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Reviewed by:
  • The Phantom Carriage (1921)
  • Rob Byrne (bio)
The Phantom Carriage (1921) ; Blu-ray distributed by Criterion, 2011

Decades prior to his iconic role as Dr. Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 Wild Strawberries, Victor Sjöström played the lead as one of the greatest film directors of Sweden’s golden age of silent cinema. Between 1912 and 1922, he directed, and often starred in, more than forty Swedish films, including Terje Vigen (A Man There Was; 1917), Klostret I Sendomir (The Monastery of Sendomir; 1919), and his 1921 masterwork Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage), which has been digitally restored and released on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection.

Körkarlen, literally The Coachman, was the first production of the newly formed Svensk Filmindustri, which had been created through a merger of Svensks Bio and Filmindustri AB Skandia in December 1919. The film is based on the 1912 novel of the same title by Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Released in Sweden as Körkarlen (1921), as The Stroke of Midnight (1922) in America, and in the United Kingdom as Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness (1922), the film was a great critical success. Filmnyheter declared it “one of the biggest ever screen successes,” and the New York Times called it “compellingly interesting,” stating that “the Swedish company and Mr. Seastrom have taken a theme which has been done hundreds of times by others and invariably done to death, and they have made it live as a story on the screen.”1

The film begins on New Year’s Eve at the deathbed of Sister Edit (Astrid Holm), a Salvation Army sister, who is dying of tuberculosis. She calls for David Holm (played by the director), requesting to see him one final time. As the clock ticks toward midnight, Holm is found drinking with down-and-out friends in a church cemetery. In flashback, he relates to his drunken comrades the legend that the last person to die before midnight of a new year is doomed to serve as Death’s coachman in the coming year. When the emissary from Sister Edit arrives, Holm refuses entreaties to come, inciting a melee that culminates with Holm being skulled with a bottle. He collapses and expires just as the bell chimes midnight, while Death’s carriage, driven by a hooded coachman, arrives to claim his soul. Through a series of flashbacks and ghostly visits reminiscent of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the relationship between Edit and Holm and the source of her consumptive infection is revealed. In another flashback, Holm’s relationship with his wife (Hilda Borgström) and children is illuminated as well as his twisted reasoning for rejecting Edit and his own family. The coachman accompanies Holm as he visits those whom he has harmed the most, culminating with a return to his family just as his wife, in all despair, prepares a poisonous mixture with which she intends to end her suffering as well as that of the children.

While the plot may seem overly melodramatic to modern sensibilities, Sjöström’s masterful rendering is anything but. The visual composition of the film is spellbinding. Most dramatic is the director’s use of multiple exposure, which brings a multilayered translucency and depth to the sequences in which Death’s coach harvests the souls of the recently departed or in which the soul of David Holm travels in the company of the coachman. Sjöström achieved these unworldly effects through extensive use [End Page 175] of multiple exposures, sometimes passing the same strip of film through the camera as many as four times. He later described the sequence in which we see Death’s driver collecting the souls of the departed:

First the background was photographed. Then the same strip of film went once again through the camera, then the ghosts were taken against a neutral, dark backing, for the whole thing to balance in such a way that the ghost’s gaze, when talking to a real person—photographed at the same time as the surroundings—really met the human being’s eyes. . . . There was...

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