Victor and Selma go filmmaking... The Lass from the Stormy Croft (1917)

Apparently, it was after seeing Victor Sjöström's Terje Vigen that Swedish Nobel literature winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf decided to sign a deal allowing A-B Svenska Biografteatern the rights to adapt her films, with the studio committing to one a year. She had previously resisted any cinematic adaptations but saw in Sjöström a man with a similar vision of life and landscape as well as someone who would respect the authorial intent of his source literature. She wanted him to do for her what he had done for Henrik Ibsen and to not sensationalise the moral issues at the heart of her work.

As Aleksander Kwiatkowski wrote in Swedish Film Classics (1983), “… Sjöström's adaptations remained completely faithful to the original works as well as the environments he was constructing,” aiming, as Danish director Benjamin Christensen observed, to imitate “the very rhythm of life.” This was unlike Mauritz Stiller and, later, Gustaf Molander, who both had lighter agendas and more overtly populist entertainments to make. For them, sometimes, the Swedish landscape could be a background, whereas for Sjöström it was a character with its own contribution to human stories, so too with tradition and the nature of rural economies.

Lars Hanson and Hjalmar Selander face a reckoning

This film, more properly translated as The Girl from the Great Marsh (Tenant) Farm, shows that he and Selma Lagerlöf were on the same page right from the start even though the filmmaker did not follow the flashback format of the author’s story; which he also doesn’t do with Jerusalem. It was the first of A-B Svenska’s adaptations and stays as close to her tone as Sons of Ingmar (1919) and Karin, Daughter of Ingmar (1920) do to the novel Jerusalem. It also pays due respect to the setting and the culture with a stunning set up for a wedding showing all the trappings of a village celebration along with less formal trips to church and even the magistrate’s courtroom.

I also like the subtleties the theatrically-trained Sjöström is introducing to his cinematic language, a coffee cup falls to the floor when a character suspects himself of murder and as he struggles to pick up the pieces, the hot coffee stains his hands as he tries to think through the drunken night before. A groom’s father nervously wrings his hands as the family of his intended realise their serving girl has a past and, after a wedding is halted prematurely the camera focuses on disappointed hands silencing the strings on an otherwise jaunty violin.

The Sjostrom Touch?

There is so much to enjoy in this film and, as is usual, Sjöström directs the best out of his players especially an youthful Lars Hanson, actually just turned 31 and still five years away from marrying another of the film’s stars, Karin Molander who was then still with director Gutsaf Molander. She is good too but the plum role goes to Greta Almroth as Helga Nilsdotter, the titular lass from a humble homestead on the marshier end of the town’s agricultural land.

Helga has had a baby with a married man, Per Mårtensson (Gösta Cederlund) who refuses to accept that the child is his. In most cinematic cultures of the time, this is breath-taking set up – you can imagine Griffith moralising already – and yet we immediately feel sympathy for Helga and that only grows after she and her father (William Larsson) try and get Mårtensson to accept his responsibility. There is no option but to take him to court and face the opprobrium of the entire community.

Greta Almroth is also in A Lover in Pawn (1920), The Parsons Widow (1920) and with Lars in The Flame of Life aka Song of the Scarlet Flower (1919) as screened at last year's Il Cinema Ritrovato

Helga encounters Gudmund Erlandsson (Lars Hanson) on route to the hearing and, by this time expecting negative attention jumps out of his horse and court before he can question her. He shakes his head; he is not dishonourable but young enough to take everything at face value.

In the court there is a bravura Lagerlöf twist as Helga, out-gunned and out-flanked by lawyers and hypocrites, refuses to let Mårtensson swear an oath on the bible as she does not want him to perjure himself. This wins her the admiration of the judge and many in the room, a selfless act in the most demeaning of situations. Gudmund is impressed and asks the young woman to become his housekeeper. Helga soon proves her worth and greatly impresses Gudmund’s parents, Erland (Hjalmar Selander) and Ingeborg (Concordia Selander) with her cooking and cleaning.

