#106: The Phantom Carriage

The Phantom Carriage

Victor Sjöström
Initial release: January 1st, 1921 (Sweden)

images c/o FILMGRAB

The film industry is nearly 130 years old now, and with all those years of history, it's easy to forget that all the narrative and cinematographic techniques we take for granted now had to be invented somewhere. With what few silent films remain in the modern age, it's even easier to forget that the film industry between 1890 and 1930 was big business, with hundreds of films every year — go check out the wonderful Fritzi Kramer's Movies Silently blog if you wanna do a deep dive into silent film. And not just in America and Germany, but in Japan, the UK, Italy, Sweden, and elsewhere. When looking through the history of the Swedish film industry, obviously Ingmar Bergman is a major point on the line; but even he was building on ground sown by Victor Sjöström's 1921 film The Phantom Carriage.

It's New Year's Eve sometime after the turn of the century (the actual year is not set, but I usually tend to think it's 1912 based on when the original book, Selma Lagerlöf's Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! was published.) Sister Edit of the Salvation Army is dying, and has one last wish: to see David Holm, a local drunkard. She's been trying to help David patch up his marriage with his wife, but David has spiraled into a bleak, nihilistic worldview of hate and bitterness, hostile to everyone, and all her efforts have, so far, been in vain. Meanwhile, David is telling his fellow drunkards the story of his friend Georges, who died on New Year's Eve the year before, and how Georges had once related to David the legend of the phantom carriage, which appears every New Year's Eve driven by the last person to die in the previous year as they go around collecting the souls of the dead. David then gets into a fight with his drinking buddies, and they wind up accidentally murdering him and running off. Before long, the phantom carriage rolls up to collect his soul, driven by none other than the ghostly form of Georges — a fate that, ultimately, leads David to strive towards his own redemption.

This is a story, ultimately, about redemption and second chances; the film, the fourth one to adapt a novel by Lagerlöf, moves the action from the rural settings of previous films to an urban setting, giving it a bleak, lonely feel, with a complex narrative built on flashbacks within flashbacks. The real treat however is the special effects: in an era before optical printing made it easy to blend multiple pieces of film together, Sjöström used multiple exposures to create a ghostly effect, allowing for such tricks as the carriage going out to sea to collect a drowning victim. It's a real work of art, an obvious bright line linking it to Bergman's philosophical classic The Seventh Seal.

As with nearly all films of the era, this film is in fairly bad shape, and for a while no complete version existed. A high-end Blu-ray restoration did its best to piece together a full film using two separate, incomplete versions. But even then, a few frames are missing. It's not enough to detract from the film, however, in spite of the fact that the restoration did nothing to clean up the myriad scratches and other film artifacts, though most of the worst damage has been cleaned up. The Blu-ray also features not one, but two soundtracks. Most silent films actually did come with musical accompaniment, but it was all done live — in some places, by a full orchestra. Much of this has obviously been lost over the years, sadly, but there are often replacements, some of them composed specifically for the film. So aside from a brand new traditional soundtrack by Matti Bye, there's also a very different soundtrack done by KTL, one of the many side projects of Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley. The Criterion Collection Blu-ray features both soundtracks, so you get to pick, which is really nice. I can't speak to the Bye score because I haven't heard it, but the KTL score is an example of how modern musical genres can elevate older art, or even period or fantasy art that typically uses traditional music for a score (a good example would be the PSYRIM mod for Skyrim. Yes, I am a weirdo.)

While the story seems a bit maudlin, even mawkish now, if you're looking for a spooky ghost story to watch the night after Halloween, or even on New Year's Eve if you wanna get thematic, you could do worse than watch The Phantom Carriage. And it's a must-see for Ingmar Bergman fans as well.

-june❤