All you need is Lagerlöf… Bologna Preview – Swedish Restorations

Not one but three restored films based on Selma Lagerlöf’s novels to screen at Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival.

Gösta Berling saga (1924)

It was probably in 2018 that I first heard of the restoration of Mauritz Stiller's Gösta Berling saga (1924), and a few years after I’d started my fascination with the story, its original writer and its stars after viewing the Kino DVD… Sure it was Greta Garbo’s breakthrough role, but it also featured vital performances from Lars “Handsome” Hanson, Gerda Lundequist - "The Swedish Sarah Bernhardt" – and Jenny Hasselqvist, Royal Swedish Ballet prima ballerina and an actor in so many European films: has anyone ever managed to combine both careers so well?

The initial restoration was screened in San Francisco pre-pandemic but now, at last, next month’s Il Cinema Ritrovato will screen the film as part of the 1924 selection. This new digitally restored Gosta will be unlike any other I’ve seen and is based on the analogue reconstruction from 2018, but with some changes in the editing work according to the Swedish Film Institute. The film now has a running time of 206 mins (simulating 18 fps) which is a good 22 minutes longer than the Kino version. It was originally measured by the Statens Biografbyrå in March 1924 at 4534 meters, which with a display speed of 18 frames per second would correspond to 221 minutes. The film has subsequently been shortened and re-cut several times over the years, and so this latest reconstruction moves it as close to the original release as it’s been.

 

As Jon Wengström, Senior Curator of the SFI’s Filmarkivet / Archival Film Collections explained:“The main sources for the restoration was an existing duplicate positive from our collections, and tinted nitrate print from the collections of Cinemateca Portuguesa (Lisbon). A brief scene was also added from a safety print in the collections of Gosfilmofond (Moscow).”

Gerda Lundequist, whose grand-daughter is rock singer Sonja Kristina... 

Jörgen Viman was the SFI’s Film Archivist on the restoration or “recreation” as he puts it, of the film explains further that tinted nitrate prints were also borrowed from the Cinémathèque française in Paris and the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, as a reference for the film's continuity. Having just re-read Paul Norlen’s 2009 translation of Selma Lagerlöf’s extraordinary debut from 1891 it will be fascinating to compare Stiller’s focus. Lagerlöf creates such a powerful, magical-reality and seems to write from inside her subjects… I wonder what Powell and Pressburger would have made of her work and the interpretation of Stiller, Sjöström and Molander are all so tonally different.

The film's subtitles have also been recreated based on the wording in text lists submitted to the Statens Biografbyrå. These intertexts have now been based on Alva Lundin’s original designs - only three of the 405 text boxes have survived and another three were found reproduced in a trade journal from the time. Sadly, Lundin’s original painted illustrations of the text have not survived but you can read more about her work on the Women Film Pioneers Project website!

The film’s colour ways have been recreated though using the tinting scheme of the Portuguese nitrate print. The colour shading of the intertexts is also based on a description in another trade magazine article – bless these secondary sources!

 

Jenny Hasselqvist and Lars Hanson in Till Österland 

Till Österland (1926)

 

At the start of the pandemic, I read Selma’s epic Jerusalem Parts I and II (1901-2) as translated by the American Velma Swanston Howard in 1915. The story was set in the traditional rural heartlands of Dalarna and involves a group of villagers who gain a new faith and emigrate to Jerusalem as happened in the parish of Nås in 1896. It gave rise to four cinematic adaptations with Victor Sjöström making the first two films, The Sons of Ingmar (Ingmarssönerna) (1919) followed by Karin Daughter of Ingmar (Karin Ingmarsdotter) (1920) which failed to repeat the success of the first film leading the director to turn his attention elsewhere. Gustaf Molander picked up the project and completed the story with his brace, Ingmar's Inheritance (Ingmarsarvet) (1925) and Till österland (1926).

