas are associated with male sexuality--in Letty's mind, at least, and thus of the film primarily sharing her perspective. Note, too, that the cyclone, the first intrusion of nature upon the indoor, domestic spaces Letty occupies, occurs as Lettty again meets Roddy and is also approached with marriage proposals from two other men, and she's attacked by another woman who sees her as a threat to her marriage with a fourth man. Unable to afford a trip back home to Virginia, Letty is forced to marry one of the men merely for shelter. Finally, during a so-called Norther, or strong windstorm, Letty is unable to continue to keep this sexual threat as a force of nature from collapsing her personal boundaries and is raped.
As star Gish relates in the introduction usually accompanying the Thames print, she wrote an outline for an adaptation of Dorothy Scarborough's novel, a script for which was written by pioneering scenarist Francis Marion. Indicative of Gish's clout by this time, she also claims to have selected her leading man, the serviceable Lars Hanson, who was also her co-star in "The Scarlet Letter" (1926), and her director, Victor Sjöström, also the director of "The Scarlet Letter." She couldn't have picked a better director for a scenario where nature is like a character and more of Gish's co-star than Hanson or Love. Sjöström and other Swedish filmmakers like Mauritz Stiller pioneered such cinematic treatments in the prior decade, including in Sjöström's "Terje Vigen" (1917) and "The Outlaw and His Wife" (1918). The added or greater emphasis here associating that nature with sexual threat and other issues may make this his pinnacle achievement in this regard.
The same may be said for Gish, who had been training as the ingénue threatened by rape or otherwise violation to her body and safety since starring with her sister Dorothy in their first film, one of D. W. Griffith's last-minute-rescue shorts, "An Unseen Enemy" (1912). This took on a recurring racial dimension and a more developed notion of femininity by the time of "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). From there, again and again, the petite Gish served as this notion of ideal, pure and white womanhood. In this respect, too, then, "The Wind" may be seen as a career culmination and problematization of an entire body of work. Moreover, it goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway because she deserves it, that Gish is terrific. She continues to act circles around even the most capable cast. Even before her wide-eyed descent into madness, it's commendable how she acts with her entire body. Nearly 100 years later now, and I swear most movie actors don't seem to be able or willing to do this. Her trembling on her marriage night is a standout.
What you have is a classic when you add to this that "The Wind" is not some simplistic, Victorian morality tale from a Griffith, but a gothic Western based on an anti-Western novel critical of Manifest Destiny, the genocide of Native Americans and issues of class, gender and race as highlighted by the harsh Southwestern state via Letty's traveling from the care of her mammy in Virginia--all issues that even in their arguably diluted form in cinematic adaptation severely complicate and expand those oeuvres brought to the fore by Gish and Sjöström.
According to Gish and Marion, the supposedly happy ending went against their desire to keep the book's original conclusion of Letty dying. As Fritzi Kramer of the Movies Silently website has convincingly argued, this happy ending must have been planned early on in the production, including it naturally following from the picture's borrowings from the scenario of another film, "The Canadian" (1926), although I have no reason to doubt that Gish and Marion originally argued for the tragic finale. Gish even calls the happy ending enforced upon them by Irving Thalberg to be "immoral." I think there's an argument against that belief, though. The tragic end reinforces a morality that only finds redemption for a rape victim in death. Indeed, as the film borrows from another film in part, this moralistic tragedy in the book may have been borrowing from another book, as Rayond D. Tumbleson ("Potboiler Emancipation and the Prison of Pure Art: "Clarissa, The Wind", and Surviving Rape"), for one, has argued for this similarity in Scarborough's text to that of Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa."
Granted, the alternative here of a woman seemingly so suddenly sexually awakened and triumphant from a rape hardly comes across as unflawed, either, but I'd argue that's rather the point if we acknowledge that the Hollywood ending isn't all that happy, as it turns out--at least depending on one's and whose point of view. Susan Kollin's reading of the novel, although overly dismissive of the film, is valuable to this understanding. The picture, as with the book, builds a mythology from Native Americans regarding the winds and the association with wild horses (visualized here as superimpositions), but no other trace is to be found of Native Americans in the film, nor of Mexicans, and there's only the one mammy reference to indicate the foundation of racialized hierarchy of Letty's privileged white femininity back in Virginia and that is compromised in the hard work and harsh environs--made all the worse by the poor conservation brought by white settlement--of West Texas and how as opposed to a simple victim of a patriarchal system, frontier women are complicit in this racial order and so-called Manifest Destiny. The film was written by way of three female authors, after all.
