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)

Spirited… Mod lyset (Towards the Light) (1919)/Asta Nielsen (1968), with Neil Brand, BFI Asta Nielsen Season

 

Fame is just a word written in sand…

 

Thus, Asta Nielsen begins her final monologue in the documentary she directed aged 86 about her life and work. It’s fascinating, that smile still youthful and her huge eyes still twinkling as she dispassionately skips through the years ending with that emotional paragraph and tears of sadness, pride or, just on cue. She still had it, even having not performed in years, content with her daughter and sister in Copenhagen before outlasting both, marrying Danish art collector, 77-year-old Christian Theede in 1970, and passing away aged 90 in 1972. A long life well lived.

 

The piece de resistance is her dinner with Afgrunden co-star, Poul Reumert, still handsome and recognisably the cowboy she tied up on stage and danced around in her leather skirt. The two toast each other and talk about the film and her early years in Denmark and Germany. As a plan to get her taken more seriously by the theatrical world it failed utterly but she was able to take on the new challenge of film and trying to make “spirit visible”.

 

She downplayed the difficulties of film but enjoyed its new challenges every one of which she met in comedies, dramas and every point in between. She skirts over the war years during which she remained working in Germany but still popular on both sides – Denmark was neutral – and talks about the formation of her own film company and its first production, Hamlet followed up by a film version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1922) and being the first Lulu in an adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Earth Spirit (1923) – showing at the BFI in March, and not to be missed.

 

Asta at sea in Mod lyset

Asked by actor Axel Strøbye if she was ever satisfied with her roles she smiles and twinkles the answer no, there was always something that could be improved. So speaks a perfectionist with an uncanny level of skill. It was so good to finally meet Asta as we celebrate this season of some of her most vital films. Sadly, Intoxication the film she made with Ernst Lubitsch in 1919, and including one Pola Negri, is considered lost but at least we have just over half of her 74 films extant; she’s done a lot better than some.

Talking of spirit, Mod lyset (Towards the Light) was Asta Nielsen’s last film in her Danish homeland and gave her the task of playing a high-society atheist forced into confronting her spirituality by events and the love of a good man. A tough pitch for worldly-wise 2022 but this was a film made for a largely Christian audience and at a time of continent-wide grieving both for soldiers lost as well as flu pandemic victims. The socio-theological context is perhaps baffling for a world now fuelled by cultural disconnection and pure dislike even as we exit a similar pandemic and the World gets madder.

 

The frivolous countess, who toys with men and their feelings the same way she played with dolls as a child…

You can keep faith in Asta though as even with this melodramatic and largely predictable script, Asta injects so much passionate febrility that you identify with even the shallowest of her emotions. Acting has never been a competition – despite all those awards – but in Asta we can see the impenetrable security of someone who feels their way through any role and who never gives you doubt in her performance. She is always very much in the present on screen and engaging with her imagined surroundings as much as the direct narrative and other characters. At one moment, devastated by twists of fate, in floods of tears, she pulls her handkerchief to her mouth, biting into it in a way Greta Garbo might ten years later…

The film starts as Asta’s character, Ysabel, hosts a charity bazaar with her mother Countess Prosca (Augusta Blad) and very quickly we see the runners and riders in the race for her heart or, more practically, just her head? There’s Baron Sandro Grec – a rich adventurer with a “heart of lead” – who’s her current beau and then, his “competition” the younger noble, Felix (Harry Komdrup). Felix is the nephew of Professor Manini (Nicolai Neiiendam) whose daughter Inga (Lilly Jacobson) longs for her cousin but he wants the one he can’t have and Ysabel is not one to let affectionate attention go to waste…

Asked by one guest whether she would put her talents to the service of religion, Ysabel is dismissive: I never insult religion or its practitioners, however, I will not adorn myself with a belief I do not hold in my heart! For the first, and not last time, director Holger-Madsen cuts for contrast, to a different party, one being hosted by the “poverty preacher” Elias Renato (Alf Blütecher), who is helping his poor flock snatch some enjoyment just as Ysabel pours drink from an amusing porcelain figurine for her well-heeled guests.

 

Astrid Holm and Alf Blütecher

Later that day as the rich men smoke cigars and play cards, Elias rescues a desperate young woman, Wenka (Astrid Holm) from throwing herself into the river. Her miserable story of domestic abuse is conveyed with Holger-Madsen cutting across to those who can afford to gamble their riches… as the day closes Elias prays and thanks God for his blessings in saving the girl. The next scene jars for being alongside this moment as Felix arrives at Ysabel’s front gate the following morning, just as she’s about to drive out in her limousine. He joins her and they come across a small crowd listening to Elias preaching. As Felix looks on with alarm, the Countess is moved by the hot priest’s presence if not necessarily his message.

 

He was so beautiful when he spoke! … it is the first time a preacher’s words have touched my heart!