The two directors had many differences in approach with Sjöström’s narrative much closer to Lagerlöf’s text and more focused on the interior life of her conflicted characters whilst Molander broadened the palate, taking more liberties and setting up more action. Sjöström made two feature films out of less than 105 pages whereas Molander crafted one from the remaining 240 and another from the 350 pages of Volume II, including adding some of his own inventions. The feeling is much the same but the pace has changed and the cinematic vision of the narrative is one aimed at creating a hit film with hot actors, most of whom feature in both films.

Mona Mårtenson and Conrad Veidt

Ingmar's Inheritance has Lars Hanson, Mona Mårtenson and Jenny Hasselqvist as well as a powerful turn from the non-recurring Conrad Veidt. It’s still extant but the follow-up has long been incomplete and unscreened. Not any more as Till Österland has been restored, as far as possible, to create a 42 minutes long mix of the surviving film and other elements; it’s narrative structure now intact.

One additional scene, showing the dance of the dervishes, was found in a compilation film but the main thing is that the existing footage is now properly put in context, with the film’s original intertitles accompanying the surviving footage, and some stills and explanatory titles where footage is missing. All in all, the fragment now has a running time of 42 mins (simulating 20 fps), and the surviving footage is now shown with recreated tinting.

Filming in Jerusalem

Magnus Rosborn was the archivist working on the film and his summary is… “The surviving scenes have mainly been taken from a duplicate negative made from a duplicate positive which in turn was produced in 1977 from the film's then fragmentarily preserved – but now lost – original negative. In addition, another scene has been taken from a duplicate negative for the film Selma Lagerlöf 80 år (1938), which has been preserved in Sveriges Television's archives.”

The intertitles have been taken from the film's preserved original text boxes and the colours of the film have been reconstructed using handwritten tinting and toning notes copied into the duplicate positive. The missing scenes have been reconstructed with the help of those text boxes, production stills and newly made explanatory texts.

Before the premiere in 1926, the film was measured at the censorship review at 2587 meters which corresponds to a playing time of 113 minutes, so whilst approximately three quarters of the film's moving image material is still missing, we are now able to finally see what becomes of the characters in what was Volume II of Jerusalem. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride…

Victor yes, Mauritz maybe and Gustaf.. well!?

What did the author think of these films? According to Paolo Cherchi Usai in The Oxford History of World Cinema, it was the Selma’s admiration for Sjöström’s films that led her to sign over the film rights for all her books to Svenska Bio and he adds that the director “found in her work the ideal expression of the active role played by nature in the destiny of characters torn between good and evil.” The author was certainly not low on opinion and was initially unsure about The Phantom Carriage (although pleased with the result) and berated Mauritz Stiller for his adaptation of The Gosta Berling Saga calling it “cheap and sensational”.

Well… we can see more clearly for ourselves in just one month’s time! Bring it on!

Details of Il Cinema Ritrovato can be found on their website.

The Swedish Film Institute website is here.

Acta, non verba! Bermondsey Tales: Fall of the Roman Empire (2024), Out now!

 

Keep your enemies close but your family closer…

 

You can choose your friends but you’re born with your family. I felt a bit nervous watching this one given my Dad was a policeman in Liverpool but then again there was Uncle Les and whilst I knew he was a wrong ‘un, nobody ever told me why. Michael Head’s a Bermondsey boy and he’s previously included details of his fascinating family background in his theatrical work, specifically the excellent Time (2020), they drive him forward and as he says in the introduction, he wouldn’t have it any other way; how can you not?

 

This new film, his first full feature, is loosely based on real events mixed no doubt with family legend from his grandad’s generation and inventions all his own. Throughout its twisting and innovative narrative, there are surprises and delights in equal measure whilst it’s also as funny and it is heartfelt. If you’ve ever wondered how The Sopranos would play out in South London, Bermondsey Tales is your answer and Michael even throws in a bunch of Roman references to add Italian flavour.

