Hearts of darkness… The House of Shadows (1924), Stephen Horne & Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto Silent Stream

Le Giornate is streaming highlights from previous festivals to whet our appetites for 2021 and to help keep the silent family together as we hide away in our various lockdowns and in tiered separation. This is a recording from a screening and accompaniment from the 36th Pordenone Silent Film Festival in 2017 – my first year – as part of the Scandinavian Cinema: The Swedish Challenge stream… it’s a fine choice although, as I’ve said maybe too often, you can never have enough Scandi-silents.

Anders Wilhelm Sandberg’s film is an intense, mystical family drama that is as disturbing as it is haunting with some outstanding locations matched by some exceptional performances. I have to highlight Peter Malberg who plays Aslak, the mentally-impaired son of the fierce patriarch at the heart of the story. It’s a difficult watch for modern eyes as the understanding of mental illness was so different a century ago, yet he’s pretty brave creating an awkward yet consistent character and managing to gain our sympathy with theatrical manners that bring to mind Lear’s Poor Tom/Edgar lost in a wilderness of unresolvable parental conflict.

House of Shadows (Morænen), directed by Anders Wilhelm Sandberg, is a Danish film set in Norway, in the far north, bounded by the gloomy, rocky, Moraine valley and, whilst the characters are often uplifted by glories of the lakes and valleys, they thoroughly oppress the high sheriff, Thor Brekanæs (Peter Nielsen) who is often seen out on the rocks crying to heaven bemoaning the shame that he thinks has blighted his life.

Peter Malberg

 

The characters – even the authoritarian and unyielding Thor – are all rounded and no one is entirely good or bad not even Swein Gudmundsson (Sigurd Langberg), Thor’s protégé – his surrogate son - who recognises that he cannot marry sheriff’s ward Thora (Karina Bell) and make her unhappy. This doesn’t stop him from behaving badly driven by his jealousy of her true love, Vasil (Emanuel Gregers) but he feels real enough. Without these everyday human failings the film’s melodramatic mysticism might overwhelm, but whilst there’s a good deal about fate and family, actions leading to shame that lives on through generations and high energy railing against God for misfortunes received as a result, it’s the people that make it so compelling.

Swein pulls back from the arranged marriage that ruined Thor’s life and that of his wife Gunhild (Karen Caspersen) who grew to hate her husband and just as she is expecting their second son, reveals that their first was sired by another man. Thor’s reaction is to cast her down and with his stonewall refusal to forgive and to nurture the shame she has brought on his family name, he sets in course the tragedies to come. Gunhild dies in childbirth – she would have killed herself anyway and with Thor’s blessing - and the boy’s mind and body are deeply affected by the cursed relationship between his parents.

Glowing sun, I hate you... Peter Nielsen as Thor the god of thunder

Forward a few decades and Vasil is away studying law and Aslak has remained in childhood, looked after by his adopted sister Thora. Thora is the angelic yin to her adopted father’s furious yang and she even plays the harp to prove it… Karina Bell edges it as Morænen’s MVP partly because Sandberg can’t resist lingering soft-focused close-ups but mostly because she plays Thora as the most morally uncompromised character.

Vasil is also searching his true path and rebels against Thor by deciding to return and pursue life as a poet. Thora greets him in idyllic shots of his boat arriving up the fjord and then their reunion against a glorious valley backdrop. They are interrupted by Swein, conflicted by his love for Thora and his jealousy, who nearly comes to blows with Vasil as he gives him back Thora’s engagement ring…

Karina Bell 

Thor naturally takes an even dimmer view of a) the poetry plan and b) Thora’s revised matrimonial schedule and pushes back against the “son” he has always hated and, for good record, he has never told about his true parentage. It’s nature versus nurture and Thor has the sons his pride and hatred deserve… we never find out just who Vasil’s true father is but it’s just struck me that it could well be the rather kindly tenant farmer Gudmund (Charles Wilken), Swein’s father. That would make perfect sense, the man Thor sees as his natural heir is the half brother of his hated Vasil and, in the final reckoning, neither has his ruthless selfishness.

The exception Thor makes to his everyday regime of stringent cruelty is for his poor broken Aslak but even he is so much his mother’s son and even though he was too young to remember her “spirit” somehow lives on.

Emanuel Gregers and Peter Nielsen

He does not know that this is the song his mother used to play when she carried him under her heart… but those sounds somehow managed to touch the strings of his soul, and to chase the darkness of his spirit.

This is a film in which music plays a major part and the harp, especially, which makes Elizabeth-Jane’s contribution all the more welcome. She and Stephen make for a intuitive paring and allow each other the space to develop themes as well as knowing when to work two or four elements all at the same time, vocal and harp plus flute and piano at one point and all with just the four hands. Sometimes they agree a structure beforehand and some themes but it always works sympathetically and makes every screening so vibrant and musically fascinating.

This one is no different and they fill the characters with so much musical warmth as well as dread, lifting their lines above the swooping panoramas and pacing the viewing narrative with a measured precision that confounds the occasional reminder that this is all played live. There’s a rapture of applause at the end and I think you can just hear me whooping as well!

As Thora plays the harp, Aslak is calmed and can think clearly, soothed by his mother’s song*… but Thor is enraged and smashes the harp. But he can’t keep his former wife’s legacy from surfacing forever and as tensions rise over Thora, the sheriff’s inheritance and the next generation’s desire for free will, there’s a murder committed with at least three suspects!

It’s easy for Morænen to sound overwrought but Sandberg controls matters very well and if it’s a film full of emotional excess these are counterbalanced by those performances and the setting which, along with the accompaniment makes for very satisfying locked-down viewing!

The film can be found on the Giornate website here and watch out for more goodies as the build up to next year’s event continues.

*According to Magnus Rosborn and Casper Tybjerg in their 2017 catalogue notes, the music originally used for this was probably Berceuse (1904) by the Finnish composer Armas Järnefelt, who wrote the original score for Mauritz Stiller’s Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919).

I liked that at last year's Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna and you can read about it here!

 

More excellent work from Slartibartfast...