A Man There Was

Born in Silbodal, Sweden, in 1879. The son of a lumberjack, he emigrated with his parents to the U.S. when he was only one year old. The Sjöström family prospered in the district of Brooklyn where Victor lived until the age of seven. In his teens, he was beset with problems related to his father who had become a religious fanatic. With the death of his mother, in 1887, the boy decided to return once more to Sweden. He joined the world of theater, a profession he was not to abandon throughout all of his life, even when he became a film director. Sjöström’s only appearance on the screen to reach Brazil was his performance in the role of Isak Borg, a main character in Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries (1957) – and was his last piece of acting for cinema. Sjöström also acted the role of an orchestra conductor in Till Glädje/ The Joy (1950), with Bergman as director. Sjöström directed 53 films – all of them silent movies, except for the last two (The Markurells of Wadköping, 1931, and Under the Red Robe, 1937). A good number of his films, however, were lost as a result of an outbreak of fire in the archives of the Svenska studios, where he began his cinematographic career, in 1912. His initiation into cinema, in fact, was by sheer chance. Sjöström was an actor in the theater and director of the Einar Fröberg repertory company, when a school friend called him to ask whether he would like to be a film maker. The Svenska studios, at that stage, were in a process of expansion and the young actor fell in the good graces of the Director General, Charles Magnusson. In 1912, Sjöström acted in The Black Masks and Vampyren, two films by his great friend Mauritz Stiller (a film maker acknowledged by a retrospective at the 27th Mostra). The same year, he directed his first film, a drama, The Gardener, an original script by the same Stiller. Right from his very first film, the new director was the source of controversy. The final scene, where the main character (Sjöström himself) practically rapes a young girl in a hothouse full of flowers was rated too explicit and the film was censored. The censors claimed that the scene was a “threat to public order”. This did not seem a very promising start. But, in his second film, Ingeborg Holm (1913), the director attained success. Under pressure from his boss, Magnusson, to find a role for film star Hilda Borgström, whose contract with the studio was about to expire, Sjöström adapted a play by playwright Nils Krok, starting a trend he was to adopt throughout all of his career – adapting literature. The film was a great success and also wrought much controversy in the contemporary press, around his theme, namely rendering assistance to the poor. Critics were high in their praise of the realism of the narrative and the camera work by Henrik Jaenzon, together with his brother, Julius Jaenzon, one of the most consistent partners in this, his first phase as director. In 1916, he directed Sea Vultures, a drama with a court scene that became anthological, and Kiss of Death, a police story. It was with Terje Vigen (1917), however, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s celebrated poem, that the film maker was at last acknowledged. More than that, together with Mauritz Stiller, he was raised to the condition of one of the exponents of the so-called Golden Era of Swedish cinema. One of the basic characteristics of his style was his faithful rendering of the literary masterpieces he adapted. Along these lines, he filmed four books by Selma Lagerlöf (1858-1940), winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909. The first of these was The Girl from Marsh Croft (1917), and the last, the celebrated Körkarlen (The Phantom Chariot, 1920), that Ingmar Bergman, even today, admits he sees at least once a year. Regarded as the height of the Swedish Golden Era, The Phantom Chariot was extremely long in producing, with a premiere only in 1921. The outdoor scenes were filmed at night, producing a somber, magical atmosphere as a setting for the story of David Holm (Sjöström himself), a man compelled to return once more from the world of the dead to save his family’s life. Nature is at the center of the narrative, almost a character in itself, and is one of the distinctive characteristics of The Outlaw and his Wife (1918). With the beautiful scenery covered in snow and the flight of the main characters running the length of gorges, the film was considered by French film maker Louis Delluc “the most beautiful in the world”. The main character is, in fact, Sjöström himself, together with Edith Erastoff who eventually became his second wife. The director developed an epic in two parts as from only three chapters of Jerusalem, a novel by Selma Lagerlöf – The Sons of Ingmar (119) – a success that was seen by 196,000 people, almost one half of the population of Stockholm at the time – and Karin, Daughter of Ingmar (1920). Another constant partner to Sjöström was author and script writer Hjalmar Bergman. Together, they made five films, amongst these, A Dangerous Pledge (1920), Love’s Crucible (1922), and Fire Onboard (1923), the latter made in Sweden before he left for Hollywood. Sjöström moved to the U.S. on invitation of the head of MGM studios, Louis B. Mayer, in 1923. There, he became known under the name of Victor Seamstrom and made nine films, amongst these He Who Gets Slapped, with Lon Chaney, The Scarlett Letter (1927), and The Wind (1928) – both with film star Lillian Gish, who chose him as director, as also the actor who was to act with her, Lars Hanson, also from Sweden. Filming The Wind imposed a good deal of hardship on the cast and team when the director required that the outdoor scenes be made in the Mojave desert, with extremely high temperatures, in addition to the constant use of ventilators to produce a sandstorm effect. In her memoirs, Lillian Gish was to remember the occasion as “one of my worst experiences in filming”. Even though he was overshadowed at the time by the recent introduction of spoken cinema (with O Cantor de Jazz, of 1927), The Wind was later to be regarded as one of the masterpieces of the director’s career. His last film in Hollywood was The Divine Woman (1928), a biography on film of actress Sarah Bernhardt, starred by Swedish actress Greta Garbo. Unhappily, this film was lost, with only one fragment remaining. In Europe, once more, Sjöström directed only two more films. The first in Sweden, once again, a story by Hjalmar Bergman, The Markurells of Wadköping (1931), released soon after the death of the script writer. His last film as director was made in England, Under the Red Robe (1937), an adaptation of the adventure novel by Stanley Weyman. In spite of various invitations to go back to directing, Sjöström always refused and remained solely as an actor. He acted in a further 18 films, working for directors such as Gustaf Molander (who had been his script writer in Terje Vigen), Tancred Ibsen, Arne Mattsson, and Ingmar Bergman. Sjöström died in 1960. —Mostra