 

These tales from the underground are from an age of criminal chivalry and a code of conduct that rationalised the violent side of their work as the only means of protecting the good people in their lives; family and friends, from men like themselves. Michael grew up listening to these stories in the pubs and clubs of SE16 and as much as they were based on actual criminal activity, the best ones were always the funniest ones even if the humour was dark.

 

Michael Head at a car boot sale

The Code meant that they would only ever battle their own and that innocents would never be harmed even if they were relieved of some excess wealth as happens when one Rosemary Hatfield (Vicki Michelle) is given a lift to her grand abode by a friendly cabbie who calls on one of the gang, Skats (Alan Ford, a man who’s been in everything with a CV stretching back to Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966)!) who pops round dressed as a policeman to relieve her of her biggest jewels and even make her a cup of tea…

 

The cast is sprinkled with such talent and I was a little stage struck at the premier in the O2 multiplex; Linda Robson – an actor I’ve pretty much grown up with from CFF films, Survivors and Pauline’s Quirks onwards - was set on the couch next to mine! She plays Kath (very loosely based on Michael’s late grandmother) whose husband Mick Roman is played by Gary Webster, the head of the family firm and carrying the gravitas as well as the quick wit to flavour the comedy. This is a gritty film but not in a Guy Richie way, it’s warmer and the humour comes from people laughing at themselves and the “there but for the grace of God…” moments of chance that can make the difference from a stretch inside or a long break on the beach.

 

The stories are linked together by the power struggle over the future of the firm, two brothers nicknamed by the smarter of the two, Henry (Michael Head) who is the self-styled Romulus to his step-brother Jimmy’s Remus (Charlie Clapham), the latter all Brutus-force to the former’s ability to play the fiddle whilst everything burns. Henry was adopted as his child by his uncle after his father George (Frank Harper) was the victim of a professional killing in their home – nobody knows hy who or for what reason but all my become clear. We see George in flashback in a jewel robbery in which he gets on rather well with the young shop assistant (Jade Bovington) – I suppose workplace romances can take place on the job too.

 

John Hannah tries to make a point

Everyone delivers of their best and there’s such spirit in even in the cameos and smaller roles. As Michael says in an interview, “there’s film you write, the film you shoot and the film you edit…” and the script and story evolved around certain performers with, for example, John Hannah’s manic Postman episode one such example of allowing the madness to flow around this character’s paranoid energy as he calls in the lads to help protect him from being spied upon by parties unknown. Hannah riffs superbly off Charlotte Kirk as his wife Olivia who gives as good as she gets; direction here allowing the team to improvise and ramp up the ridiculous in the most natural and chaotic of ways.

 

The excellent David Schaal – who was also in Time – plays Charlie, Mick’s elder brother and father to the scheming Chloe, played by Eastenders and Strictly star, Maisie Smith who delivers the glam and guile – do not get on the wrong side of this woman. It’s, literally, in the family though as Henry’s plans are slowly revealed after an opening segment in which it looks like he won’t last five minutes let alone the whole film. Like I said, the narrative is twisty and keeps you guessing as every story provides more foundation for the breathless finale.

 

There’s superb support from Vas Blackwood wearing a most unconvincing syrup as well as Eddie Boxshall as Hippy Bill – the clue is in the name – Rohit Nathaniel, and Daniel O’Reilly (also in the Time play) who tells a great tale of a drunk and improbable evening of thwarted romance which, as those of us who’ve drunk and dabbled will know, is far from the hungover truth.

Messrs Nathaniel, O'Neill, Clapham, Head, Blackwood and Ford

There are plenty of laughs and a furious pace that allows the characters and the conversations to breath but, this being the nature of the business, they’re be plenty to worry about come the Ides of March or in this case, May.

 

It’s great to see an independent film with this level of ambition and it was a privilege to mix with the cast and crew for a packed out premier south of the river at the O2. At a time when the arts in Britain are dominated by middle class voices it’s also good to see this kind of authentic contribution from a culture most of us recognise whichever side of the line our forebears trod. Whatever the bloody Guardian says, this one's from the heart!