Nice use of mirror by Sjöström and cameraman Henrik Jaenzon

But Helga cannot escape her shame as Gudmund is due to marry Hildur Persson (Karin Molander), daughter of a well-to-do family who seeing the Erlandsson’s new domestic immediately issue a no-Hildur-with-Helga ultimatum. The family have little option although Ingeborg offers any help the outcast Helga may need saying that Hildur who is one of those people who see their own needs first…

Things progress and with days to go to the big wedding, Gudmund has a night out with the lads he is going to regret. A drunken brawl results in a man being killed and it is only in the light of day with his hangover clearing does he hear of the killing and of a broken pen knife found embedded in the victim’s skull. Reaching down for his own knife he finds the blade has been broken off… is he the killer? Can he be forgiven and can he be saved? No spoiling today!!

Karin Molander and Greta Almroth

At every turn, Helga does the right thing and what she feels she must do for everyone else, she is the most morally consistent character and whilst other’s learn from their mistakes as they go they, eventually learn from her too. The woman at the heart of this story is a single parent, with a child born out of wedlock and she is the hero!

The Lass from the Stormy Croft seems to have been a success and, influential too with author Peter Cowie, writing in Scandinavian Cinema, that Sjöström’s film influenced Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Parson's Widow (1920). The author herself was impressed as related by John Fullerton, in his article Notes on the Cultural Context of Reception: The Girl from Marsh Croft 1917, quotes her as having said that despite the length of some title cards “…she was in tears like everyone else who had seen the ending of the scene”. Lagerlof reportedly said that 'film is much better and stronger that drama...Never before have the different roles in a dialogue scene been so thoroughly or excellently realized." She was not so much in accord with Stiller but that is for another day…

Arriving for the big wedding...

The film is only available digitally on YouTube but the Swedish Film Institute have copies including 35mm positives and a duplicate negative.

You can read the source material too with the novella available of the oddly-named The Selma Lagerlof Megapack: 31 Classic Novels and Stories Kindle Edition. Fill your boots but the translations are mostly from American Velma Swanston Howard who was not always as faithful to her author as Victor Sjostrom.

Lars stars and Pola powers... Pordenone seconda parte

Day two and it was a leap into the unkown or rather the unwatched. Familiar faces in some cases but stories that had been lost or simply not been allowed out very much. I’m relatively new to this cinema muto lark and the joy is still very much there in discovery.

 

Why do we like silent film? It's the maths... 90% of human communication is non-verbal and perhaps our deepest instinct is to study faces, body language and the thousand tiny betrayals of true feeling. On a human level silent film is primal in more ways than one.

Today we had a number of stand-out emotional performances that spoke genuinely to our media-saturated senses in ways our monkey-minds instantly recognised: Handsome Lars Hanson’s infinite bewilderment, Febo Mari’s earthy spirit conveyed even when half-human (half cow? Not my period...) and, of course, Pola’s energy with anthracite eyes conveying dangerous levels of passion, her dancer’s grace enabling contorted communications that render title cards redundant. The words just get in the way, we only need to look, to see.

No wonder they had to get married after this film and for 45 years!

Lars opened and for almost the whoe day was in poll position with his performance in  John W. Brunius Synnöve Solbakken (A Norway Lass) (1919), one of so many Swedish pictures which attempted to recreate traditional rural life. Here his character Thorbjörn, starts as a boy led astray by an impish farm hand Aslak (manically-mischievous Einar Rød) who prefers the Devil’s work to his day job, spending more time filling the farmer’s son’s head with tales of trolls living up the hill in the Solbakken’s farm.

Up that hill is of course, Synnöve the girl who takes Thorbjörn’s fancy and most of the boys in the neighbourhood. She grows up to become Karin Molander and Thorbjörn must fight the others and, most of all, himself to gain the control and respect required to win her hand. Like so many of the best Swedish films of this time, this one moves a hand-cart pace with so much lingering detail of landscape, labour and love… a cracking film with real energy between the two leads who went on to marry in 1920 and for the rest of Hanson’s life. Was this a Mary and Buddy moment? Felt like it.

I love Italian cinema of this period also and with Lyda, Pina and Francesca otherwise occupied, Febo Mari’s Fauno (1917) gave us the chance to appreciate a diva who was, in soccer parlance, well-placed for the 4^th Champions League spot; Elena Makowska! She’s not alone as Nietta Mordeglia actually plays the lead but it’s the look as well as the performance and both excel.

