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What is most important to Bo Florin, Stockholm University is the question of film style when looking at Victor Sjostrom directing in the United States as Victor Seastrom, the films an inevitable transformation from his having established the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film with director Mauritz Stiller. It might also be irresistable, Sjostrom having made two films with actress Lillian Gish, to evaluate the work Victor Sjostrom to that of D.W. Griffith, who, during 1926 was filming "The Sorrows of Satan" with Carol Dempster. Peter Cowie in fact likens Victor Sjostrom to D.W. Griffith by noting Sjostrom's admiration for Griffith with the observation thst both directors saw "the human conscience as a register of emotion". Peter Cowie, in his volume Swedish Cinema" goes so far as to write that of the films Sjostrom directed in the United States only the two films Victor Sjostrom made with Lillian Gish are of "lasting importance". Cowie explains that even Sjostrom himself felt that the films he directed after the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film would in fact be "transformations". "Everyone praised the visual beauty of the film, but many in it a decline of Sjostrom's vitality. 'Det Omringade huset' (1922) and 'Eld omboard' were disappointing, and in 1923 Sjostrom left for Hollywood on account of the lucrative offer from M.G.M and because of an urgent need within himself to find the magic for producing pictures of an international appeal." It had been Victor Sjostrom who had convinced Mauritz Stiller to depart for America in order to meet his artistic aspirations. Admittedly, the films made in the United States are transformations of genre in regard to narrative conventions and transformations of genre in regard to literarary adaptation if in a sense of transnational analysis in the use of genre by an auteur, the auteur Seastrom/Sjostrom with whom Stiller had given up filming comedies after "Erotikon" to film "particularly Scandinavian drama". Of "The Scarlet Letter" Peter Cowie writes,"Both this film and 'The Wind' are given an undeniably Scandinavian character by the intensity of Sjostrom's direction."
Paul Rotha in his volume The Film Till Now looked at Victor Sjostrom in the United Stares directing as Victor Seastrom, "The theme of 'The Scarlet Letter' was gloomy, but Seastrom raised its gloom to moments of great beauty....Seastrom's sweeping sense of landscape, evident in his early Swedish pictures was expanded and gave an enchanting atmosphere to the first love scenes between Miss Gish and Lars Hanson....This feeling for depth and space was common to all the Scandinavian directors in their pre-American work."
Puritanism itself can be reflected in the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Samuel Sewall, Edward Taylor, Michael Wigglesworth and Cotton Mather, The Puritan Errand, the Scarlet Letter having taking place during the two decades after 1630 when most of the oldest cities near Boston were first incorporated.
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