Victor Sjöström: A Pioneering Innovator Restored
December 26, 2003–January 19, 2004
The international fame and glory of early Scandinavian
cinema are perhaps best exemplified by the innovative work of Victor
Sjöström (1879–1960). His illustrious career as a
filmmaker and actor spans much of the past century, during which
his pioneering inventions in cinematic language took him almost single-handedly
from representing the artistic quality of the famed literary film
in Sweden to a promising career in Hollywood and then back to Sweden
again. In the burgeoning Nordic film industry of the 1910s and 1920s,
Sjöström’s originality set a lofty standard, producing
some of the silent screen’s most enduring works.
The Swedish Film Institute has restored and preserved
many of the prints in the series, and we are grateful to Jon Wengstrom
of the SFI and to The Swedish Institute for making the prints available.
The retrospective and its North American tour
was organized by Edith Kramer, Director, The Pacific Film Archive,
Berkeley, with generous support from the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia
Foundation. The series is organized for MoMA by Jytte Jensen, Curator,
Department of Film and Media, with grateful thanks to The Swedish
Film Institute; The Swedish Institute; and Svensk Filmindustri.
The exhibition is further supported by the Consulate General of
Sweden and the Embassy of Sweden, Ottowa.
All prints courtesy The
Swedish Film Institute, unless otherwise noted.
. 1912. Sweden.
With Victor Sjöström, Gösta Ekman, Lili Bech. In his
first film as a director, Sjöström cast himself in the
lead, a gardener’s son in love with a girl whom his father
opposes. The film was banned upon its release, largely due to its
depiction of death as something beautiful. English intertitles. Courtesy
The Library of Congress. 34 min.
. 1913. Sweden. With Hilda Borgström, Bertil Malmstedt,
Aron Lindgren. Public welfare authorities snatch a widow’s
child, leading her into madness. Perhaps the most fully realized
work in pre-1915 cinema, Ingeborg Holm created a heated debate about
Sweden’s institutionalized care, causing a change in the laws.
68 min.
. 1918. Sweden. With Victor
Sjöström, Harriet Bosse, Tore Svennberg. Selma Lagerlöf’s
popular books portraying Värmland, Sjöström’s
native province, became great source material for the director, starting
with this film, the greatest commercial success in Sweden at the
time. Fellow artist Carl Th. Dreyer commented that “Lagerlöf’s
predilection for dreams and supernatural events appealed to Sjöström’s
somewhat somber artistic mind.” This glorious black-and-white
and tinted print illustrates that perfect marriage of creative minds.
102 min.
.
1920. Sweden. With Victor Sjöström, Tora Teje, Bertil
Malmstedt. This new, tinted print restores the astonishingly modern
feel of this sequel
to The Sons of Ingmar (1918). Ingmar is old, his wife is dead, and
his daughter Karin loves one man and marries another. The story is slight, but the style and depiction of milieu
and the sense of common heritage between the peasants is marvelously
realized. 72 min.
. 1920. Sweden. With Victor
Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Tore Svennberg. This new,
tinted print shows Sjöström’s crowning Swedish masterpiece—and
Ingmar Bergman’s favorite film—in all the splendor of
Julius Jaenson’s cinematography. The film’s technical
experimentation and sophisticated narrative construction, as well
as Sjöström’s beautifully modulated performance as
the lead character, all combine to bring alive the old legend on
which Selma Lagerlöf’s morality tale is based. Courtesy
Cowboy Pictures. 92 min.
. 1916. Sweden.
Sjöström and
Sweden’s wild west coast both play prominent roles in this
tale of smugglers and coast guards, filmed on location. New, tinted
print. 44 min.
. 1916. Sweden. With Victor Sjöström,
Albin Laven, Jenny Tschernichin-Larsson. With its marvelous use of
photographic depth-of-field, beautifully executed double exposures,
and elaborate narrative flashback structure, this newly restored
crime drama, featuring Sjöström in a double role, made
the director famous among contemporary French critics. 32 min.
. 1919. Sweden. With Karl Mantzius, Carl Browallius, Greta
Almroth. This first real
Swedish comedy, based on a popular 1910 novel by Hjalmar Bergman,
showcases the delightful Danish character actor Mantzius. Distinguishing
this elegant tale of an elderly fat count, his valet, his beautiful
niece, and a complicated will are careful direction and a precise
rendering of milieu. 70 min.
. 1918. Sweden. With Victor Sjöström, Edith
Erastoff, John Ekman. In this lavish film set in midnineteenth-century
Iceland, happy summer days
on a farm fade as ice and snow set in, erasing all traces of humanity.
A film of rarely matched wild beauty and unity of vision. 99 min.
.
1917. Sweden. With Greta Almroth, Lars Hanson, Karin Molander. Sjöström
remains faithful to his literary source, a novel by Selma Lagerlöf,
while also creating a purely cinematic work through his use of close-ups
in this film about the intertwined fates of Helga, a poor girl with
a noble character, and Gudmund, a young man from a different class.
