Left Field Cinema

Nearly ninety years has passed since director Victor Sjostrom set about adapting Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlof’s novel. In 1921 the film was released, and the once great Swedish filmmaker had delivered an inspirational piece of art which crossed cinematic boundaries and would go onto lead the next generation of native film makers into their craft, most notably Ingmar Bergman who watched The Phantom Carriage once a year every year and described it as “the film of all films” with praise like that its hard to say anything more positive, but lets examine “the film of all films” and consider how it has achieved such a revered status with such a revered film maker. Sjostrom was Bergman’s mentor, he was one of a number of guiding forces for the young directing legend as he struggled through his first films like Crisis in 1946, constantly advising Bergman to make his scenes less complicated that film scenes needed to be simple. Sjostrom and Bergman had a long creative relationship up to Sjostrom’s death in 1960, an actor as well as a director Sjostrom also performed in some of Bergman’s work, as an orchestra conductor in his 1950 feature To Joy, of which Sjostrom is easily the best part, and later the more famously as Dr Isak Borg in 1957’s nostalgic and sentimental Wild Strawberries. Indeed his part in Wild Strawberries is probably where he is most widely known, an oddity, as his primary profession was that of the director, not the actor.

The plotline of The Phantom Carriage follows David Holm played marvellously by the films director, he is one of three drunkards who recalls the legend of the titular carriage, the last person who dies before the stroke of midnight on new years eve will have to drive the carriage for a whole year and retrieve the lost souls of the dead. Holm gets into a fight with one of his fellow drunks and in the scuffle he is killed just as the year comes to an end. Before he is to begin his charge, the previous driver, another man who’d previously warned Holm about his future fate, takes him to witness how his behaviour has affected the people in his life, his wife and children and a Salvation Army Nurse who’d previously sought to save Holm through an act of kindness only to have Holm mercilessly dismiss her with little to no thought about his actions. Through this process of memory and penitence Holm begins to see the errors of his ways, and although it is too late for him to redeem himself or to correct any of these mistakes, he can finally and truly realise the type of man he’d become, and how wrong his actions had been. The institution of death’s carriage in cinematic form had clearly influenced Bergman as well, the obvious touch stone being The Seventh Seal which famously featured a very humanised version of Death who liked to play chess.

The book and the film of The Phantom Carriage are both multi-layered; on the one hand this is a ghost story, a piece of super natural pulp fiction with its roots in urban legends and paranormal activity. On the other hand, Selma Lagerlof’s novel was actually tackling the thorny subject matter of alcoholism, and the devastating effect it has both on the family unit and the human soul. Sjostrom wanted to adapt the novel in order to make the first film about something real, the real being alcoholism the paradox being that in order to make a film about something real, he made a ghost story. A fantasy about mystic occurrences, and phantoms who can walk through walls.

The plot of the book and the film does seem very familiar, it is very closely related to Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, it’s clear that there is some heavy influence in the narrative, a tyrant who embarks on a reformative and redemptive journey with a spirit or spirits. But where A Christmas Carol differs from The Phantom Carriage is within its structure, although both of them move back and forth through time, the perspective of A Christmas Carol always remains grounded in Scrooge’s present. The Phantom Carriage is far more complex, weaving flash backs within flash backs and constructing an objective rather than subjective, non-linear structure. What is quite unpredictable is how deceptive the films title actually is, although the ghostly element of the story is most definitely in play, its is far from central, and audiences may be surprised at how little room there is for the paranormal. The film concentrates more on the protagonists struggle with his addiction and the painful unravelling of his life, The Phantom Carriage is more of a catalyst through which the story can take form.

