10. Körkarlen (1921) [The Phantom Chariot]
Sweden 93m Silent BW
Director: Victor Sjöström
Producer: Charles Magnusson
Screenplay: Victor Sjöström, from novel by Selma Lagerlöf
Photography: Julius Jaenzon
Cast: Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström, Tore Svennberg, Astrid Holm
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A celebrated world success in its initial release, The Phantom Carriage not only cemented director-screenwriter-actor Victor Sjöström and the Swedish silent cinema’s fame but also had a well-documented, artistic influence on many great directors and producers. The most well-known element of the film is undoubtedly the representation of the spiritual world as a tormented limbo between heaven and earth. The scene in which the protagonist-the hateful and self-destructive alcoholic David Holm (Sjöström)-wakes up at the chime of midnight on New Year’s night only to stare at his own corpse, knowing that he is condemned to hell, is one of the most quoted scenes in cinema history.
Made in a simple but time-consuming and meticulously staged series of double exposures, the filmmaker, his photographer, and a lab manager created a three-dimensional illusion of a ghostly world that went beyond anything previously seen at the cinema. More important perhaps was the film’s complex but readily accessible narration via a series of flashbacks-and even flashbacks within flashbacks-that elevated this gritty tale of poverty and degradation to poetic excellence.
Looking back at Sjöström’s career, The Phantom Carriage is a theological and philosophical extension of the social themes introduced in his controversial breakthrough Ingeborg Holm (1913). Both films depict the step-by-step destruction of human dignity in a cold and heartless society, driving its victims into brutality and insanity. The connection is stressed by the presence of Hilda Borgström, unforgettable as Ingeborg Holm and now in the role of a tortured wife-another desperate Mrs. Holm. She is yet again playing a compassionate but poor mother on her way to suicide or a life in the mental asylum.
The religious naivete at the heart of Selma Lagerlöf’s faithfully adapted novel might draw occassional laughter from a secular audience some 80 years later, but the subdued, “realist” acting and the dark fate of the main characters, which almost comes to its logical conclusion, save for a melodramatic finale, never fails to impress.
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Information
Internet Movie Database (IMdb)
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This article was written by Michael Tapper and is included in the book “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die” (Ed. S. J. Schneider)
Copyright © 2006 Quintet Publishing Ltd
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