 

But poor Felix can’t compete with the preacher’s allure and nor has he a chance against Sandro Grec’s wealth and masculine power. He announces that Ysabel has agreed to marry him even though we can see the doubt in her and her mother’s minds. But worse is to come as Felix, hopelessly in love, is devastated reading the announcement of their union in the paper, and, as his cousin looks on, he heads out to drown himself.

 

Lilly Jacobson and Harry Komdrup

When Felix does not return, Professor Manini and Inga go to Ysabel’s palace in the hope he might be there but not only has she not seen him, she has no desire to accept responsibility. When Elias arrives with the young man’s body and his note, she seems to privately revel in the dramatic testament of his fatuous longing. The Professor reminds her that whilst he does not judge her, what you sow you will reap… (especially in melodramas of this period). Then, from the selfish to the sublime, we cut to the community for orphans Elias has established on an island outside the city with charitable donations.

Karma comes quickly though when Sandro is implicated by a former partner in crime on the day of his wedding.  He’s not a fine rich baron at all but Loen Spontazzi a master criminal who the police rush to arrest, wedding night or not. Just as “Sandro” reassures his new wife their carriage is stopped by the police and he is arrested. Ysabel’s new life is snatched away and after she burns her bridal veil, she stares at herself in the mirror only to imagine the Professor there remining her of his prophetic statement. Six months later she is at her lowest ebb with her mother physically and emotionally broken yet pride still comes before her fall/possible redemption.

 

Sandro tricks Ysabel into marriage, Mother suspects he's a wrong 'un...

 

I did not acknowledge religion when life was fair, and I am now too proud to do it now that my happiness has been cast aside!

 

The kitchen sink is thrown at the closing segment of the film and whilst you might be able to guess some of what happens it’s still worthwhile watching our heroine “live” through it. Even given the broader strokes of religious passion, Asta is still so measured in her expression, micro-managing her emotions in ways that are seemingly intuitive and which, even now, have you watching in vain for any sense that she’s consciously “acting”.

Miss Nielsen could also not have wished for a more sympathetic and dedicated accompanist as Neil Brand became the latest of the BFI’s finest to match musical wits with the Dane. As we have come to expect, Neil provided an emotionally informed musical narrative with some gorgeous emotional fills and dramatic lines, channelling the most fitting moods from a century of film score appreciation – by which I mean the form and not the player!

 

 

There’s a lot more to come, many of which, like Mod lyset, just hasn’t been screened here for many decades. You know the drill, go straight to the BFI website and book as many as you can!

 

Asta enlightened… Mod lyset (Towards the Light) (1919), Danish Film Institute Online, #Bosslady

The frivolous countess, who toys with men and their feelings the same way she played with dolls as a child…

 

This was Asta Nielsen’s last film in her Danish homeland and she’d already enjoyed much success in Germany and beyond – the first European screen superstar and a performer who helped establish the art of screen acting. From the start she was so measured in her expression, micro-managing her emotions in ways that were seemingly intuitive and which, even now, has you watching in vain for any sense that she’s consciously “acting”. Even with this melodramatic and largely predictable script she injects so much passionate febrility that you identify with even the shallowest of her emotions.

 

Acting has never been a competition – despite all those awards – but in Asta we can see the impenetrable security of someone who feels their way through any role and who never gives you doubt in her performance. She is always very much in the present on screen and engaging with her imagined surroundings as much as the direct narrative and other characters. At one moment, devastated by twists of fate, in floods of tears, she pulls her handkerchief to her mouth, biting into it in a way Greta Garbo might ten years later…

 

All for charity? Asta Nielsen and Augusta Blad

The film starts as Asta’s character, Ysabel, hosts a charity bazaar with her mother Countess Prosca (Augusta Blad) and very quickly we see the runners and riders in the race for her heart or, more practically, just her head? There’s Baron Sandro Grec – a rich adventurer with a “heart of lead” – who’s her current beau and then, his “competition” the younger noble, Felix (Harry Komdrup). Felix is the nephew of Professor Manini (Nicolai Neiiendam) whose daughter Inga (Lilly Jacobson) longs for her cousin but he wants the one he can’t have and Ysabel is not one to let affectionate attention go to waste…

 

Asked by one guest whether she would put her talents to the service of religion, Ysabel is dismissive: I never insult religion or its practitioners, however, I will not adorn myself with a belief I do not hold in my heart! For the first, and not last time, director Holger-Madsen cuts for contrast, to a different party, one being hosted by the “poverty preacher” Elias Renato (Alf Blütecher), who is helping his poor flock snatch some enjoyment just as Ysabel pours drink from an amusing porcelain figurine for her well-heeled guests.

 

Harry Komdrup and Lily Jacobson

Later that day as the rich men smoke cigars and play cards, Elias rescues a desperate young woman, Wenka (Astrid Holm) from throwing herself into the river. Her miserable story of domestic abuse is conveyed with Holger-Madsen cutting across to those who can afford to gamble their riches… as the day closes Elias prays and thanks God for his blessings in saving the girl. The next scene jars for being alongside this moment as Felix arrives at Ysabel’s front gate the following morning, just as she’s about to drive out in her limousine. He joins her and they come across a small crowd listening to Elias preaching. As Felix looks on with alarm, the Countess is moved by the hot priest’s presence if not necessarily his message.