Faun stars: Nietta Mordeglia and Febo Mari

It helps that they play off the great divo Febo Mari who we believe entirely when he says: “Do not run from me. I am love.” Well, I couldn’t carry that off but even as a statue come to life with hooves and really hairy legs, he has a torso to die for and a style that makes this operatically-daft ploy work well. It’s more of a poem than a drama and just a joy to watch with luxuriant tints throughout.

This was good but then the Pola flares started in the evening performance of The Yellow Ticket (Der Gelbe Schein) (1918) a German film that started out as anti-Russian propaganda and which would have been destroyed for its Jewish content had it not been hidden in the war to come. It is not a great story but it is a very neat one and a well-made film with some interesting composition and camerawork.

The film's main achievement is to recognise the value of it’s lead and there is a satisfyingly-huge amount of Negri content with the young actress given the chance to show her complex movements as well as passionate delivery. She is mesmerising in this film and the restoration projected pays glorious tribute to her ability to hold the eye and, in those human terms mentioned at the top... when you’re watching Pola Negri you get the point.

American title... a bit more sensationalist

There was a very interesting new score from Alicia Svigals performed by herself and Marilyn Lerner, I especially appreciated the violin which was played as if the centuries weighing upon its strings was being cast off. My uncle, a professional violinist loved the work of Jascha Heifetz and he would have really have liked this.

We also watched: There’s a cheeky strand of shorts entitled Nasty Women but really they’re just really funny and for me, the funniest today was Louise Fazenda in the Mack Sennett comedy, Are Waitresses Safe? (1917). Victor Heerman directs and the answer has to be, absolutely not! There’s a guy in this film looks just like Ben Turpin, really, check it out! 

Stephen Horne and Frank Bockius took the breaks off for this film’s climactic four-way battle, beating their piano and drums to within an inch of their ebony and indeed ivory.

I’d also never seen L'Emigrante (1915) before and it was brief but powerful; a little sprint classic in an Olympics of silent film. In what remains of Febo Mari’s film we see the great stage actor Ermete Zacconi play a peasant struggling for work as he emigrates from Italy to South America. He finds a job but is betrayed by the company who fool him into signing away his rights.

A reminder of just how low a de-regulated economy can sink - Brexit Bulldogs beware! This week I am totally enjoying being a part of Europe! 

The birds and the beetles… Erotikon (1920)

This slick comedy illustrates just why Mauritz Stiller was so admired in Hollywood following on from his equally knowing and thoroughly modern films featuring Thomas Graal. Along with Lubitsch (who this film influenced), he was the master of sophisticated European cinematic suggestiveness with this film containing much about Eros and very little of the more overtly-functional specifics a casual glimpse at the title might indicate…   

It’s not exactly Lars von Trier but for the time Erotikon must have been shocking enough with its freewheeling infidelities and close-relations-relationships

Anders de Wahl and Tora Teje

Along with the great Victor Sjöström, Stiller produced World-class films in a period when Sweden was able to compete on equal terms not just with Germany and France but also America, building on a great theatrical tradition through the war years when it wasn’t possible to import films from those involved in the conflict. The quality of their film production, performance and cinematography was second to none.

Here Stiller takes a zoological view of human relations, comparing bourgeois social mores with the sex life of the beetles that form the focus of one of the central characters academic studies.

Based on A kék róka (The Blue Fox Stole) a play by Ferenc Herczeg, Erotikon was an ambitious production successfully aimed at overseas markets, it featured sumptuous sets designed by Stiller himself as well as aerial photography and a cast of many dozen beetles.

The sex lives of Beetles and one of the film's many witty intertitles

Professor Leo Charpentier (Anders de Wahl) is the entomologist in question and he is almost totally absorbed in his studies even if he can only attract a half dozen students to his stultifying lectures. His wife Irene (Tora Tejz) is left alone top her own devices and these prove not inconsiderable.

She drops off Leo’s forgotten brief case at the university and then checks her hectic diary: “2pm, teach the furrier some patience, 3pm go flying with Baron Felix…” and off she goes as Leo beetles off to prepare for his passion.