Much of this is indicated in the film if not explicitly or dwelled upon. Perhaps, that's partly a vestigial artifact of adaptation, but it also goes to the film's new conclusion and morality. Note that Hanson's Lige states that the wind-wiped sands of the desert bury justifiable acts: "Wind's mighty odd--if you kill a man in justice--it allers covers him up!" The film, then, is justifying the displacement of native populations for white settlement, of the increasingly-barren landscape wrought by such romantic notions of marriage of loving and working together. Indeed, they work in concert, the winds covering those killed in the psychosexual and otherwise rapacious conquest of the West.
Which brings me back to the stereoscope. It's not only our protagonist Letty who supports this Manifest Destiny, or the Western writ large, but photographic motion pictures generally. Now, I don't know how how much Gish, Marion, Sjöström or Scarborough intended this, but not only were romantic notions of the West largely codified by such photographic means, including through the Yosemite and San Francisco photography of film pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, by the way, but the stereoscope is also behind some of the earliest, if not the earliest, experiments in the invention of motion pictures. This was a medium that inherently required pairs of still photographs from different positions for its 3D effect. It was from there that the likes of Charles Wheatstone and Antoine Claudet realized the potential for series of sets of photographs and combining them with the synthesis of the illusion of motion offered by Joseph Plateau's phenakistiscope. Jules Duboscq realized this as early as 1852 with the patenting of his Bioscope stereoscopy viewer and a series on disc of posed stereoscopic photographs of a steam engine, itself a symbol of the progress of industrialization and capitalism that would rewrite landscapes and displace their people just as with train as enigmatically captured in Lumiere's "Arrival of the Train" (1896), the Lumieres also being interested early on in depicting the depth of scenery with stereoscopy--even finally reshooting this train subject in 3D by 1934. This is the foundation of "The Wind" and film in general. It's what we're reminded of when Letty is at her most content early on in this new land and when, later, she is to become most distressed. Conquering land and people and turning them ghosts, superimposed mythologies, the Manifest Destiny of photographic motion pictures.
Bo Florin ("Confronting The Wind: a reading of a Hollywood film by Victor Sjöström") is right that the key theme of "The Wind" is "collapsing the boundaries between subjective and objective, inner and outer space," which alone on a formal level makes for an architecturally interesting picture, but a lot more may be read into natural and human forces attacking Letty from the outside and the effect thereof on her inner, psychological breakdown. From the beginning, on the train and with Roddy offering Letty some forbidden fruit, so to speak (and he literally calls over the train's fruit vendor), the winds of Western Texas are associated with male sexuality--in Letty's mind, at least, and thus of the film primarily sharing her perspective. Note, too, that the cyclone, the first intrusion of nature upon the indoor, domestic spaces Letty occupies, occurs as Lettty again meets Roddy and is also approached with marriage proposals from two other men, and she's attacked by another woman who sees her as a threat to her marriage with a fourth man. Unable to afford a trip back home to Virginia, Letty is forced to marry one of the men merely for shelter. Finally, during a so-called Norther, or strong windstorm, Letty is unable to continue to keep this sexual threat as a force of nature from collapsing her personal boundaries and is raped.
As star Gish relates in the introduction usually accompanying the Thames print, she wrote an outline for an adaptation of Dorothy Scarborough's novel, a script for which was written by pioneering scenarist Francis Marion. Indicative of Gish's clout by this time, she also claims to have selected her leading man, the serviceable Lars Hanson, who was also her co-star in "The Scarlet Letter" (1926), and her director, Victor Sjöström, also the director of "The Scarlet Letter." She couldn't have picked a better director for a scenario where nature is like a character and more of Gish's co-star than Hanson or Love. Sjöström and other Swedish filmmakers like Mauritz Stiller pioneered such cinematic treatments in the prior decade, including in Sjöström's "Terje Vigen" (1917) and "The Outlaw and His Wife" (1918). The added or greater emphasis here associating that nature with sexual threat and other issues may make this his pinnacle achievement in this regard.
The same may be said for Gish, who had been training as the ingénue threatened by rape or otherwise violation to her body and safety since starring with her sister Dorothy in their first film, one of D. W. Griffith's last-minute-rescue shorts, "An Unseen Enemy" (1912). This took on a recurring racial dimension and a more developed notion of femininity by the time of "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). From there, again and again, the petite Gish served as this notion of ideal, pure and white womanhood. In this respect, too, then, "The Wind" may be seen as a career culmination and problematization of an entire body of work. Moreover, it goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway because she deserves it, that Gish is terrific. She continues to act circles around even the most capable cast. Even before her wide-eyed descent into madness, it's commendable how she acts with her entire body. Nearly 100 years later now, and I swear most movie actors don't seem to be able or willing to do this. Her trembling on her marriage night is a standout.
