We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
man's Flickan och Djavulen (The Girl and the Devil). Set in seventeenth-century Sweden when witch-hunting was at its height, the film described how an old witch, about to be burned at the stake, has her revenge on a farmer by translating her spirit to a girl about to be born on his farm and how, years later, his household is disrupted by jealousy and hatred, culminating in a mob demand for the burning of the girl at the stake. Faustman found the mystical atmosphere demanded by the story somewhat beyond his capacity, although he did draw from Gunn Wallgren an intensely moving performance as the innocent girl with a witch-mark on her shoulder.
By now the lines on which the new movement was developing were becoming more clearly established, although there were some strange diversions. Svensk Filmindustri attempted the production of an operetta. Hans Majestdts Rival (1943), which included a pictorially charming sequence filmed in the decorative gardens at Drottningholm, but otherwise seemed stagey and ponderous. Several costume films were made, most notably Sjoberg's Kungajakt (1944), which, with Ake Dahlqvist as his cameraman, he made visually exciting if emotionally somewhat arid.
It was Sjoberg, however, who was to produce the key film of the Swedish revival. In considering Hets (Frenzy) (1944) it is necessary to link his name to that of Ingmar Bergman who wrote the scenario and who. as writer and director, was quickly to become the outstanding figure of the new period. Hets was a challenging film: it had a high seriousness of theme combined with a distinctive visual style. The theme, to become familiar in subsequent Bergman films, was the mental suffering of an adolescent boy. In his last year at school he is tormented by a sadistic master, and anguish rapidly develops into neurosis. His home is unsympathetic — a recurring element in the Bergman stories — and he takes refuge in an affair with a shop-girl who is being persecuted by a man whose identity she conceals. As the dramatic mood of the film becomes more and more tense, it is revealed that the sadistic master is also the sexual tormentor, and the first crisis is reached as he drives the girl to her death. The second occurs when the boy, who has had a breakdown, recovers, assaults his tormentor, and is expelled from school. The note of hope in the final sequence is both apt and unforced. As Dilys Powell has written, the film 'shocks and delights by its bold, mature handling of a subject which, in the Anglo-Saxon cinema, would, I fancy, be syruped over, or perhaps treated to some childish parody of the psychiatrist's approach'. It was this adult treatment of a difficult subject which made the film outstanding. Sjoberg handled his characters with authority, fumbling nothing in their psychological interpretation. The first shots, of a small boy late for school dodging up and down stairs to escape a pursuing master, were an exciting foretaste of the film's imaginative treatment. Here was young life caught up in an exacting, inflexible system. Building on this impression, Sjoberg developed the conflict between the sensitive, highly-strung boy and the master, whose cross-examinations are a refined form of
27