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resemblance to the light witty comedies we associate with Lubitsch, and it appears to pre-date his German and certainly his American films. Whether or not Stiller was influenced by Lubitsch or the early deMille, it seems clear that the inspiration for Erotikon did not come from within Sweden. Stiller was a cosmopolitan, and the film, with its reflection of elegance and luxury, may have been a gesture to this other life. There were to be echoes of it in later Swedish films.
With Gunnar Hedes Saga (1922) Stiller returned to Selma Lagerlof. This story of a great house, whose master (played by Einar Hansson) goes insane while he is driving a herd of reindeer into the mountains, was much more clearly in the Swedish film tradition than Erotikon. Again there was a distinctive combination of a powerfully dramatic story and a magnificent setting in the northern landscape. The sequence in which the animals scatter as they run free, then pause in alarm, their delicately trembling nostrils snuffing the air, has been praised as 'one of the loveliest pictures ever incorporated in a film'.
Gosta Berlings Saga (1923) was the last film produced by Stiller in Sweden before his departure for Hollywood in 1925. Perhaps because of its association with Greta Garbo it is one of the Swedish films best known outside its country of origin; but at least in the version circulated abroad it hardly justifies its reputation and is a less satisfying film than Herr Ames Pengar. Selma Lagerlof 's long and complicated novel had attracted more than one film director; but they could not see how its vast theme, full of plots and sub-plots, could be simplified for the screen. Encouraged by his success with the earlier — but much simpler — Lagerlof stories, Stiller collaborated with Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius in attempting to produce a filmable scenario. He found he could fulfil his scheme only by dividing the action into two parts, and the finished work lasted four hours. A condensed version including about half the original material was prepared for showing outside Sweden.
The action of the story inevitably suffered, together with the dramatic logic of the work, while the rhythmic development was destroyed. It was not difficult to understand why the director was accused of obscure and arbitrary ellipses, of melodramatic effects, and of the absence of a convincing psychological argument. Nevertheless the condensed version did suggest something of the scope of the original work. It retained the spectacular scenes, including the expulsion of the clergyman Berling from his charge, the merry-making at Ekeby Castle, and the pursuit by wolves of Gosta Berling as he flees in his sledge across the snow. It retained, too, one of the quieter scenes — that in which the Mistress of Ekeby seeks out her aged mother whose curse had weighed heavily on her life and silently begs for forgiveness. The two women stand face to face, their minds full of bitter memories. No word is spoken, not a gesture made. Then the women, one at either side of the great press, begin to turn it. Moments such as this, when the camera was used to express great depths of feeling, showed Stiller's gifts as a director.