Tag: Julius Jaenzon

Live cinema at the BFI: Gösta Berlings saga (1924; Sw.; Mauritz Stiller)

On Sunday I went to London to the BFI Southbank. The reason? To see the UK premiere of the new(ish) restoration of Mauritz Stiller’s Gösta Berlings saga. Having known the film only on its old DVD incarnation, I was excited to see the differences that extra material and tinting/toning would make. I also have memories of being mildly irritated by the Matti Bye score present on the old restoration, so looked forward to hearing the live piano accompaniment from John Sweeney. Delightfully, the presentation took place in NFT1 – Stiller deserves the biggest screen on offer! With an excellent view in the centre of the auditorium, I took my seat…

Where to begin? I suppose with a synopsis. But with Gösta Berlings saga this is something of an undertaking. As he had done with Gunnar Hedes saga (1923), Stiller simplified the Selma Lagerlöf novel on which the film is based – by my god it’s still a complex affair with a shedload of characters. Later I will discuss a few aspects of the plot through its characters, but a brief summary might go as follows: Gösta Berling is a defrocked priest who joins a band of revelling “cavaliers” on the Ekeby estate. He variously attracts and is attracted to a series of women, resulting in much heartbreak and ruin – including to the Ekeby estate. Can Gösta Berling rebuild his reputation and restore the estate to its rightful owner?

The new Svenska Filminstitut restoration was completed in 2022 and adds some sixteen minutes’ worth of footage to the longest previous edition, though it is still another fourteen minutes (approx.) short of the original two-part version from 1924. The restoration credits at least acknowledge this history, unlike those of the recent Svenska Filminstitut version of Stiller’s Sången om den eldröda blomman (1919), which (as I wrote when I saw it) omits any mention of the significant amount of material that remains missing. In terms of viewing the film, the missing scenes from Sången om den eldröda blomman cause less of a problem than the material missing from Gösta Berlings saga. With the latter, the plot is so complex that a summary of what happens in missing scenes (if this information is available) would have enhanced the experience. I remain entirely unclear as to whether the narrative gaps are an issue with Stiller’s skill as a screenwriter or with the gaps in the restoration. (More on this issue later.) As the restoration credits also admit, the pictorial designs for the intertitles of Gösta Berlings saga were not able to be recreated even if the text and font have been. This is a shame, but entirely understandable – and at least the credits flag this absence. But the most obvious difference to the new restoration is the revival of tinting (for the film) and toning (for the intertitles). The film colours are based on a positive copy of the film preserved in Portugal, and the intertitle colour on a contemporary written description, so the overall scheme is likely not identical to the copies presented in Sweden – but this is not a major issue. The main point is that the tinting, in combination with the picture quality, looks stunning. Gösta Berlings saga is a fabulous film to look at. As I’ve written on previous posts about Stiller films, one of the main reasons to watch them is the photography. For Gösta Berlings saga, Julius Jaenzon captures the landscapes in winter and in spring with equal skill. The level of detail, the subtlety of the lighting, the richness of the textures, the artfulness of the composition – it all makes for a great watch. Though I always prefer Stiller when he’s outside, the interiors of this film are also excellent. The well-appointed rooms of the big houses are grand in scale, but more interesting and more complex are the ramshackle spaces of the cavaliers’ “wing” and the various poor houses in which characters end up at various stages.

The cast of Gösta Berlings saga is led by Lars Hanson, who is superb in the title role. As well as being a strikingly handsome star, Hanson is an engaging and sympathetic screen presence – and Stiller knows just how to frame him, to light him, to capture his performance to its best. His character swings wildly from mood to mood, but Hanson can also be disarmingly reflective and vulnerable. It is these moments of stillness, often at the end of a sequence, that win you over to him. I must say that I find Hanson’s Don Juan-ish character in Sången om den eldröda blomman more comprehensible, and thus his highs and lows more moving than in Gösta Berlings saga. But Hanson is still striking on screen, and committed in his every scene of Gösta Berlings saga – whether channelling divine inspiration, drinking himself half to death, making promises he can’t keep, leaping into blazing buildings, or riding across frozen lakes. He has a lot to do and does it all with great aplomb.

