The woman always pays… The Gardener (1912), Victor Sjöström 1912-1917 (Part One)

We are lucky that almost all of the feature films Victor Sjöström made after A Man There Was (Terje Vigen) (1917) through to his last in Hollywood, A Lady to Love (1930) survive and that there are only two missing, one from the US and another, The House Surrounded (1922), from Sweden. Yet, of the thirty films he made from 1912 to 1917, only five survive… and even these are sometimes incomplete.

The main exception is, of course, Ingeborg Holm (1913) – reviewed elsewhere on this blog – along with the recently rediscovered and restored Judaspengar / The Price of Betrayal (1915), screened at last year’s Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone. Most of the others were lost in a fire in the vaults of Svensk Filmindustri in 1941 although the damage was far worse for Mauritz Stiller’s work.

Half these films were shorts and the remainder were features of up to an hour or so in length – as with Ingeborg Holm and Terje Vigen -  and, whilst we can only wonder at the possibilities of the quality matching those two films, it is well worth viewing what remains.

Lili and Gösta go boating

The earliest survivor and, indeed, the director’s second film, is The Gardener (Trädgårdsmästaren) from 1912 also known as The Broken Spring Rose the first Swedish film to be banned for reasons that will become clear. This was the year when Svenska Bio’s Charles Magnusson hired theatrical actor-directors Sjöström and Stiller and the latter provides the script for this film as well as popping up as brief romantic interest for the lead character. The triumvirate of leading lights is completed by cameraman Julius Jaenzon, who captures some stunning locations and moves his camera with some assurance for 1912.

Originally three reels and some thirty minutes, what remains is just over 23 admittedly running a little fast on the YouTube copy I saw transferred from a VHS too; in these times it’s so difficult to pop over to Sweden isn’t it?

Lili Bech plays our young Spring Rose who is seen frolicking at the film’s start with Gösta Ekman (later to star in Faust, Intermezzo and many more) who is the son of a well-to-do gardener played by Victor Sjöström. The two are in love and a perfect pair only the grumpy gardener does not agree pulling them apart even after his son returns from college. He has designs of his own though and in still harrowing scenes, pursues the young woman through his greenhouse…

The Gardener (Victor Sjöström) takes an interest...

Next, we see Rose she is distraught and has a tear in her skirt, she has clearly been molested – hence the film’s ban. The gardener then throws her and her father off his land and they have to travel to the city to live in poverty. Luckily, an old General (John Ekman) Rose previously befriended at the café where she worked, lends them a hand and offers her work at his home. After her father dies, she is adopted by him but can’t cement her place in society so, when he too passes on, his family unite to kick her out and she is once again alone.

This is going to be another in the timeless strand of films in which the woman pays… there’s no doubt where the filmmakers’ sympathy lies and, pre-figuring the social concern of the following year’s Ingeborg Holm (1913), Sjöström is asking questions about a woman’s rights to live unmolested and secure in tenancy as well as providing a critique of class prejudice: she’s not good enough for the Gardener or his son and she’s not good enough for the General’s family or money.

Unable to fit in with polite society...

There’s a lot packed into the story and already Sjöström’s control of narrative is firm even allowing for the tableaux form and title cards that give away the action to come rather than reflect dialogue; it’s like an early “demo” with some rough edges but clearly leading up to the expertise of his first album, or at least the earliest left extant, Ingeborg Holm.

The scenes of rural life – the café, the boating and the marker gardening are also well captured and the director’s concern with these details prefigure cinema verité and neo-realism even with the technology and technique of 1912. Far more was to come of course but the including of these details allied to Jaenzon’s glorious sweeps of land and lake, add so much satisfying depth to the tale.

Mauritz is onboard!

Landscaped intimacies