Condemned by film historians to stand in the shadow of Victor Sjöström as the second of the two great silent Swedish film directors, Mauritz Stiller (1883–1928) has still not received his due for his contributions to both Swedish and international film history. As a director, Stiller was an innovative and autocratic perfectionist whose work not only helped articulate the conventions and codes of cinema but also insisted on the legitimacy of film as an independent art form in a time when film was ust starting to emerge. As a homosexual man born to a Russian Jewish father and Polish mother in Finland and living in Sweden and the U.S., Stiller always thought of himself as an outsider-a theme worked through in many of his films. Perhaps it was his constant searching for a place to belong that made him less conservative in his subject matter and more modern and daring in his technological innovations than his counterpart, Sjöström.
Beginning his career with melodramatic themes and burlesque comedy, he later refined his style, making more serious and thoughtful literary adaptions as well as sophisticated social comedies, many of which employed self–reflexive and metafilmic structures that interrogated the process of filmmaking itself. Stiller left with his young protege, Greta Garbo, for Hollywood in 1925 but was to return alone to Sweden just two years later, gravely ill and frustrated by the American studio system. Always the outsider, Stiller might have searched his whole life for a place to belong, but his great contributions to cinema guarantee that his place is not in the backseat of silent film history.
-Christopher Oscarson
Christopher Oscarson is a graduate student in the Scandinavian Department studying Scandinavian literature and film. In summer 2001 he did extensive research on early Swedish cinema at the Swedish Film Institute.