 

I look forward to more but remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, it took weeks.

 

Bermondsey Tales is out now and on digital platforms from 10^th June and you can check out details of screenings on the Seraphim Film’s website here and a trailer on the old YouTube here.

Cast and crew at the O2 premier.

David Schaal

Frank Harper

Maisie Smith and Linda Robson

Selma's ghosts... The Phantom Carriage (1921), with Stephen Horne, Kennington Bioscope

 

O God, grant that my soul may ripen before it is gathered in.

For years now I’ve had in my head the plan to write a Christmas story of the kind that Dickens used to write…*

After a few years of this silent film business, you have seen most of the cannon and have your own list of The Greats but all such classifications are blown out of the window when you see a screening like tonight’s with the right venue, the right audience and a supernatural accompaniment from Mr Stephen Horne that not only sent chills but brought out the full flavour of Victor Sjöström’s film and, indeed his own performance.

Not only was Sjöström probably Sweden’s finest silent film maker, he ranks as one of the finest of any era. Here with his fourth adaptation of one of Selma Lagerlöf’s works, he shows again why he is such a good interpreter of her work. Selma’s work is passionate and poetic and deceptively complex in expression and narrative form – trust me, I’m reading Gösta Berling yet again! Sjöström takes his time and makes her key points with precision and power: his two films based on her magnum opus, Jerusalem, use only the first 70-80 pages whereas Gustaf Molander gobbles up the remaining 400+ in his action-packed brace.

Perhaps Sjöström was more concerned with meaning and, as his stunning performance shows, he may well have had a personal connection with this story as Chris Bird suggested in his introduction, for the Swede’s father was abusive and alcoholic just as Sjöström’s David Holm is. For most of the film, Holm seems irredeemable, not just continuing to fall back into his old brutal ways but actively enjoying his cruelty in ways that suggest extremes of self-hatred. It seems that nothing will make him change, even when his actions throw his family into poverty, even when he is given another chance by his long-suffering wife played with high-intensity and the last flickers in the saddest eyes by the wonderful Hilda Borgström – who had previously starred in Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm (1913).

Hilda Borgström and Victor Sjöström

Both Borgström and Sjöström can create so much atmosphere, soundlessly signifying the break-up of their marriage, hiding from each other and seeking oblivion in different ways and good as he is, nothing makes Sjöström’s Holm so frightening than Borgström’s reactions to him as he bashes down the door in their apartment she is exhausted and just drops to the floor. This is a film about domestic violence and the ties that suffocate.

The film is based on Lagerlöf’s 1912 book Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! (Swedish: Körkarlen) after she had been commissioned to write it by the Swedish Tuberculosis Society* as a means of public education about tuberculosis ("consumption"). Holm has consumption and whilst he self-medicates with alcohol, he is also happy to cough in other’s faces to broaden his revenge on the world; sadly, this doesn’t sound so unlikely after our experiences with the Pandemic. As her recent translator Peter Graves has said, in The Phantom Carriage she manages to keep two balls in the air – the ghostly plane alongside the gritty slum story – without lessening the impact of either. Her director is able to maintain this ingenuity.

Holm is Swedish for Day, and appropriately enough, the action largely takes place over the course of a day – New Year’s Eve - with a potentially complex series of flash-backs deftly used to explain more of the background to Holm and the supernatural events that will be used to show him the reality of the world he has made.

Astrid Holm and Lisa Lundholm

Chris Bird rightly lauded the cinematography of Julius Jaenzon especially his ability to create the ghosts through in camera trickery and multiple exposures. Knowing that they were using wooden Pathé cameras – hand-cranked – makes the effects even more impressive. Chris read out a number of letters from Sjöström to his wife complaining about the slow progress on the required night-shooting and repeated takes but the results are ground-breaking in the cinematic world of 1921.