Karin Molander keener than most of the Professor's students...

At the University, Leo’s niece Marthe (Karin Molander) works diligently drawing beetles as well as drawing male students to her like bees to a flower. Listening in, she is  rather too excited by her uncle's discussion on and is greeted with a disapproving look from the elderly Professor Sidonius (Torsten Hammarén), poised like an arthritic preying mantis.

Marthe dotes on Uncle Leo and thinks Aunt Irene equally marvellous oblivious to her wide range of friendships but then she has her own reasons for flattery.

Irene spends an awfully long time not deciding on what furs to buy and then tells the exasperated shop owner that she will return tomorrow.She bumps into her friend the Baron (Vilhelm Bryde) in his 100 horsepower sports car: how the other half lived in 1920's Stockholm.

Up, up and away...

Irene makes her appointment with the Baron and off they fly up into the friendly sky. Leo’s best friend is a handsome sculptor Preben Wells (Lars Hanson, didn’t really need to mention “handsome” there did I?) who spots the couple and the plane: is he interested for his pal’s sake or his own?

Henrik Jaenzon’s cinematography is, like much else in the film , excellent and the aerial shots are fascinating especially as the plane flies close to ground passing over Preben as he looks up in concern.

A dinner party is held at the house and we see the complex relationship between Preben and Irene as she plays a love song on the piano, "Jeg Elsker Dig" (I Love You) and he smokes his pipe lost in thought – not surprisingly given the rather risqué dress she is wearing: the Twenties obviously started roaring early on in Sweden.

After they have eaten the party head off to the theatre to watch a ballet about the infidelity of an Arabian queen: Schaname. It's fascinating to watch a ballet from this period and the staging and choreography are spectacular with dancers Martin Oscár as the Shah and Carina Ari as the tragic herione Schaname.

A night at the opera

The show’s adult themes challenge the watchers as Irene looks at the Baron, Preben looks at her and Leo thinks perhaps of beetles… There are some witty shots of the audience as one wife pulls the opera glasses from her husband as he spends rather too much time admiring the leading dancer.

Don't look now...

Earlier Leo had calmly discussed how many mates specific beetles have as in some cases “one female is never enough”, and it’s not just some of the audience in the ballet that have similar perspectives. But beetles are more straightforward than people and what follows is a confusion of motives and interpretation as everyone miss-understands everyone else.

 

Preben might be worried for Leo and Irene but he also wants Irene and her splendid wardrobe for himself. But, the Professor’s wife is seemingly engaged in pursuit of the dashing Baron… her signals are confusing.

Tora Teje

At the same time, Professor Leo is oblivious not just to his wife’s obvious courting displays but also the close admiration of his niece (and I really hope she’s not a blood relative!).

Things come to a head when Irene returns to the frustrated furrier and sees Preben’s model try to order an expensive stole on his account… She leaves before the young lady’s request is declined after a phone call to the artist.

Then Preben sees the Baron enter an apartment with a young woman who looks very much like Irene… Both are now feeling betrayed by the other and as Preben points the finger in front of the astonished Leo, Irene heads off back to mother (Elin Lagergren) whilst the sculptor urges the Professor to seek satisfaction from the Baron: a duel that can surely have only one winner!

Preben is concerned for Leo's honour

No spoilers:  The various strands are tied up very neatly in a well-balanced closing sequence which I won’t reveal. The performances are superb with Tora Teje the stand out as her boredom and thrill-seeking is revealed as something else all together as  the real sadness in her life comes to the fore.

I watched the Kino DVD which comes with a really interesting modern score from Bruce Bennett which works around the action, creating a mood slightly at odds with some of the emotional shifts but none-the-less it's very interesting musically. For me it succeeds in connecting over the whole film by mirroring the uncertainty of the characters’ motivations and the film’s detached and forensic approach to its subjects. 

It’s also worth mentioning the inter-titles which feature illustrations passing sneaky comment on the story and characters… very post-modern design from Alva Lindbohm Lundin.

Erotikon is available direct from Kino or from online retailers named after a big river in Brazil.

