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captions such as 'The Happy Family', 'The Coughing Attack' and 'Death'. The camera remained stationary and there was no attempt at continuity. What made the film interesting was its content — an analysis of madness in a workhouse setting — and the powerful performance given by Hilda Borgstrom under Sjostrom's direction. Here was the beginning of that attempt to create psychological tension through acting which was to become a characteristic of the Swedish cinema.
Between Ingeborg Holm and Terje Vigen (191 6) Sjostrom directed some twenty films, some from stories written by himself and others from the works of Emile Zola, Nils Krook and Marika Stiernstedt. He was feeling for material which would give him the kind of films he wanted to make and, with his ambitions for the film medium, he felt the inadequacy of many of the subjects he directed. Just before Terje Vigen he had decided to leave films and return to the theatre. Ibsen's poem, however, gave him the opportunity he needed. As with Stiller in Herr Ames Pengar, he had the collaboration of Gustaf Molander in writing the scenario. Sjostrom played the leading part of the bitter old sailor who lives alone on an island and who nurses his hatred through the years before he has his revenge. Although still episodic in structure, the film had a greater sense of continuity. It might have dispensed with the text of the Ibsen poem which provided the captions, both because it duplicated the action on the screen and because Sjostrom's acting was sufficiently powerful to express the emotion inherent in the theme. The heroic quality in the story gave Sjostrom a satisfaction he had not felt since Ingeborg Holm; and the naturalistic setting — ocean, cliffs and sea birds — also reassured him that he had found a fruitful line of development for the film.
Sjostrom built quickly on his newly-found confidence. In 19 17 he made Tbsen frdn Stormyrtorpet (A Girl from the Marsh Croft) from a story by Selma Lagerlof and, later the same year, Berg-Ejvind och hans Hustru [The Outlaw and His Wife) from a play by Johan Sigurjonsson. Both films showed a marked advance on anything previously achieved in the Swedish cinema. There was greater freedom of movement, an assured sense of rhythm, and a fine feeling for composition. In Berg-Ejvind Sjostrom used landscape with a skill which was to become part of the Swedish film tradition. He found a way of filming the tree-lined valleys and widearched skies of his country, so that they became not merely backgrounds but organic elements in the theme. There was still, however, a lingering tendency to melodrama in the acting. Sjostrom played the part of a man who, having escaped from prison, finds work on a big farm and gradually earns the love of the woman who owns it. She finds out the truth about him just as he is about to be rearrested and follows him into hiding in the mountains. Their life as outlaws brings them no happiness and, eventually cornered, they die of cold in the winter snows. The end of the film especially was marred by melodramatic excess; but despite this fault Berg-Ejvind was memorable because of its visual beauty, the simplicity and strength of its theme, and its demonstration in the earlier sequences of the film medium's affinities with poetry.
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