Scandinavian Realism

1918 · Victor Sjöström

The template. Sjöström shoots the north on real rock and real snow and lets the mountains close the story. Halla and Ejvind on the farm, then the highland, then the blizzard. By the last reel the weather is the only character still talking.

1919 · Mauritz Stiller

Stiller's saga: three Scottish mercenaries, a murdered household, and a frozen sea that will not let the ship leave. The procession across the ice is the image. Jaenzon was already doing double exposures here, a year before the Phantom Carriage.

1920 · Carl Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer, funny. A student wins the parish and has to marry the previous pastor's widow, and Hildur Carlberg, in her seventies, plays her without asking for anyone's pity. Farm rooms, a churchyard, real hay. The severity came later, and it was a choice.

1920 · Mauritz Stiller

The same decade, the other Stiller: a sex comedy about a professor who studies beetles while his wife arranges her afternoons. The lecture on beetle mating is the film's best scene and its thesis. Lubitsch is said to have watched it, and The Marriage Circle suggests he took notes.

1920 · Carl Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer's Intolerance: four centuries, one Satan, a weak place in each. Skip to the Finnish episode, shot nearest the war it shows. You can watch him learn, story by story, that a face is enough.

1921 · Victor Sjöström

Guilt on ice. Sjöström plays the drunk, Jaenzon lays the exposures, and the coachman walks through a wall to collect a man who is not ready. The axe through the door is the scene Kubrick borrowed. The wife on the other side of it is the film.

1922 · Benjamin Christensen

Not a story, a lecture with demons in it. Christensen reads the Malleus Maleficarum, stages a Sabbath, then ends in a modern clinic and says the accused were patients. He plays the Devil himself. Sweden let it open in four cities on one day; Variety called it unfit for exhibition.

1923 · Per Lindberg

A labor picture that thinks it is a comedy. Four women clerks split rent and wages in Stockholm, and Lindberg keeps the camera in the kitchen and the typing pool. Tora Teje is the one to watch. The realism here is a pay envelope.

1923 · Mauritz Stiller

A reindeer herd Stiller could not direct and did not need to, and a man who comes home from the stampede with his mind gone. Incomplete, and the missing footage is part of the experience. Watch Hanson in the snow: the landscape working on a body until it breaks.

1924 · Carl Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer in Berlin with Freund on camera, and the household is the landscape. An old painter loses his model to a princess and keeps painting. Christensen, fresh from playing the Devil, plays the artist. The last title is not a twist. It is a man deciding what his life was.

1924 · Mauritz Stiller

Stiller's Lagerlöf epic and Garbo's way out. Lars Hanson as the defrocked priest, manor houses in Värmland, and a sleigh chased by wolves across the ice as the set piece. Watch Garbo look at Hanson too long. Mayer saw the same thing.

1925 · Carl Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer strips the set to a flat and puts a bully in an apron. The old nanny moves in and runs the house until he is fit to. Low doorways, small rooms, a camera that knows where the dishes are. No visions. A feminist argument made with a laundry basket.

1926 · Karin Swanström

A woman directing, a girl in her brother's tailcoat, and a town that has to decide what it saw. Swanström plays it as a comedy about permission. The suit gets the laughs. The gossip gets the last reel.

1927 · Victor Sjöström

The tradition crosses the water. Sjöström at MGM, Gish as Hester, Hanson as the minister who will not speak, and the Puritan town standing in for weather. Watch the scaffold scenes: a community as a climate you cannot get out of.

1928 · Carl Theodor Dreyer

The set stripped until a face is enough. Dreyer builds a concrete castle and then barely shows it; Maté keeps the camera on Falconetti and the judges leaning in. No makeup. The print that survives was found in a hospital closet outside Oslo in 1981.

1928 · Victor Sjöström

The Texas wind Sjöström took to Hollywood. Gish in a shack, sand under the door, propellers in the Mojave doing the acting the mountains used to do. She shoots a man and the ground will not keep him. The studio ending is not his, and you can tell where it starts.

1932 · Carl Theodor Dreyer

Dreyer with sound and almost no talk. Shot through gauze so the image looks half developed, and the shadows go where they like. The burial seen from inside the coffin, a glass window and sky, is the moment. Not Expressionism: a Dane with French money and a dream's logic.

1913 · Victor Sjöström

The one that changed a law. A widow loses the shop, the children are boarded out, and the poorhouse takes the rest. Sjöström in 1913, already refusing to soften it. The scene where her son does not know her is the whole argument.

1917 · Victor Sjöström

Ibsen's poem, and the sea as the lead. Terje rows to Denmark for food, comes home to a dead family, and years later has the officer's wife and child in the water in front of him. Sjöström shot on real water and let the choice take its time.