The Outlaw and His Wife

Sjöström, Svenska Bio, 1918, from Jóhann Sigurjónsson's play. Berg-Ejvind (Sjöström), a thief on the run, takes work on a farm and leaves with the widow Halla (Edith Erastoff) for the mountains. They live as outlaws until hunger and a posse close in. He shot it in the north, on real snow and rock, not a painted fjord. Svenska Filminstitutet treats the film as a hinge of the silent gold age: landscape doing the work a close-up would later do. The last reel is weather, not speeches.