The Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film: Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller

"The Image Makers see their images emerge out of the story. And then suddenly: darkness."- Per Olov Enquist in Bildmakarna, a fictional account of Victor Sjostrom, Julius Jaenzon, Tora Teje and Selma Lagerlof

"The stylistic changes brought about by Sjostrom's moving to Hollywood may not have been as definite as film history would have it according to the paradigm. Still the story of Sjostrom was transformed by his transition to Seastrom"- Bo Florin

An actress tells a film director, with whom she is having a brief affair, that he is not the author of the film he is making, "Hon menar att det ar hennes bok Victor. Inte din. Du mekar bara."/ "She means that it is her book Victor. Not yours. You are just tinkering with it."- Lynn R Wilkinson on the Victor Sjostrom film Bildmakarna

When reading t he play "The Image Makers" by P. O. Enquist, who passed away in 2020, Ingmar Bergman reiterated an often quoted sentiment about the actor-director Victor Sjostrom with " 'The Phantom Cariiage' is one of my most important cinematographic experiences." I needed a question that could be answered quickly when recently corresponding with, introducing myself to, rather, author Bo Florin, Stockholm University, my having asked him which was his favorite film directed by Victor Sjostrom and his favorite directed by Ingmar Bergman. He was kind enough to reply by offering to send me a copy of the book on Stiller and Garbo that he wrote with author Patrick Vonderau in that although it could be downloaded it was nicer "in the real", so in the future I might have something more than a preliminary question, one having to do with film history or film technique, at which both Stiller and Sjostrom were highly proficient. Florin wrote, "Concerning favourites: I guess my favorite Sjostrom is same as was Bergman's ('the film that he saw at least once a year': The Phantom Carriage." Although I here mention having recieved letters from Jon Wengstrom and Ase Kleveland, my correspondence has been sparse and has contained little film theory, that having been delegated to massive open online courses, some of which were on film and some of which, those on literature and history, where I have had the oppurtunity to meet my instructors in person here in the United States - so of course I was thrilled to hear from Professor Florin. In his letter, Bo Florin mentioned Patrick Vonderau, his coauthor to the volume "A Tale from Constantinople". Later in the week I recieved a letter from Professor Vonderau in which he wrote, "Thanks for your interest."