Then there is Greta Garbo as Elizabeth, his Italian love interest and the not-quite-for-legal-reasons wife of the comic Henrik Dohna. I must be honest and say that I never really understood or engaged with Garbo’s character. This is partly an issue of performance, or of direction of performance. Stiller doesn’t quite know how to get the best out of Garbo, either in terms of her look or her gestures – and thus nor does Garbo. For me, Garbo is the least successful of the film’s major performances. But I think that the real issue is that her character is not well developed, and her relationship with Gösta a little unconvincing. We never see Elizabeth meeting Gösta for the first time, nor do we learn that he was tutoring her until later in the film, when we get a flashback to her Swedish lessons with him in the park. We see this same scene in flashback twice, but never the original scene or its context. I imagine this is a matter of missing material from the restoration, but if this is the case couldn’t we get a “missing scene” title to help explain? But even with this theoretical scene in place, I remain uncertain about the development of Elizabeth’s love for Gösta – and vice versa. Everything points to Gösta ending up with Marianne (they are attracted to each other, they clash, he rescues her from the snow, then from the fire), and Jenny Hasselqvist’s outstanding performance as Marianne makes her a far more appealing and comprehensible character than Elizabeth. Marianne’s smallpox aside (and are we to assume that a night out in the snow is the cause of this viral disease?), I was confused by the fact that she and Elizabeth are (so a title claims) good friends at the end of the film. This seems like a title doing a lot of work to fix quite a glaring dramatic tension, and to help us overcome any doubts about Marianne getting hard done by. The result of all this is that Garbo may look beautiful, but her character often doesn’t provide her with a clear and convincing set of motives or emotions to express or shape into a coherent performance. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still fascinating to see Garbo so young and not-quite-there-yet, but this is absolutely not her film.

For me, the real star is Gerda Lundequist as Margaretha Samzelius. When she has her first major scene with Gösta in the “wing” of the cavaliers, she suddenly brings a degree of emotional depth and complexity that the film has not yet plumbed. She narrates her past, puts his troubles in perspective, and sets up the personal trauma that comes back to haunt her later in the film. It’s a great scene, and she commands attention in everything she does. She is both naturalistic and expressive, superbly controlled without ever seeming mannered. What a great screen presence she is – you really can’t take your eyes of what she’s doing. This is the case even when the saga around her gets confusing. Dramatically, her relationship with the “cavaliers” that live on her estate goes through several total reversals of attitude that I find hard to comprehend. It’s an issue with the cavaliers more than with Margaretha, but she must bear the brunt of the dramatic topsy-turviness. Her most devoted cavalier (for reasons I don’t fully grasp) suddenly turns on the woman he has repeatedly said he loves, then feels devastated with guilt, then calls her an old witch, then (at the end of the film) feels remorseful once more. But whatever strange twists the film puts in the path of her character, Lundequist is there to embody the emotional resonance of the consequences. It’s a great performance.

Around the leads are a host of other strong, characterful performances. I have no reservations about any of the rest of the cast, but in discussing them I must work through some of my reservations about how the film knits together their various characters. For example, there is the scheming Märtha Dohna (played with relish by Ellen Hartman-Cederström). I can grasp her desire to disinherit her stepdaughter Ebba by (mis)allying her to Gösta: the film explains that this will enable Märtha’s natural son Henrik to inherit the Borg estate. But why at the end of the film does Märtha start taunting her prospective daughter-in-law, Elizabeth? Having tried so hard to get Elizabeth to sign the documents that would finalize the marriage, why does she suddenly turn on her and imply that the marriage would be a mistake? Seriously – why is she doing this? She also starts an argument with Gustafva Sinclaire about the history of her family and the identity of Henrik’s father. Given that the film has produced a dozen paintings (portraits of historic owners of Borg) to show on the walls of this very set, the faces of which are all clearly based on the features of the actor playing Henrik (Torsten Hammarén), we are given a clear visual answer (and a marvellous piece of design) – if no verbal answer in the dialogue of the scene. But this does not clarify the history of Märtha and her deceased(?) husband, nor the context of Henrik’s conception – nor the legal standing between the legitimate Ebba and the illegitimate(?) Henrik. God, what a confusing plotline – couldn’t the film make this clearer? Or at least not throw in last-second complications to make something relatively simple unnecessarily confusing?