80 min.
.
1920. Sweden. With Tore Svennberg, Tora Teje, Richard Lund. This
period drama about
an elderly husband’s jealous suspicion of his younger wife
is distinguished by its menacing symphony of light and shadow. Sjöström
and cinematographer Henrik Jaenzon boldly experiment with cinematic
detail—much of the plot is performed at night and outdoors
to great tragic effect. 75 min.
. 1924. USA. With Lon
Chaney, Norma Shearer, John Gilbert. When a scientist makes the
horrifying discovery that
his one-time patron has stolen both his wife and his life’s
work, he resolves to become a clown but cannot shake his past. The
film’s noteworthy lighting is on a par with that of the director’s
Swedish films. Courtesy Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment Co., Los
Angeles. With English intertitles. 78 min.
. 1917. Sweden.
With Victor Sjöström,
Bergliot Husberg. Lauded upon its release, Terje Vigen, the story
of an aging sailor who looks back on the injustices he suffered at
the hands of the British but refrains from exacting revenge, won
the Swedish art film a place in world cinema. By animating Henrik
Ibsen’s popular narrative poem in grandiose style and largely
keeping the intertitles true to the original text, the film generates
tremendous power and pathos. 50 min.
. 1924. USA. With Mae Busch, Conrad Nagel, Hobart Bosworth.
This film about an unmarried pregnant girl ostracized by her family
and the lover who is appointed judge at her trial works mainly by
means of contrast, juxtaposing the New World with the Old, urban
life with the countryside, sophistication with rustic poverty. Courtesy
Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels. With English
intertitles. 60 min.
.
1957. Sweden. Directed by Ingmar Bergman. A rare look behind the
screen: Bergman directs Victor Sjöström in one of his most
affecting performances (as well as his last), as the old professor
in the early Bergman classic. 18 min.
. 1920. Sweden. Screenplay by
Hjalmar Bergman. With Victor Sjöström, Greta Almroth, Concordia
Selander. A miserly old pawnbroker falls in love with a young man’s
fiancée, and circumstance allows him to take her as a pawn.
Old is counterpointed with young, and darkness with light, in this
artful exploration of self-effacing love. 95 min.
.
1922. Sweden. With Ivan Hedqvist, Jenny Hasselqvist, Gösta
Ekman. A drama of love and intrigue set in Florence during the Renaissance.
The French director René Clair said of Hasselqvist, who plays
a young wife subjected to a trial by fire, that “one will
never forget… her flickering eyes, her severity of spirit,
her abrupt and startled expressions like some threatened animal….
The Swedish integrity of image.” 85 min.
. 1928. USA. With Lillian Gish, Lars
Hanson, Montagu Love. An orphan takes refuge with her cousin, and
when the cousin’s wife views her as a rival, she is forced
to marry a neighbor against her will. Gish insisted that MGM cast
Hanson opposite her and hire Sjöström to direct, who in
turn insisted that the exteriors be shot in the Mojave Desert in
120-degree temperatures with nine wind machines whipping up the
sand. Courtesy Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment Co. With English
intertitles. 85 min.
. 1923. Sweden.
With Victor Sjöström,
Jenny Hasselqvist, Matheson Lang. A man boards a ship in order to
take revenge on a heartless captain, but changes his mind at the
sight of a doll on deck belonging to the captain’s daughter.
The film, which has shades of the director’s groundbreaking
Terje Vigen (1917), was justly celebrated for its lighting and compositions.
90 min.
. 1927. USA. With Lillian
Gish, Lars Hanson, Henry B. Walthall. The film is based on Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s novel about adultery in a seventeenth-century
Puritan colony in New England. The powerful team of Gish, Hanson,
and Sjöström, combined with an effective dissolve technique
that injects metaphor into the narrative, brought Sjöström’s
third American production critical and commercial success. With
English intertitles. Courtesy Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment
Co. 95 min.
. 1928. USA. With Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson. Fragment,
10 min.
. 1925. USA. With Alice Terry, Lewis Stone,
John Bowers. Sjöström was dissatisfied with the many modifications
he had to make in adapting Alphonse Daudet’s novel “to
appease the American public,” and although the film was not
a critical success, it was deemed “amusing and entertaining” by
the press. Only part of the film has been found and restored. 47
min. Program courtesy Warner Bros./Turner Entertainment Co.
. 1937. Great Britain/USA.
With Conrad Veidt, Annabella, Raymond Massey. In this period piece,
Cardinal Richelieu,
worried about a Huguenot uprising, sends out the adventurer Black
Death to capture the rebel leader. When Black Death falls in love
with the leader’s sister and instead helps him to flee, he
must return to Paris to accept his punishment. Sjöström’s
last film as a director. Courtesy the Douris Corporation, Ohio. 82
min.
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