There are constants in the work of Victor Sjöström, a major figure in film history both behind and in front of the camera. One is the seeming always present sense of death. Sometimes, death might come in the form of disease or a sudden, violent mishap; or sometimes, a character in a film might depict death, or in the case of The Phantom Carriage, death’s servant. At the conclusion of most all his films, viewers are confronted by tragedy, some form of resignation, or noble self-sacrifice.
In many of Sjöström’s films, men are isolate individuals, if not physically, then emotionally. Regret and repressed feelings mark many characters, along with those who are depicted as sensitive or sullen. There is as well a corrosive sense of both men and women at odds with themselves, fighting their internal nature or outward environment, lonely and afraid in surroundings that overwhelm them and yet sometimes spur them to acts of courage. Another characteristic of Sjöström’s films is the strong-willed woman, singular characters who strive to overcome unfortunate circumstance and resist the near entropy that surrounds them.
The crowning glory of Sjöström’s early career is The Phantom Carriage. Known in his native Sweden as Körkarlen (which translates as “the driver” or “the coachman”), the film is based on a 1912 novella by the writer Selma Lagerlöf. The film was one of five Sjöström made from the works of this Swedish writer, the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sjöström wrote the script in one week and later met with the author on at least one occasion, reading her the script, quarreling over its direction, and finally taking her advice on ways to improve its cinematic presentation. Notably, some intertitles in the film come word for word from the book.
The Phantom Carriage, and Lagerlöf’s novella, is based on a folktale in which the last person to die on New Year’s Eve is doomed to take the reins of death’s cart, a cart with which they must collect the souls of the newly departed over the course of the following year. The film and the book follow the story of David Holm, who is knocked down and killed in a graveyard at the stroke of midnight on December 31; his death condemns him to become the next driver of the phantom carriage.
However, for reasons suggested in the film, Holm is instead resurrected by death’s servant, and made to relive the errors of his ways (à la Dickens’s A Christmas Carol). Holm, superbly played by Sjöström himself, is a deeply flawed character, an alcoholic, abusive, brutish man who is bitter and angry at the world. He is a man in desperate need of being saved, from himself. Holm has tuberculosis (then an uncurable disease) and deliberately tries to infect others, including his own young children. In another scene, Holm tears apart his only warm coat after the Salvation Army worker who cares for him mends it. Ultimately, The Phantom Carriage is a story of redemption, a common theme in films of the time, including Sjöström’s.
The Phantom Carriage can be a challenge to follow. The film’s almost experimental narrative is built on four lengthy flashbacks that make up the bulk of the film. Each looks back at incidents in Holm’s life. Far from a straightforward story, its challenges are compounded by the limited clues regarding time or place, especially in the form of intertitles. The Phantom Carriage was one of the first movies to make extensive use of the flashback technique, going as far as to employ flashbacks within flashbacks. Viewers would do well to allow themselves to float along in the churning currents of the film’s disjointed narrative—one loose of time yet psychologically bound by an outward realism that explores Holm’s inner being.
The Phantom Carriage has been described as a horror film, but it is not. If anything, it is a somber morality tale tinged with fantasy. Contributing to its unreal nature are the special effects used to depict death’s servant and its ghostly cart. To do so, the film famously makes use of double exposures. While this technique, like flashbacks, was not new, in this film its use was far more advanced than anything yet seen; consisting of brilliantly rendered multiple layers—namely double, triple, and, quadruple exposures—the living and the dead, and the material and the spiritual worlds are shown to exist side by side. While this technique may seem primitive or even obvious by today’s standards, it astounded audiences in the early 1920s.
Sjöström was a meticulous filmmaker, and deepening his film’s visual tension is its camerawork. Throughout, there is an avoidance of visual balance, with some scenes shot in to the corners of rooms. Sometimes characters stand with their backs to the camera, and in one scene, a character weirdly stands in the corner while looking into that same corner. Others scenes feature triangular compositions, suggesting characters psychologically locked by circumstance. In others, the camera was set up to form a circle around a character, suggesting an intense internal claustrophobia. While critics at the time complained about the dinginess of the film, the use of filtered light, pools of darkness, unearthly glows, and deep focus all add to a palpable sense of realistic unreality.
The person responsible for the film’s impressive camerawork as well as its use of multiple exposures (achieved in camera) was cinematographer Julius Jaenzon. He and Sjöström had worked together on fourteen earlier, though very different films. Among them were Terje Vigen, or A Man There Was (1917), and The Outlaw and His Wife (1918). Both were groundbreaking in their use of outdoor locations, the landscape and the natural environment acting as a mirror to human emotion.
In Sweden, The Phantom Carriage was released on New Year’s Day 1921. With the film’s ghostly events having taken place on New Year’s Eve, one can only imagine the effect it had on viewers of the time, especially in the first few weeks of its release. The Phantom Carriage went on to receive rave reviews and was successful at the box office, not only in Sweden, but elsewhere. Early on, Charlie Chaplin said it was the best movie he had ever seen.
The Phantom Carriage was also the film that drew the attention of executives at the newly formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who were so impressed that they invited Sjöström to work in the United States. He came, and directed nine films in seven years under the name Victor Seastrom. Among them are his best-known films, such as He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Scarlet Letter (1926), and The Wind (1928). The latter two starred Lillian Gish. The great actress once said, the “Swedish school of acting is one of repression,” adding Sjöström’s “direction was a great education for me.”
Over the years, The Phantom Carriage has influenced a number of filmmakers, among them Ingmar Bergman, who called it “one of the absolute masterpieces in the history of cinema.” In interviews, Bergman recounted how he first saw it when he was around twelve or thirteen years old, and how deeply shaken he was by the experience of the film.
Later in life, as his own career as a director began to take shape, Bergman returned to Sjöström’s masterpiece, watching it every year for years on end. In acknowledgment of his debt to The Phantom Carriage, Bergman used the same studio that Sjöström had used to shoot parts of his own masterpiece, Wild Strawberries (1957), a film in which Sjöström—in his final performance as an actor—once again portrays a man looking back on his life.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by the Matti Ensemble