I do not feel that I am merely nitpicking. It’s not unreasonable to want to know what is at stake in a drama and what motivates characters to act in the way that they do. For such a long and convoluted film, which has ample time to create complex narrative strands, I honestly don’t think Gösta Berlings saga is as coherent as it could be. At some point I will read the Lagerlöf novel, but my suspicion is that the film doesn’t go far enough in simplifying the original story. I often get the sense that far more has happened, and needs to be known, than I am being told in the film. Stiller creates a marvellously rich world on screen – but as impressive as the enormous sets and set-pieces are, I’m not wholly convinced in the coherence of the drama and its characters.

But I regret having to spend so much time on my reservations about this film. Despite all the above, I still think Gösta Berlings saga is tremendously pleasurable to watch – especially on a big screen with a full house and live music. In these circumstances, the film absolutely works. Indeed, one of the remarkable things about Gösta Berlings saga is that the way scenes can by be baggy or confusing yet somehow pack an emotional punch. Again and again, Stiller finds a way of pulling things together and providing you with a pay-off that works – even if the preceding material doesn’t.

In Act 2, the long flashback to Berling’s time as a priest is a case in point. The chapel scene, in which the hungover Gösta Berling delivers a knock-out sermon, doesn’t quite work on screen: intertitles have to do too much summarizing, to convey too much dramatic weight, to be convincing. (Stiller cannot quite find the cinematic means of expressing the content of the speech. Even Hanson’s performance, committed though it is, isn’t enough to substitute for what I presume is a lengthy chunk of prose in the novel.) Yet if the scene doesn’t quite come off, it is followed by a truly excellent realization of the aftermath of the sermon, as Gösta insults his parishioners and is run out of town. (We’ll pass over quite why he does this.) There follows a simply stunning image of him at night on a snowy, tree-lined road. It’s an image of amazing resonance, the very picture of dejection, isolation, loneliness, defeat. It’s beautiful to look at, with amazing low-level lighting, and expresses everything you need to know in a single shot. Perfect. Absolutely perfect. And it somehow redeems the rather uneven earlier part of the act. It gives you the emotional pay-off to what preceded it so effectively that the whole act makes more sense. This kind of thing happens many times across the film. Though I wasn’t convinced by Garbo as the main love interest, I was still moved when she got together with Gösta at the end. As I said, Stiller finds a way of ending things so effectively that your reservations (or at least mine) melt away.

Another factor must be mentioned, which is the terrific musical accompaniment by John Sweeney at the BFI screening. He kept up an amazing stream of lush, beautiful musical scenes and sequences that knitted together the drama into an effective whole. The race across the ice sequence in the penultimate act of the film, for example, was wonderfully handled. As elsewhere, I found the character motivation in this scene, and even the basic plotting, very confusing. (Dramatically, the whole sequence is oddly organized. Elizabeth heads off across the ice from Borg to Ekeby because she believes that her father will attack Gösta, but the audience has already been shown the father forgiving Gösta entirely. Fine – at least we know, even if it makes her journey less dramatically effective. But then why does Gösta seem to overtake Elizabeth rather than encounter her? The point of the scene is that they should meet each other coming from opposite directions, yet here he is catching up with her from behind. This isn’t just a matter of a different continuity pattern in Stiller’s editing, but a matter of dramatic staging. And when Gösta gives Elizabeth a lift, why does he steer away from Borg and admit that he is abducting her – not just from Borg but from Sweden? A fit of pique? Genuine passion? If so, from whence has it sprung? Only when Elizabeth asks him what the hell he’s doing does he mention the fact that they’re being chased by wolves. When did he realize this?) Yet during the screening, when Sweeney started pounding out a terrific refrain for the race across the ice, all these questions faded away: you’re left to marvel at the technical brilliance of the way the race is filmed, and the mad melodrama of it all. Even the faint sense of incoherence or (at least) incomprehension is somehow suspended, or transcended, in the thrill of such a gloriously cinematic scene. Later, when Ekeby has been rebuilt (but how?! and by what means?!), and Gösta and Elizabeth enter their new home, Sweeney’s grand, pealing chords were the perfect way to end the film. The final notes had hardly faded when the audience burst into applause: for the film, for the stars, for the music. Bravo!