What you have is a classic when you add to this that "The Wind" is not some simplistic, Victorian morality tale from a Griffith, but a gothic Western based on an anti-Western novel critical of Manifest Destiny, the genocide of Native Americans and issues of class, gender and race as highlighted by the harsh Southwestern state via Letty's traveling from the care of her mammy in Virginia--all issues that even in their arguably diluted form in cinematic adaptation severely complicate and expand those oeuvres brought to the fore by Gish and Sjöström.
According to Gish and Marion, the supposedly happy ending went against their desire to keep the book's original conclusion of Letty dying. As Fritzi Kramer of the Movies Silently website has convincingly argued, this happy ending must have been planned early on in the production, including it naturally following from the picture's borrowings from the scenario of another film, "The Canadian" (1926), although I have no reason to doubt that Gish and Marion originally argued for the tragic finale. Gish even calls the happy ending enforced upon them by Irving Thalberg to be "immoral." I think there's an argument against that belief, though. The tragic end reinforces a morality that only finds redemption for a rape victim in death. Indeed, as the film borrows from another film in part, this moralistic tragedy in the book may have been borrowing from another book, as Rayond D. Tumbleson ("Potboiler Emancipation and the Prison of Pure Art: "Clarissa, The Wind", and Surviving Rape"), for one, has argued for this similarity in Scarborough's text to that of Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa."
Granted, the alternative here of a woman seemingly so suddenly sexually awakened and triumphant from a rape hardly comes across as unflawed, either, but I'd argue that's rather the point if we acknowledge that the Hollywood ending isn't all that happy, as it turns out--at least depending on one's and whose point of view. Susan Kollin's reading of the novel, although overly dismissive of the film, is valuable to this understanding. The picture, as with the book, builds a mythology from Native Americans regarding the winds and the association with wild horses (visualized here as superimpositions), but no other trace is to be found of Native Americans in the film, nor of Mexicans, and there's only the one mammy reference to indicate the foundation of racialized hierarchy of Letty's privileged white femininity back in Virginia and that is compromised in the hard work and harsh environs--made all the worse by the poor conservation brought by white settlement--of West Texas and how as opposed to a simple victim of a patriarchal system, frontier women are complicit in this racial order and so-called Manifest Destiny. The film was written by way of three female authors, after all.
Much of this is indicated in the film if not explicitly or dwelled upon. Perhaps, that's partly a vestigial artifact of adaptation, but it also goes to the film's new conclusion and morality. Note that Hanson's Lige states that the wind-wiped sands of the desert bury justifiable acts: "Wind's mighty odd--if you kill a man in justice--it allers covers him up!" The film, then, is justifying the displacement of native populations for white settlement, of the increasingly-barren landscape wrought by such romantic notions of marriage of loving and working together. Indeed, they work in concert, the winds covering those killed in the psychosexual and otherwise rapacious conquest of the West.
Which brings me back to the stereoscope. It's not only our protagonist Letty who supports this Manifest Destiny, or the Western writ large, but photographic motion pictures generally. Now, I don't know how how much Gish, Marion, Sjöström or Scarborough intended this, but not only were romantic notions of the West largely codified by such photographic means, including through the Yosemite and San Francisco photography of film pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, by the way, but the stereoscope is also behind some of the earliest, if not the earliest, experiments in the invention of motion pictures. This was a medium that inherently required pairs of still photographs from different positions for its 3D effect. It was from there that the likes of Charles Wheatstone and Antoine Claudet realized the potential for series of sets of photographs and combining them with the synthesis of the illusion of motion offered by Joseph Plateau's phenakistiscope. Jules Duboscq realized this as early as 1852 with the patenting of his Bioscope stereoscopy viewer and a series on disc of posed stereoscopic photographs of a steam engine, itself a symbol of the progress of industrialization and capitalism that would rewrite landscapes and displace their people just as with train as enigmatically captured in Lumiere's "Arrival of the Train" (1896), the Lumieres also being interested early on in depicting the depth of scenery with stereoscopy--even finally reshooting this train subject in 3D by 1934. This is the foundation of "The Wind" and film in general. It's what we're reminded of when Letty is at her most content early on in this new land and when, later, she is to become most distressed. Conquering land and people and turning them ghosts, superimposed mythologies, the Manifest Destiny of photographic motion pictures.