The story begins on New Year's Eve at the death bed of a salvation army worker, Edit (Astrid Holm), who calls out for a last visit of one David Holm (Sjöström). But Holm won't come, preferring to carry on getting sloshed in the graveyard with his drinking buddies. He tells them of a tale concerning a carriage driven by the last person to die in each year, which takes the spirits of the dead to their afterlife. A fight breaks out and Holm himself becomes the last fatality before the clock strikes midnight. He is greeted then by the phantom carriage and its ghostly driver, his friend and the man who first related the tale, Georges (Tore Svennberg). George it was who first led Holm into the life of drunken depravation and here he has come to collect Holm's mortal soul and take it to account for the life he has led.

It is now that the real horror begins as we learn about the un-making of the man through the intricate flash backs that gradually tie up the backstory. We see Holm’s estrangement from his wife and his pursuit of them across Sweden and how he ends up seeking refuge at the Salvation Army hostel run by Edit. She tries to help him by mending his jacket but he cruelly rips apart her handiwork and tells her he needs no saving… a defiant act of calculated cruelty but he’s picked on the wrong Christian, Edit won’t stop trying.

This is as uncompromising a film as you’ll find and it takes any lazy preconceptions by the throat and hands them back to you in pieces. The true horror is not ghostly carriages but in what people do to each other and themselves and the chances they let go. The film's prayer quoted at the top seems to me a very humanistic sentiment as much as religious: let me comes to terms with who I am before it is too late.

Victor Sjöström times two plus Tore Svennberg

Chris said that a 24-piece orchestra accompanied the film’s British premier in Leicester Square and tonight we had the closest it’s possible for one man to get with Stephen’s multi-dimensional accompaniment. There were the potent emotional lines you’d expect from his piano playing also, plucked strings, harmonium and flute with a spine-tingling reverb set up to stretch the latter’s pure notes to maximum uncanny affect. The man in front of me couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing and looked away briefly from the screen to check that there wasn’t a group of ghostly musicians playing along…

The Phantom Carriage is full of camera trickery and we also had a fabulous fantasy from Georges Méliès, the man who invented so many in-camera tricks, here with the 16-minute epic The Kingdom of the Fairies (Le Royaume des fées) from 1903. This is Méliès in excelsis with hand-coloured frames – courtesy of a Madame Elisabeth Thuillier according to Chris Bird – and which bring out so much delight in this relentlessly imaginative film. John Sweeney played along in complementary style, full of contemporary flourishes and rich detail to match the unparalleled invention on screen.

Another evening of pure quality all round at the Bioscope, epic in fact… thanks to all involved!

 

Great job Madame Elisabeth Thuillier!

*A letter from Selma Lagerlöf to her friend Sophie Elkanas per Peter Graves in the publication below…

**From Helena Forsås-Scott’s introduction to Selma Lagerlöf, The Phantom Carriage translated by Peter Graves, Norvik Press (2011)

Bolonian rhapsody… The Vagabond Queen (1929), with Stephen Horne, BFI

And so, to Ruritanian or rather Bolonia where Britain’s Queen of Happiness finds herself in the unlikely position of being Queen also of all she surveys in this tiny kingdom sandwiched somewhere between Freedonia, Graustark and maybe even Dr Victor Werner von Doom’s Latveria. Inspired by the works of English novelist Anthony Hope, notably The Prisoner of Zenda Ruritania became the catalyst for many imaginary kingdoms of central and eastern Europe and a multi-media genre of romantic adventures in which the imagined age of chivalry and royal circumstance lived on to eventually become the Daily Mail’s Celeb section covering our own increasingly mythical royal family.

 

In her learned introduction, the BFI’s Bryony Dixon said that there were some 250 silent films in this space, some of which had been the focus of strands at the Giornate del Cinema Muto Pordenone in recent years as curated by Kelly Robinson and Ingrid Stigsdotter (who’s reflection so Betty Balfour and the film formed the basis of today’s screening notes). The films were sometimes serious but always ripe with potential for lampooning which is exactly where the film sits; a situational comedy with some elements of danger more there for effect than to provide actual jeopardy.