I do hope this new restoration is released on DVD/Blu-ray, or at least made available online per other Swedish silents via the Svenska Filminstitut digital archive. Sadly, there is no guarantee that even the most important restorations ever get a commercial release. I still find it staggering that Sången om den eldröda blomman is not available on home media: you can buy the complete recording of Armas Järnefelt’s beautiful score on CD, but you cannot buy the film on DVD! Let’s hope something more happens to Gösta Berlings saga. I imagine that the old Matti Bye score will be expanded/reworked for any media release, but I do wish any original arrangement from 1924 would be investigated. Evidence of the music clearly survives, as Ann-Kristin Wallengren (in her thesis on music in Swedish silent film) mentions some of the cues used. (This included parts of Järnefelt’s score for Sången om den eldröda blomman, as well as of the Louis Silvers/William F. Peters score for Griffith’s Way Down East (1920).) It’s curious that the musical legacy of Swedish silent cinema has received so little attention, especially compared to the numerous original scores and arrangements that have been researched and restored for films elsewhere in Europe and in Hollywood.

Gösta Berlings saga is a big, baggy, beautiful film. I’m so glad I saw it in such wonderful circumstances at the BFI. And as much as I would welcome it on DVD/Blu-ray, I also cannot help think that I wouldn’t have been as moved – nor would my reservations have been so effectively overcome – if I had seen it on a small screen instead. Live cinema allows silent film to attain its maximum impact: audiences and music are an essential element of exhibition, and thus of understanding, that cannot be replicated at home. So if you ever get the chance to see Gösta Berlings saga this way, seize it!

Paul Cuff

Gunnar Hedes saga (1923; Swe.; Mauritz Stiller)

I saw the film via the streaming service of the Bonn International Silent Film Festival this summer. I didn’t make many notes “live”, so what follows is not as detailed as previous entries…

Gunnar Hedes saga (1923; Swe.; Mauritz Stiller)

Gunnar Hedes wants to be a musician, but his father dies and his mother wants him to go into business to save the family house. But when Gunnar falls for the orphan Ingrid, he decides to choose music over business and embarks on a wild scheme to win a fortune by herding reindeer…

The opening titles tell us the film is “freely adapted” from Selma Lagerlöf’s novel by Mauritz Stiller. It’s always interesting to see the way a filmmaker can insert their name into the credits when adapting a literary text. Given the tense relationship between these two authors, it’s no wonder that Stiller had to emphasize his artistic license from the outset. It’s a boast and an excuse.

Little Gunnar dreams of his grandfather the fiddler and legendary reindeer-rustler, whose portrait hangs on the wall of the Munkhyttan estate house. Miss Stava, the family’s old housemaid—who almost stands in for a kind of Lagerlöf -style female narrator—tells Gunnar the tale of his grandfather. The picture on the wall comes alive: within the inner frame, the grandfather plays his violin; beyond the inner frame, a vision of reindeer fills the rest of the film’s frame. It’s a neat encapsulation of Stiller’s art: exterior spaces flooding into the interior world of the boy’s physical and imaginative space. It also encapsulates the functions of the film’s music: bringing to life pictures in the frame. If the boy longs for an escape from reality, we soon understand why. For Gunnar’s reality is a world where the bourgeois adults (as exemplified by his mother) are cold, judgemental, and restrictive. “Gunnar is not going to be a violin player and a dreamer, but a practical man, who can one day take over Munkhyttan!”

Cut to the adult Gunnar (Einar Hansson), who is forced to study mining instead of his beloved music. A letter arrives, dragging him back home: his father is dying. We see the father die, but the following scenes are missing—so the restoration gives us just the titles, which survive without a visual context. There is something moving in the way the film offers just these intertitles. We read, then, that the father has left debts, and that the estate must get rid of some of its staff. The falling apart of Munkhyttan is given a kind of reconstructive equivalent by the missing footage.

The Blomgrens—travelling performers—arrive with an orphan they have taken in. She is Ingrid (Mary Johnsson). The Blomgrens are the antidote to the Hedes: free-talking, freewheeling, artistic. Even their horse, Lady Hamilton, has personality: she doesn’t budge without a musical soundtrack, so the Blomgrens must take it in turn to play the harmonica while they travel.

