January 16 – February 29, 2004 at the PFA Theater in Berkeley

Pacific Film Archive presents Victor Sjöström: Northern Light in a New Light a 25-film series which includes many prints that have been preserved and recently restored by the Swedish Film Institute. An actor and a stage and film director, Victor Sjöström earned his place in his country's film history as one of the leading talents of the Golden Age of Swedish cinema, and earned a very important place in international cinema history for the advances in visual storytelling that he introduced by combining populist drama with intense, subtly expressive natural landscapes and outdoor vistas. He was the artistic director at the Swedish Film Institute, where he acted as a mentor to Ingmar Bergman, and gave an unforgettable performance as a dying professor in Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

This touring series would not have been possible without the generous support of The Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, the Consulate General of Sweden, New York, and the Embassy of Sweden in Ottawa. It was organized by Edith Kramer at PFA in collaboration with Jytte Jensen of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Jon Wengstrom, curator at the Svenska Filminstitutet, Stockholm, and will travel to The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Cinematheque Ontario, Toronto; and the Cinémathèque Québecoise, Montreal.

In the years around World War I, Swedish cinema was popular and critically respected throughout the world, and Sjöström was acclaimed for his films, many of which were adapted from literature. He created a number of films drawn from stories and novels by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf. One of the most celebrated of these was the visually elegant ghost tale The Phantom Chariot, which offers spectacular multiple-exposure cinematography by Julius Jaenzon. Sjöström enacts the role of a derelict who may have to pilot a carriage that collects the souls of the dead if he dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. Other adaptations of Lagerlöf books and stories-which all demonstrate Sjöström's skill at expressing emotion with intensely expressive landscapes-include The Girl from the Marsh Croft, and the family saga The Sons of Ingmar, Parts 1 and 2, and Karin, Daughter of Ingmar. Terje Vigen, based on a poem by Henrik Ibsen, tells the stirring story of a fisherman (played by Sjöström) who runs a blockade during the Napoleonic wars in a vain attempt to save his family. Author Hjalmar Bergman's writings were the basis for a sailing adventure film, Fire on Board, for Sjöström's only surviving comedy, His Grace's Will, and for Masterman, which historian Tom Gunning called "one of the neglected masterworks of world cinema."

Ingeborg Holm is a social justice film about a widow who is mistreated by bureaucrats; it led to recognition of cinema as an art form, and also led to welfare reform in Sweden. The Outlaw and His Wife is a masterpiece about a man accused of stealing sheep. He flees to the mountains, where he lives with a woman landowner who falls in love with him. During the 1920s in Sweden, Sjöström also directed two opulent and lovely period films: The Master of Sendomir and Love's Crucible.

Sjöstrom came to Hollywood with his family in the winter of 1923, with a contract that gave him a great deal of freedom in choosing scripts, and stipulated that he would use the name Victor Seastrom. He directed Lon Chaney in the inventive, expressionistic tale of a wronged man, He Who Gets Slapped. It was an enormous critical and box office success, and helped launch the career of Norma Shearer. Sjöstrom also received critical acclaim for The Tower of Lies, which reunited Chaney and Shearer in an adaptation of a Selma Lagerlöf novel. Greta Garbo stars in a film loosely based the early career of Sarah Bernhardt's, The Divine Woman. It was thought to be irretrievably lost, but a lone surviving reel was discovered in a Moscow archive in 1993. Sjöstrom's greatest American pictures star Lillian Gish. She gives a wonderful performance as Hester Prynne in an excellent version of The Scarlet Letter and, in her most powerful performance as an actress, stars as a fastidious Southern belle who moves to the prairie, where she is tormented by The Wind of the West. Lars Hanson co-stars in both these films, and in The Divine Woman.

Sjöström returned to Sweden in 1930 and apart from Under the Red Robe, a costume drama made in England and set in 17th-century France, he gave up directing films in favor of acting in them. His wonderful appearance in Wild Strawberries, filmed when he was ill and in pain, was his last and probably greatest.

Screenings in this series will be held in the PFA Theater, which is located at 2575 Bancroft Way near Bowditch Street on the southern edge of the UC campus in Berkeley. General admission is $8 for one program and $10 for double bills. Tickets are available at the Berkeley Art Museum admissions desk during daytime business hours, evenings at the PFA Theater Box Office, and by telephoning (510) 642-5249. A series schedule follows. For further ticket or program information, please see our website, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu or telephone (510) 642-1412.

