Mark Sandberg is professor in the Departments of Scandinavian and Film and Media at UC Berkeley. The Town Quartet comprises violinists Corey C. Mike and Mia Bella D'Augelli, violist Jacob Hansen-Joseph, and cellist Brady Anderson.

(A Man There Was). Victor Sjöström became Sweden's most prominent silent-film director when he discovered the main advantage of location shooting for a marginal film industry in the far North: particular landscapes that could be not easily be duplicated by other film industries. His film adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's epic poem Terje Vigen exploits the Scandinavian seascape, beginning the rise to international prominence of a Swedish film aesthetic in which powerful landscapes form an unyielding backdrop for human action.