 

He was so beautiful when he spoke! … it is the first time a preacher’s words have touched my heart!

 

But poor Felix can’t compete with the preacher’s allure and nor has he a chance against Sandro Grec’s wealth and masculine power. He announces that Ysabel has agreed to marry him even though we can see the doubt in her and her mother’s minds. But worse is to come as Felix, hopelessly in love, is devastated reading the announcement of their union in the paper, and, as his cousin looks on, he heads out to drown himself.

Astrid Holm and Alf Blütecher

 

The power that Sandro Grec holds over Ysabel makes her believe that she has truly found happiness…

 

When Felix does not return, Professor Manini and Inga go to Ysabel’s palace in the hope he might be there but not only has she not seen him, she has no desire to accept responsibility. When Elias arrives with the young man’s body and his note, she seems to privately revel in the dramatic testament of his fatuous longing. The Professor reminds her that whilst he does not judge her, what you sow you will reap… (especially in melodramas of this period). Then, from the selfish to the sublime, we cut to the community for orphans Elias has established on an island outside the city with charitable donations.

 

Karma comes quickly though when Sandro is implicated by a former partner in crime on the day of his wedding.  He’s not a fine rich baron at all but Loen Spontazzi a master criminal who the police rush to arrest, wedding night or not. Just as “Sandro” reassures his new wife their carriage is stopped by the police and he is arrested. Ysabel’s new life is snatched away and after she burns her bridal veil, she stares at herself in the mirror only to imagine the Professor there remining her of his prophetic statement. Six months later she is at her lowest ebb with her mother physically and emotionally broken yet pride still comes before her fall/possible redemption.

I did not acknowledge religion when life was fair, and I am now too proud to do it now that my happiness has been cast aside!

 

The kitchen sink is thrown at the closing segment of the film and whilst you might be able to guess some of what happens it’s still worthwhile watching our heroine “live” through it. This was a film made for a largely Christian audience and at a time of continent-wide grieving both for soldiers lost as well as flu pandemic victims; the socio-theological context is perhaps baffling for a world now fuelled by cultural disconnection and pure dislike even amongst a similar pandemic.

 

You can see it on the DFI Asta Nielsen collection DVD which comes with Afgrunden (1910), The Black Dream (1911) and The Ballet Dancer (1911) altough this looks to be hard to find now. The first two as well as this film are however, available to stream for free on the DFI site although Mod lyset runs a little faster than on the disc and comes in shorter.

 

There’s also an enlightening essay on Die Asta – Bosslady - on the site from film scholar, Nanna Frank Rasmussen. As if you needed any further reason to go to the DFI site, where there are literally hundreds of silent films to stream for the Lockdown and beyond!

Humanistic horror? The Phantom Carriage (1921)

The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen) is a renowned film directed by and starring Victor Sjöström. I'd has this on the shelf for some time and,after flipping a coin between it and Häxan, watched it on Halloween. I was expecting an horror story with an atmosphere to fit the occasion, but, what you get from Phantom Carriage is not just ghosts, special effects and the chill of mortality, it's a very human tale that challenges the viewer to wake up and grow up.

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, that 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 a series of intricate flash backs that gradually tie up the backstory.

Sjöström acts his sock off as the wastrel Holm who gives in to a life of alcoholic self indulgence, dragging down all those around him in the same way he was sucked in. Neglecting those he loves he drinks away health and wealth, forcing his wife to take their children and flee.

He pursues them across Sweden and 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. She is not deterred and keeps on trying to help him, ultimately sacrificing her own happiness so that he can be re-united with his family.

But Holm looks beyond help and he seems doomed. It is only when his wife is about to take her own life and those of their children that he finally decides that enough is enough. But is it too late?

This is a pretty uncompromising film that takes any lazy preconceptions by the throat and hands them back to you in pieces. Genuinely moving and thought provoking; the true horror is in what people do to each other and themselves and the chances they let go.

The film's prayer is "Lord, let my soul come to maturity before it is reaped…" and this seems to me a very humanistic sentiment: let me comes to terms with who I am before it is too late.

The Phantom Carriage is superbly constructed with great acting and innovative production - there is extensive use of double exposure to create the transparency of the carriage and its un-living passengers. It deserves its ranking as one of Sjöström's and silent film's very best pictures but not necessarily in the way I expected.

Tribute to the extraordinary and enduring talent of Mr Sjöström... still making people think 90 years on! Jag hälsar er sir!

The Tartan DVD comes with a challenging modern soundtrack composed by KTL a musical duo consisting of Stephen O'Malley (of drone metal funsters Sunn O)))) and Peter Rehberg (Pita). It's not synchronised exactly to the action but interwoven thematically, matching the mood with raw yet delicate tonal extrusions.

Still available from Amazons worldwide.