When the performers arrive in the courtyard of Munkhyttan, Gunnar is daydreaming of his grandfather playing the violin: his tiny figure appears superimposed on the desk. But he is woken by reality: it is Ingrid playing the violin. Gunnar races downstairs and joins in, playing the waltz from Gounod’s Faust and nicknaming Ingrid “Marguerite”. He explains that she was “a young girl who loved Faust and saved his soul with her love.” (Hint, hint.)

Gunnar’s mother comes outside and smashes the violin. Not just that, she stamps on it. It’s a great scene, and a brutal assertion of parental power. Realizing it was Ingrid’s violin and not her son’s, she instead gifts Gunnar’s violin in its stead: an act of spite disguised as an act of charity. Mother and son have a furious argument. Ingrid enters, hoping to return the violin to Gunnar, but falls in a faint at the family’s feet. She is taken in by the estate’s old steward, while Gunnar’s mother ejects him from Munkhyttan without a penny.

Gunnar takes up as a strolling musician and, on a train, ends up entering into a business deal with strangers to herd reindeer in order to make a quick profit. There follows a long section of the film in which we follow the reindeer herd across stunning landscapes. The film’s main set piece takes place when a snowstorm strikes and the lead reindeer makes a dash for it, dragging Gunnar across the frozen landscape and depositing him in a snow drift. When he wakes, he hallucinates a vision in the horns of a deer. The vision is, frankly, confusingly rendered via superimposition: it represents a fire at Munkhyttan, where Gunnar’s mother is trying to beat Ingrid. I wonder if this scene is in the novel (Lagerlöf liked her premonitions, so it strikes me as possible): it feels shoehorned into the scene. It didn’t relate convincingly to the rest of the film.

Ingrid’s own vision in the next scene is more interesting: the vision of an old woman as the personification of sorrow gives Stiller the chance to play with interior/exterior spaces. The woman and her bear-drawn sled appear to dissolve as a vision into Ingrid’s room, but (in reality, as a production still suggests) the bed has surely been relocated into the exterior space itself. (The wall dissolving away is an exceedingly brilliant effect.) Stiller cuts between a medium shot of Ingrid with the sled in the background to close-ups of Ingrid with the bedroom behind her: she is weirdly in these two spaces at the same time. The sled then appears inside the room itself, and slides out of frame as if further into the house, completing this strange transformation of spaces.

As elsewhere in the film (and in Lagerlöf’s work, and Stiller’s adaptations thereof), the vision is a premonition. As Gunnar is revealed being borne by misfortune, so Gunnar returns to Munkhyttan in a state of mental derangement. He refuses to sleep in the main house and soon escapes into the countryside. There is a lovely scene where he stares at his reflection in a river, and where he is found by Ingrid—the only person he seems to trust. Together they gather some gleaming rocks, which Gunnar believes are coins. He hopes to buy back Munkhyttan, which is being sold off by his distraught mother for want of funds.

But despite the time he spends with Ingrid, Gunnar is divorced from reality. In despair, as Munkhyttan is about to be sold, Ingrid tries to drown herself—but is rescued by the Blomgrens, who are once more on their summer tour. The scene is set for a return to the start of the film: this time it is Ingrid who plays the music from Faust, and it is this music which awakens Gunnar from his mental torpor. Gunnar’s mother finally blesses bother her son and Ingrid, and the Munkhyttan estate is miraculously saved: the rocks Gunnar gathered when mad are in fact valuable, and enable a new mining operation to bring them a fortune. The End.

A good film? Yes, but not a great one. If my description of Gunnar Hedes saga is less lengthy than with previous posts, it’s because I found the film less interesting than many I’ve watched recently. Perhaps it would make a difference if more of the film survived: only 70 minutes remain from the original 100. Would the various premonitions/visions have made more sense with more scenes around them? Perhaps, but I don’t think my wider reservations would be solved with more plot. I didn’t find the story especially engaging, and I was moved only occasionally. Likewise, I found the performances only occasionally moving. This film was Einar Hansson’s first leading role, and he only got it because Lars Hanson proved unavailable for the film. Perhaps this was a happy accident, for Einar Hansson is a much more boyish Gunnar than Hanson would have been. (The former was thirteen years younger than the latter.) Through Hansson, I can believe in Gunnar’s youthful enthusiasms, and he has a kind of sad, silly charm when playing mad in the latter half of the film. But I find Mary Johnsson rather stiff and doll-like. Her way of holding a gesture for too long, even her stilted way of playing the violin, inhibited rather than evoked feeling. Her performance often made it difficult to feel for her, or to believe in her inner life and emotions. I don’t think it’s her fault: she’s clearly been asked to perform this way. The sheer beauty of the way she is filmed almost underlines the limitations of the performance: the cinematography is lavishing so much attention on her face and hair that it forgets that more is needed to move the viewer.

