Lillian Gish’s 1928 ‘Wind’ Isn’t Gone

As the abandoned Letty of “The Wind,” this Wednesday at Silent Movie Theater (611 N. Fairfax), actress Lillian Gish uses her fragile face and body and wild, yearning eyes to devastating effect. Around her, the empty Texas prairie stretches menacingly, and the wind howls, gradually uncovering the grave of the rapist she’s killed and buried outside. . . . Both a memorable Western drama and a searing psychological horror story, the 1928 “The Wind,” is, with the exception of Gish’s D. W. Griffith films, the apogee of her silent work: an unforgettable poem of isolation, terror and madness in the Old West.

Gish’s hand-picked director, Victor Sjostrom (Americanized as “Seastrom”), is known to film buffs primarily for his lead performance in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 “Wild Strawberries,” in which he played Professor Isak Borg, traveler and dreamer. But Sjostrom was also Sweden’s first great filmmaker: a master landscapist and a storyteller of great lyricism and power. “The Wind,” his last masterpiece, almost fell prey to the talkie furor after “The Jazz Singer”; MGM demanded a patched-together “sound” version and a happy ending. (Sjostrom and Gish envisioned a darker, more tragic climax.) Even so, the silent version, the “European cut,” ranks with Sjostrom’s best Swedish films: “The Outlaw and His Wife,” “The Phantom Carriage” and Bergman’s favorite, the 1913 “Ingeborg Holm.”

Silent Movie’s presentation of “The Wind” will be shown with a Harry Langdon comedy short and Chapter 3 of the serial “The Power God”; all will feature live musical accompaniment. Call (213) 653-2389.

At Filmforum (LACE, 1804 Industrial St.) tonight at 8, the eminent European archivist and experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder will present an evening of her work: unusual post-structuralist films that use landscapes, mixed time schemes, multiple exposures and frame-to-fame discontinuities in an innovative style, which derives from her experiences as sculptor, painter and film editor. Call (213) 663-9568.