 

As you would expect, from the star, the film is charming and effectively made, with director Géza von Bolváry, who made a number of films in this country including The Wrecker (1929) and The Ghost Train, the first adaptation of Arnold Ridley’s play perhaps best known for the 1941 Arthur Askey remake. Cinematography is from Charles Rosher, Oscar winner, and possible Anna May Wong paramour – Bryony pointing out that both came to Britain at the same time – who provides the highest quality of visual content.

 

The story was from Douglas Furber whose various musical plays included The Lambeth Walk (Oi!!) with script from Rex Taylor and Val Valentine, which has the feel of some compromise. It does contain many fine moments especially from Our Betty but also from the excellent Ernest Thesiger, here as Lidoff who is the very the embodiment of world-weary royal secretary. If looks could kill any number of adversaries would have been disapproved of to death whilst he sees the multiple threats to the royal family, not just from the scheming Winkleburg (Harry Terry) but also from their own wistful incompetence – certainly in the case of the real Princess Zonia’s husband, plastered Prince Adolphe (Charles Dormer).

Ernest Thesiger photographs Betty Balfour during a break in filming. (Associated Newspapers/Rex/REX USA)

All seems so far away as the film opens in London with Betty playing Sally, a subversive house maid with a soft spot for one of her landlady’s tenants, the cash-strapped inventor Jimmie (Glen Byam Shaw) who is only a one-pound battery away from the invention of television. Unable to leave the house without his return being barred due to his long overdue rent, Sally steps out to acquire the missing item only for it to be destroyed by local yobbos. As she exacts a fruity revenge in Pickford fashion pelting them with fruit and veg from the market stalls, she’s spotted by Lidoff and offered £500 if she’s willing to stand in for Princess Zonia.

 

They say never look a gifting diplomat in the mouth but this is impossible for Sally to resist especially when she takes Jimmie with her on this trip in space and time. Bolonia is your typical Ruritanian paradise with chicken and pigs roaming the streets and revolutionaries around every corner. There are new costumes to wear and a lack of language skills to navigate – this plastic princess has a very sore throat – which only really becomes and issue with the shock revelation that Zonia has that husband who, despite his lack of awareness and visual recognition soon becomes an over amorous issue.

 

This is nothing though as the real reason for Sally’s appointment is revealed; she’s there to take the flak – literally – for the real Zonia and, if required, a bullet or two from Winkleburg’s assassins who line her route to the palace with menace in a tense/silly/very funny closing sequence.

 

Stephen Horne provided regally gleeful accompaniment for a film that was released in both silent and sound synchronised form – Britain on the cusp of the talkie transition at this moment. It’s hard to imagine the original music improving on his uncanny syncopation and inventions though.

From Britannia and Eve, June 1, 1929

I’m a king I tell you! – A king!

 

There was also time from a precious two-reeler from Charley Chase, Long Fliv the King (1926) as if the Ruritanian location had not been spoofed enough. No one quite makes fun of things like Charlie though and here he’s a commoner condemned to death who is married to Princess Helga of Thermosa (Martha Sleeper) who needs a hubby double quick to claim her throne. Charlie is reprieved just after their ceremony and is understandably keen to pursue both Crown and Princess thereby thwarting the schemes of the evil Hamir of Uvocado, the Prime Minister (Fred Malatesta). There’s also splendid support from Max Davidson as Charlie’s mate Warfield – painfully Jewish-coded to modern eyes but full of energy.

 

It's a grand laugh in the grand duchy and Oliver Hardy is on hand to add that extra dose of comic potency. Both he and Chase demonstrate the innate potency of the best silent comics; you’re smiling as soon as you see them, you know the comedy is coming; their eyes alive with mischief and not a second wasted which is important as the essence of all comedy is, of course… timing!