Thomas Graal's Best Film (1917) Stiller & Sjöström

Arguably the pre-eminent filmmakers between Birth of a Nation and Metropolis were not the Americans or the Germans but the Scandinavians. The Danes had everyone from Urban Gad, Benjamin Christensen to Carl Theodor Dreyer whilst the Swedes had the sophistication of Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller.

A gross generalisation of course, but there was something in the fjords at that time…both the main Swedish film producers were able to move the form on through a series of dramatic adaptations of classic stories and they were also adept at comedy. Not so much slapstick as “social”. And, in Thomas Graal’s Best Film (Thomas Graals Basta Film), Stiller produced what was not only one of the first films about film but something that could reasonably be described as post-modern.

Made in 1917 from a script by future director, Gustaf Molander the film stared Victor Sjöström as the eponymous Graal and his wife, Karin Molander as the impish Bessie Douglas.

Even watching a nth generation video the skill of this film is unmistakable and places it ahead of much contemporary comedy: who knew the Swedes were so sophisticatedly sardonic? (that alliterative back-hander is in tribute to my old pen pal from Stockholm!).

The story is based on a lazy scriptwriter who is more interested in pursuing his pretty secretary than polishing off his latest script: "If he weren't the laziest, he might well be the most successful writer of cinema plays....". Bessie leaves in a huff after he takes things just too far and this sets off the story of the film within a film that follows. Thomas decides that the only way to lure Bessie back is to write the story of her imagined life and then get her to play the lead (alongside himself, natch!).

Sounds contrived? But it’s so well acted and put together that you go with it and are never quite sure how Bessie is going to work out until the very end. Throughout there are knowing quips as the mechanics and business of film making is shown in unprecedeneted detail. A cigar-chomping producer casually discards scripts with weary disdain, a stunt man complains about the harness is is wearing to be shown hanging…in the end the crew decide to drop the scene: “if we don’t cut it the censors will anyway!”…Bessie disturbs what looks like an assault but the man on horseback she disrupts is an actor mid-scene. It’s real but it’s not real.

And, it's witty throughout with some crisp inter titles: "Bessie knows nothing whatever about acting, so naturally is filled with ambition to play all the great tragic roles."

If Sjöström was adept at comedy, sending himself up with just the right amount of restraint, his wife was superb. Naturalistic and watchable she throws herself into the role whether it’s her energetic hamminess in pastiching the contemporary dramatic style so prevalent across the Atlantic (and indeed in her husband’s earlier films), her belting smile or knowing looks (occasionally direct to the camera…how arch is that?!).

Throughout Stiller directs with crisp economy and marshals the strands of reality and un-reality well. Graal is driven into the act of creation by his longing to find Bessie again and through his fantasy attains reality…Is that the films’ message?

Only at the very last does Thomas discover that Bessie is of wealthy stock and not the pauper he imagined. She had willingly left home, on many occasions, driven by the need for adventure…in the same way the audience is. We can’t help ourselves from identifying with her for that.

She reads his script and smiles directly at us as she works out how she is going to play out the story and, head thrown back in a beaming smile, we hope it’s the same ending we would write.

Thomas Graal was so successful that a sequel was made in quick order, Thomas Graals Bästa Barn (Thomas Graal’s Best Child) in 1918.

Featuring largely the same cast and crew, Best Child picks up the story with Thomas and Bessie’s wedding. It’s as well made as the first film but lacking the twists and turns of logic. It’s more of a serious attempt at comedy but still full of whimsy and adult themes. The parents are like children and behave as such for as long as they can get away with it, Bessie mimics Isadora Duncan (a hippie well before her time) and Thomas tries to avoid responsibility like a modern man-child!

Ultimately their child grows them up: a very contrary conclusion in line with the impact “unreal” cinema has on them in the first film.

Stiller and Sjöström went on to greater things but these films show them gaining full control of the medium and approaching the top of their game.

It is therefore, particularly annoying that neither film is commercially available even though decent quality prints seem to exist. So...Kino. Criterion...BFI, anybody...get your act together please!

As Thomas Graal says..."like me the poor curtain is consumed with burning emotion!" ...exactly!!