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)