But I should spend more time on the cinematography, which is stunning. Julius Jaenzon was the great cameraman of Sweden’s “golden era” of the 1910s-20s, and his work here is superb. I’ve mentioned the close-ups of Johnsson, which are often breathtakingly beautiful (aesthetically, yes, but not emotionally engaging for the drama itself). But the real stars of the film are the landscapes. The reindeer herding scenes contain some extraordinarily beautiful exteriors. Jaenzon captures the light shining off water, snow, and rock in an almost unearthly way. The tinting makes everything gleam and glow, while also enhancing the texture of the elements. I’d love to see these scenes on a big screen.

And I’d love to know what music was intended to accompany the film. The Bonn performance I saw streamed featured excellent music for violin and piano, as played by Günther Buchwald and Neil Brand. Sadly, the only soundtrack to accompany the film in its official online life (on the Swedish archive site www.filmarkivet.se) is by Helmer Alexandersson, which is more of an acoustic wash than a composed score. It’s reverbed to the max, leaving you with a dreamy, echoey drowsiness that quickly disintegrates in the memory. It’s like musical mulch. Not even the blizzard sequence awakens the soundtrack into more than a few deeper washes of sound. More to the point is that the music specifically cited by the film (and played on screen) is not used in the Alexandersson score. Buchwald/Brand carefully cite Gounod’s melody when required, and work the piece into their score in a very effective way. Why couldn’t Alexandersson? It’s not as if Gounod presents a copyright issue. (It’s a bugbear of mine when new scores ignore the music on screen. For example, the TCM restoration of The Mysterious Lady (1928) issued on DVD has a score by Vivek Maddala that ignores the music from Puccini’s Tosca that is shown being performed on screen, first in a theatrical performance and later on the piano. The opera is a thematic touchpoint of the film and to substitute it with something else—not to mention something infinitely blander—is baffling. I’m lucky to have seen the film performed with Carl Davis’s score, which quotes from Tosca and is by far and away musically superior.)

But one point to raise is with the choice of Gounod itself. A brief search in the text of the original novel seems to suggest that Lagerlöf made no mention of Faust, so perhaps the musical motif was one invented by Stiller. (Lagerlöf was unhappy with Stiller’s changes to her text, to the point of threatening to publicly disown her involvement with the film. Not having read the novel, I am unable to say which changes are obvious.) Gounod’s melody is a famous one, but also superficial: it’s a repetitive dance motif. It’s famous enough to be recognizable when played in the scene (and in the cinema) but it’s not a piece with any emotional weight. Indeed, Gounod’s opera had become a sort of joke for bourgeois taste: by the end of the nineteenth century, it was one of the most-performed operas ever written. In Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923), the artistic wife plays Debussy at the piano while her boorish husband wants to go and hear Gounod’s Faust in the theatre. (Dulac even gives us a visual parody of the singers belting out tunes that were by now a kind of cultural cliché.) The kind of cultural division between Gounod (bourgeois, populist) and Debussy (refined, modernist) is a key marker of the divide between husband and wife in Dulac’s film. (And yes, Madame Beudet is another film where the new score, by Manfred Knaak, doesn’t bother citing the music being played on screen.) Stiller’s film was released in the same year at Dulac’s, and it’s curious to observe the way these films use Gounod in very different ways. The fact that the climactic emotional scene in Gunnar Hedes saga is achieved through the citing of a banal piece of music seems odd, and contributes to the reasons why I wasn’t as moved as I felt I could and should have been. The idea of a Marguerite saving Gunnar’s soul was cited rather than developed, and the well-worn melody seemed to suit the facile way the film wrapped itself up.

So, in sum, a film worth seeing—but mostly for the exteriors, where Stiller (like Gunnar) seems freer to express himself, and where Julius Jaenzon’s cinematography is at its very best.

Paul Cuff