The film till now : a survey of world cinema (1960)

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THE FILM SINCE THEN and the standardisation of the product which flows through most of the world's projectors. * With their long and fine tradition in film-making in the early silent days, the Scandinavian countries have experienced the utmost difficulties in trying to regain their place in world cinema. Severely limited by the dictates of dialogue, comparatively little of their work has been seen overseas. In Sweden, the films produced since 1930 have been strongly marked by national characteristics, but from Gustav Molander's En Natt (1931) through The Heavenly Play (1944) and Torment (1946), (called Frenzy in Britain), none of its productions that we have seen has broken really fresh ground. Victor Seastrom returned from Hollywood to Sweden to function primarily as an actor, and until recently Gustav Molander and some of the other veterans from silent days have carried on. Neither they nor their younger colleagues, however, seem ambitious to do more than film plays and novels with emphasis on dialogue. It is strange that these smaller nations, with the limitations put upon them by dialogue, do not attempt more experiment with international language techniques, as we saw in Kameradschaft, the Swiss The Last Chance and the Italian Paisan. Actually, Sweden's bucolic comedies, crude and good-humoured, have more freshness than the occasional big productions, which smack of the methods and ideological preoccupations of a declining realist theatre. Torment (Frenzy), directed by Alf Sjoberg, was highly praised for its ' daring ' theme, as well as for its direction and photography, by both American and European intelligentsia, but it is difficult to understand why. Its theme exactly reproduced the content of innumerable minor German films of the late silent period and early talkies, (mostly featuring Albert Li even) and its camera technique stems from the same source. One of Sweden's principal contributions since sound was Gosta Werner's Midvinter Blott (1945), a brilliant reconstruction of the winter solstice human sacrifice among the 602