Schedule of screenings:
Friday, January 16
7:00 pm: The Phantom Chariot (Sweden, 1921). Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Introduced by Christopher Oscarson. An alcoholic's life is changed through love and an encounter with the Grim Reaper in this film of uncanny beauty and inventiveness. "Among the masterpieces of supernatural filmmaking."-Filmex '75
9:25 pm: Wild Strawberries (Sweden, 1957), directed by Ingmar Bergman. Bergman's tribute to Sjöström and The Phantom Chariot. As an elderly professor recollecting his life's failures, "Sjöström gives one of the greatest performances of cinema."-NFT London. With short Ingmar Bergman Shooting Wild Strawberries and Directing Victor Sjöström.

Sunday, January 18
5:30 pm: Ingeborg Holm (Sweden, 1913). Joel Adlen on Piano. A widow in the Poor House is deprived of her children in this classic drama, one of Sweden's first social protest films. Preceded by The Gardener (Sweden, 1912).

Thursday, January 22
7:30 pm: Terje Vigen (Sweden, 1917). Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, this adaptation of Ibsen's nationalistic poem is distinguished by stunning land- and seascape photography. The hero is fabulously played by Sjöström. Preceded by The Sea Vultures (Sweden, 1916).

Sunday, January 25
5:30 pm: The Outlaw and His Wife (Sweden, 1918). Joel Adlen on Piano. A thief, a young widow, and their love outside the law: "Without a doubt the most beautiful film in the world!" declared French avant-gardist Louis Delluc. Preceded by a restored, tinted print of the recently rediscovered Kiss of Death (1916).

Thursday, January 29
7:30 pm: The Girl from the Marsh Croft (Sweden, 1917). Judith Rosenberg on Piano. A young peasant girl's illegitimate pregnancy sends shockwaves through her small community. The first of several adaptations of Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf's work, and one of the first films to address Sweden's rural underclass.

Sunday, February 1
5:30 pm: The Sons of Ingmar, Parts 1 and 2 (Sweden, 1919). Joel Adlen on Piano. So popular that half
of Stockholm saw it in its opening run, this drama of love and atonement depicted a disappearing 19th-century folk culture.

Saturday, February 7
7:00 pm: His Grace's Will (Sweden 1919). Joel Adlen on Piano. A baron decides to rewrite his will, much to the chagrin of his overly anxious heirs. The only surviving comedy directed by Sjöström, and one of Sweden's first.
8:30 pm: The Monastery of Sendomir (Sweden, 1920). Joel Adlen on Piano. Maids with secret messages, handsome knights, jealous lovers, and murder: a medieval tale of infidelity and rage in a monastery. "A symphony of menacing light and shade."-Sight and Sound

Sunday, February 8
5:30 pm: Karin, Daughter of Ingmar (Sweden, 1920). Judith Rosenberg on Piano. The Ingmarssons-the next generation. A father's watch brings ill-fated lovers together after Devil Alcohol tears them apart.

Thursday, February 12
7:30 pm: Masterman (Sweden, 1920). Judith Rosenberg on Piano. A stingy old pawnbroker falls in love with one of his pawned "objects"-a beautiful young woman-in what historian Tom Gunning calls "one of the neglected masterworks of world cinema."

Sunday, February 15
4:00 pm: He Who Gets Slapped (U.S., 1924). Jon Mirsalis on Piano. In Hollywood, Sjöström's most avant-garde and enigmatic project ever: the wondrous Lon Chaney is a spurned scientist who takes on the persona of an absurdist circus clown.
5:40 pm: Fire on Board (Sweden, 1923). Jon Mirsalis on Piano. Sjöström's last Swedish film is a seafaring adventure thriller, with an "American-style" ending that Swedish critics did not fail to notice.

Thursday, February 19
7:00 pm: Love's Crucible (Sweden, 1921). Joel Adlen on Piano. A feverish Renaissance Florence–set melodrama of a sculptor and his unfaithful younger wife. "Creates a baroque visual texture that might well have served as a prototype for von Sternberg."-Monthly Film Bulletin. Followed by Sjöström's first Hollywood film, Name the Man (incomplete print, U.S., 1924)

Sunday, February 22
4:30 pm: The Wind (U.S., 1928). Jon Mirsalis on Keyboard. Naïve Virginia belle Lillian Gish relocates to windswept Texas in one of silent cinema's final masterpieces. Followed by a fragment of The Divine Woman (Sweden, 1928) with Garbo, and (an incomplete print of) Confessions of a Queen (U.S., 1925).

Sunday, February 29
2:00 pm: The Scarlet Letter (U.S., 1927). Jon Mirsalis on Piano. Hawthorne's classic novel, brought to life by Sjöström and Lillian Gish. Gish's operatic performance here makes her films with Griffith seem like mere overtures.
4:15 pm: Under the Red Robe (U.K., 1937). Sjöström's swan song follows a soldier of fortune during a Huguenot uprising. A fascinating blend of silent-film poetics and studio artifice, photographed by James Wong Howe.