It is all played out through a set of impressive performances, not least of which from Sjorstrom himself as our leading man, silent film is often known for being rather more theatrical than the standards of naturalism we’re used to today, but surprisingly The Phantom Carriage very rarely pushes into the realms of melodrama or over acting. Not only are the performances believable, but they also form three-dimensional characters, Holm being the most obvious, his story is truly heart wrenching, a story of a million other lost souls who let their lives be destroyed by alcohol. Sjostrom effortlessly creates an evocative portrait of a broken and bitter man, a representative of a real curse suffered by real people and this is despite the limitations of the medium in the early twenties, and perhaps more importantly within the confines of a paranormal plot line. It is as convincing and impressive a performance as that of Ray Milland in Billy Wilder’s 1945’s alchoholic centred film The Lost Weekend, or Nicholas Cage’s drunken stupors in Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas from 1995, but what’s more impressive is that Sjostrom managed to do it with out the aid of a single spoken word.

The Phantom Carriage is filled with memorable moments, after selflessly staying up all night to mend Holms tattered jacket, with no thought as to the diseases that maybe caught within the garment, the Salvation army nurse has her hopes shattered upon returning it to Holm. Holm tears it up again, and tells her rather bluntly that she shouldn’t have bothered and that this is the way he likes it.

A flashback in the middle of the film features drunken and enraged Holm hacking an interior door down to get to his wife and children. A powerful image, decades before Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick would use a similar scene for the 1980 film The Shinning.

The scene where Holm dies and meets the driver of the carriage for the fist time is stunningly realised. His body still lying on the ground beside his ghost, to avoid his fate he attempts to climb back inside the earthly casing but it is no use, the driver can see through his pointless deception. It’s a wonder to see how effective and often powerful this film is, conveying a bleak, nightmarish, ghastly world without the power of words.

Visually the film is as inventive as it gets. The films cinematographer Julius Jeanzon who had worked on films since 1907 pioneered the films double exposure technique for capturing the ghostly figures of the story, the current driver of the phantom carriage shown in one flash-back to collect the soul of a man who’d recently committed suicide. The driver walks through walls and doors as if by magic. Interestingly until very recently, this cinematic approach to ghostly figures in film hadn’t changed much.

The cinematography is another area where Bergman has clearly been influenced by this film, images again remind of The Seventh Seal, silhouetted persons on a hill top and high contrast sky scopes for example.

In 2000 Bergman directed a TV movie in tribute to his old mentor entitled The Image Makers. It is a fictionalised account of a meeting of Sjorstrom, Jeanzon, Lagerlof, and Tora Teje a leading actor at the time who was romatically involved with Sjorstrom. Teje is obsessed with Lagerlof’s novel and wanted desperately to play the leading role in The Phantom Carriage, but because of her tempestuous relationship with Sjorstrom this isn’t possible.

The TV movie examines the relationships between the author and the director with the material. It works on the basis that both Sjorstrom’s and Lagerlof’s fathers were alcoholics, which is what has led them to pour their heart and soul into both the book and the film. The Image Makers is a fascinating piece of work, and part of Bergman’s TV theatre (it does have the unfortunate draw back of being shot on video rather than film and so doesn’t have the same visual strengths that we have come to expect from Bergman. In fact visually it looks dreadfully cheap, but this hasn’t detracted from Bergman’s ability to direct actors, all four actors involved give believable and excellent performances. As for Sjostrom, he directed his first film in 1912, and The Phantom Carriage a mere nine years later was his 39th credit as director which when you do the sums works out at one film made every 2.7 months! In nine years he did more work than some directors achieve in a life time. It is sad to say that of all these films, I have only seen The Phantom Carriage as this is the only title available on DVD at the present time, and this is probably because of the high esteem with which Bergman held it. Hopefully in the future more of his work will be available. The Phantom Carriage is a wonderful example of early Swedish cinema, one of the best silent films currently available on DVD, up there with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, or D.W Griffith’s Intolerance. The Phantom Carriage is produced by pioneers, both in terms of technique and narrative, and goes to prove that there is more to Swedish cinema than just the works of Bergman or Roy Anderson.

M.Dawson