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330 GARBO IS FOUND AND LOST
for their most cherished effects, and Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness was based on a book by Selma Lagerlof who was a novelist who combined both literary skill and a feeling for the unostentatious religious beliefs held by her countrymen.
With eerie forcefulness and an absence of the macabre, an unconscious man sees the misery he has wrought — the death of the Salvation Army worker who tried to save him from himself, and his wife preparing to kill herself and her children, until the lesson of it all is brought home to him and he pleads for another chance, and, struggling back to consciousness, mistily sees the death cart driving away without him.
Made in 1920, the film was instrumental in making countries outside of Sweden aware of the fine artistic scope of the Swedish Biograph organisation. Their camera work was particularly brilliant. Natural light, even on interior settings, was far ahead of the work achieved on open air stages elsewhere. Their technicians had the happy thought of building the sets on locations which would provide fine vistas of natural scenery when glimpsed through open doors and windows, and the shafts of sunlight falling into a room would be the real thing, dancing with motes and breathtakingly beautiful because of its naturalness.
Seastrom's direction sometimes strained a little too much to include the beautifully simple and the simply beautiful — slow sheep toddling away at the approach of lovers, or the graceful movements made by a servant in performing the everyday, ordinary rites of preparing breakfast in a sunlit kitchen.
Stiller was more dramatic in his methods, but his feeling for beauty was to be his undoing. He chose a seventeen-year-old girl, later to become famous as Greta Garbo, and gave her a leading role in The Atonement of Gosta Berling, another of Selma Lagerlof's novels.
The film was so widely acclaimed that Hollywood sent for Garbo and asked Stiller to accept a contract as well — the Metro studio executives realised that without her mentor they would have difficulty in directing her. But Stiller could only see films as a means of artistic expression and not as a mere money-making machine attuned to formulas and " angles." Forgotten, frustrated, and perhaps a little in love with the beautiful girl he had discovered and who was being taken ever further from him by the commercial demands of the big Hollywood lot, he died of what the romanticists