The book did come to our apartment through the mail, and I have sent Bo Florin a note of thanks, which he has recieved and acknowledged with the closing, "All the best". Included in the volume is the entire unfilmed shooting script of the film written by Mauritz Stiller and Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius which was adapted from the novel Whirlpools of Life, written by Vladimir Semitjov. While writing "A Tale from Constantinople" Florin drew upon correspondence between Stiller and Semitjov that is now housed by the archive of The Swedish Film Institute. The photoplay is spectacular and not only includes both expository and dialouge intertitles as well as the shot structure of the film but blocking instructions. Working from a shootingscript itself neglected to the extent it was thought to be "lost", Florin adresses the "singularity" of lost artefacts, what a historical piece of evidence might tell us as being unique, particularly how Enhistoria fran Konstantinopal might outline the developoment of Mauritz Stiller as an artist, his "career narrative". Bo Florin has been adept, if not brilliant, doing this with the works of Victor Sjostrom. Similarly, the careeer of F.W. Murnau has been recently seen as a "narrative". Interestingly, Florin goes so far as to speculate whether the completion of the film would have kept actress Greta Garbo in Europe. Rediscovering Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller as autuers of the Golden Age of Swedish Film with the Svenska Biografteatern and Skandia Filmbrya merger into Svensk Filmindustri and as Film Preservation Victor Sjostrom, in a letter to journalist Charles L. Turner quoted in the periodical Films in Review during 1960 on the occaision of the director's death accounted for his remaining taciturn about his career, the letter having had been being written twelve years earlier. "I dislike very much speaking about myself or work. And I really habe nothing to say about work finished so long ago, and left so long behind me. As a matter of fact, I had entirely forgotten most of it and was only now reminded of it by your notes. Some of the pictures....were perhaps ahead of their time. Their success was probably because the public's taste was different from that of today." Perhaps the correspondence, dated from before Victor Sjostrom the actor had appeared on screen under the direction of Ingmar Bergman, had been prompted by a flourish revival of the films Sjostrom had made at Svenska Biograteatern with Mauritz Stiller to prefigure the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film. Turner quotes Victor Sjostrom as having said,"Unfortunately, I have a very poor memory concerning my film career. Perhaps it is because when I finish a film, I have it behind me, so it just doesn't interest me anymore. Instead, I have begun to think- or it would be more correct to say - worry about my next picture." The daughter of Sweden’s greatest director of Silent Film, Victor Seastrom, passed away during the beginning of 2019. Guge Lagerwall, actress and wife of Swedish actor Sture Lagerwall, had celebrated her one hundredth birthday during January of 2018 before having died two weeks before turning one hundred and one years old. Lagerwall was the daughter of the director and Swedish Silent Film actress Edith Erastoff and, according to Victor Sjostrom one of the reasons why he returned from the United States to Sweden. The daughter of Victor Sjostrom, Guge Lagerwall wrote the screenplays to two Swedish Films, “Smeder pa luffen” (Erik Hampe Faustian, 1949) and ”Lattjo med Boccaccio” (Gosta Bernhard, 1949)- she appeared in seven films that were made in Sweden, including “Franskild” directed by Gustaf Molander in 1951, Molander having ditected the father, Victor Sjostrom, a year later, during 1952, in the film "Love" (Karleck). It may be noted that since the passing of Guge Lagerwall, two actors that starred with Victor Sjostrom in the masterpiece “Wild Strawberries” (1957) directed by Ingmar Bergman and photographed by Gunnar Fischer, are now recently deceased. Actress Bibi Andersson passed away early during 2019, actor Max Von Sydow early during 2020. Author Tommy Gustafsson is more than correct when he reluctantantly admits a canonization of Swedish Silent Film hinging on the names Victor Sjostrom, Mauritz Stiller and Selma Lagerloff. Mauritz Stiller had given Greta Garbo a lead role while in Sweden in adaptation of one of Lagerwall’s novels, an adaptation that did not go unnoticed by Lagerwall, while Victor Sjostrom had given Greta Garbo the leading role in a film version of the life of actress Sarah Bernhardt after she has arrived in America with Stiller. Although Gustafsson omits placing directors George af Klerker, Gustaf Molander and John Bruinius in a chronological relation to the forming of Svenska Filmindustri, he marks their absence in cannon that has been widely familiarized, including the discourse of what he notes Bordwell and Thompson see as a “dependence” upon landscape in Swedish film that distinguished Stiller and Sjostrom as filmmakers concerned with artistically articulating man’s place in the universe through personifying the emotion inherent in Scandinavian exterior shots and through heightening the interest in human action when confronting the elements. Shari Kiziran of Senses of Cinema recently succinctly summarized the virtue of the work of Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller as being "cinematic adaptations of Swedish literature shot on location in Scandinavia's dramatic lanscape.", but the present author would caution that it may be added that Sjostrom's use of landscape imparted a deeping of character, the Swedish Film program guide to Wild Strawberries having noted that "Using Selma Lagerlof's material, Sjostrom introduced real people into film." Jaako Seppala quotes Leif Furhammar to illustrate that Swedish Silent Film had found a literary cannon that looked to Swedish Literature for adaptations where as Finnish Silent film looked to fiction before more reluctantly adapting belltristic litterature. "The convention of including some of the original dialogue in the film adaptations' for the audience to recognize and enjoy was presumably adapted from Swedish films of the Golden era. As Eirick Frisvold Hanssen and Sofia Rossholm argue ' the use of direct quotations implies a notion of "double authorship" underlining the [the literary author's] authorial prescence' which is what Finnish sough to achive. In both countries artistic quality was synonymous with literary quality." Film was being distinguished as transnational cinema created by the personal style of the autuer. Scholar Casper Tybjerg, University of Copenhagen, in his article "The Woman's Point of View, Thora van Deken" seeks to expand the cannon of the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film by including one film directed by John Brunius, "A Mother's Fight" as belonging to cannon by being atypical by virtue of its point of view shots and flashbacks, despite its lack of Scandinavian landscape, a film that "consistently aligns us with the title character and her point of view". Co-written by Brunius and Sam Ask, the film was photographed by Hugo Edlund and starred Pauline Brunius. It is included by the Swedish Film Institute as being a noteworthy example of films that comprised the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film. In his book Masculinity in the Golden Age of Swedish Cinema, Tommy Gustafsson looks toward the viewpoints of Leif Furhammar to see competing foreign markets as a reason for the Swedish Art Film, markets that would not only compete for the attention of rivetted audiences, but for the directors of Sweden and Europe themselves. In an attempt to delineate Victor Sjostrom as a Swedish auteur, as a pioneering father of Swedish Cinema that propagated a nationalistic style, Bo Florin also asks us to keep in mind the influence of American Film on the global market, perhaps an influence that was competing with popular Danish films. Florin notes that an economic crisis that was weighing heavily upon Charles Magnusson caused the formation of a subsidiary company, AB Filminspelning, that included directors Victor Sjostrom ,Mauritz Stiller and John Brunius, a company that was unsuccessful in preventing the departure of Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller to America and a Hollywood which comprised 90% of all silent film being manufactured, easily and readily drawing the two monolithic directors away from Sweden after they had established the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film where stylistically, often the character is analyzed against the backdrop of his enviornment to deepen the film thematically. It is far from arbitrary to begin the historiography of the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film with the adaptation of Henrik Ibsen by Victor Sjostrom - Eirik Frivold Hamssen, in his volume Silent Ibsen, Transnational Film Adaptation, in the 1920's and 1930's. "In his detailed reading of the film, Bo Florin demonstrates how the alledgedlly 'national' cinematic style of the Golden Age draws on, adapts, and imitates a variety of media and that the sources used are fundamentally transnational by nature." A filmography included in the volume compiled by Maria Lund, Oslo University, lists Axel Esbensen as the designer and Nils Ellfors as the studio manager to "A Man There Was", directed by Victor Seastrom.