From his first, pioneering work in Sweden, Victor Sjöström was concerned with the intersection of landscape and psychology, with the way the natural world both shaped the substance of his characters’ thoughts and feelings, and reflected those thoughts and feelings in its metaphoric grandeur. Sjöström largely left his interest in landscape behind in Sweden when he came to America in 1923, with the spectacular and singular exception of The Wind. The setting is the desert of western Texas, a land of high temperatures, low rainfall, and no shade, into which a frail young woman from the east (Lillian Gish, in one of the great performances of silent film) has been thrust against her will, totally unprepared for the desolation—physical, social, psychological—that awaits her. The assault is total and unrelenting, like the raw wind that never ceases to blow across the lunar landscape. The exteriors were shot, under difficult conditions, in the Mojave Desert of southern California.
Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Lillian Gish Trust for Film Preservation.