Stockholm syndrome
A PFA retrospective rescues the work of Swedish director Victor Sjöström from his Hollywood years.

By Dennis Harvey

HOLLYWOOD HAS LONG held the dubious distinction of being a pioneer in global homogenization. Starting in the 1920s, the major U.S. studios began consolidating a virtual cartel (much assisted by lobbyists and American governmental pressure) that would make Hollywood product the dominating, if not exclusive, presence on international screens – at least in those nations officially "friendly" to our own.

This wasn't the case early on, however. For a long time – roughly from the medium's circa 1895 public inception to the end of World War I – Europe loomed much larger in film production-distribution, with France the leading contributor by far. Indeed, in 1908 the French-owned Pathé company was the biggest provider of motion-picture entertainment, period – even to the United States. Meanwhile other European national cinemas developed with considerable zest, undeterred by the (as yet) disorganized and poorly cross-marketed Yankee threat.

A particular hot spot (ranking ahead of Germany, if not Italy, in the 'teens) was Sweden – whose neutrality during the "Great War" lent that fledgling industry a definite export-business edge. But even more important was the artistic elevation lent this still questionable (in many quarters) popular form by two genius directors.

Finnish-born, Russian-Jewish émigré Mauritz Stiller introduced Stockholm acting student Greta Garbo to the world – but when they were both signed on by MGM, he found his protégée's wattage rapidly eclipsing his own. The superb instinct for social comedy and epic drama he'd demonstrated at home wasn't appreciated by Louis B. Mayer, with whom he butted heads – and lost. A career-slumping Stiller died from prolonged health problems in 1928, at age 45.

The other major Swedish director of the silent era, Victor Sjöström, suffered a somewhat less tragic end (in 1960, at the ripe old age of 81) – though in nearly every other way their histories were eerily similar. Like Stiller, Sjöström spent his formative years in Finland, was a former stage actor, and entered the film industry at producer Charles Magnusson's behest in 1912. Both drew international attention for their leading contributions to the Swedish cinema golden age; both were broken by their depressing experiences being co-opted by the ascendant Hollywood of the 1920s. But Sjöström survived – sort of – and left the heftier body of cinematic works. Nearly all of which – excepting those films lost to time and celluloid disintegration – are on display through February in "Victor Sjöström: Northern Light in a New Light," a retrospective of Svenska Filminstitutet-restored titles presented at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive.

Where Stiller came mostly to be associated with sophisticated, witty comedies in the continental vein, Sjöström at his frequent best focused on pastoral dramas of hardship, injustice, tragedy, and redemption – which were perhaps closer to the core Swedish temperament (or at least its notions of national art) and, in any case, had a much greater influence on the 1917-24 golden age of Swedish cinema.

Yet restraint and naturalism generally held his films back from the melodramatic moralizing inherent in such stories, not to mention typical in that era. Where the vaguely equivalent, concurrent milestones of American D.W. Griffith now seem full of hand-wringing Victorian theatricality, for all their then innovative cinematic language, Sjöström's movies appear less antiquated than out-of-time altogether. Their curious intensity is helped by an advanced pictorial sense that found painterly compositions even in routine interiors, while seizing on the most striking, remote landscapes as a dynamic narrative element rather than mere backdrop.

Asked (as was Stiller) to abandon the stage and direct for the fledgling Svenska Bio studio in 1912, Sjöström's first success, the next year, not only elevated cinema's still suspect relation toward art in many viewers' estimation, it also helped spark actual governmental reforms. Ingeborg Holm offers a horrific case history of systemic failure: bankrupted by the failure of her husband's business after his premature death, Ingeborg first loses her home, then her children (they're pried away to foster homes), then at last her sanity.

It's still strong stuff, but the golden age officially kicked off four years later with a work that defined the director's affinity for literary, period, outdoor subjects. Based on a poem by Ibsen, Terje Vigen (1917) chronicles the epic angst of a fisherman (Sjöström, his own frequent leading player in his Swedish films) who's taken prisoner during the Napoleonic Wars while trying to smuggle food to his starving family. Yet when the opportunity for vengeance finally arises, his long-hardened humanity is rekindled. Julius Jaenzon's deep-focus photography lends man and nature equal (if antagonistic) weight, an effect even more arresting in 1918's Outlaw and His Wife. Its fugitive lovers in mid-19th-century Iceland flee into mountains so spectacular and unforgiving that the tale ends – logically – with them still entwined as frozen corpses.

Around the same time Sjöström was beginning to adapt works by Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for Literature. These peasant sagas proved massively successful, particularly 1919's Sons of Ingmar. Such triumphs amped up Swedish cinema's profile abroad, creating pressure for less specifically "Swedish" product. Sjöström accordingly stretched in new directions, notably with the droll comedy of aristocratic ill manners His Grace's Will (1919). The famous Phantom Chariot (1921) is a fantasy morality play whose intricate double exposures suggest the spirit world's invisible presence in our own.

Though already ambivalent about "internationalizing" his art, Sjöström had "gone Hollywood" by 1924, eager to learn that industry's more advanced production techniques. Hired by Metro (later MGM), he did fairly well there, unlike Stiller. He Who Gets Slapped (1924) is among the classic vehicles for Lon Chaney's grotesque pathos. Griffith's former diva Lillian Gish, still a prestige star, requested Sjöström helm The Scarlet Letter from Hawthorne's novel (considered very daring screen material then). It was a great success in 1927, but their next-year follow-up, The Wind – about a genteel Eastern woman harrowed by brutal climates both natural and human in 1880s west Texas – was crushed by the talkies' first wave. Barely seen for decades, it was instantly proclaimed one of the silent era's masterpieces when rediscovered.

Though he also got to work with Garbo (on The Divine Woman, 1928, only one reel of which survives), most of Sjöström's Hollywood assignments seemed trivial and disillusioning after all the creative control he'd enjoyed in Sweden. He directed just twice in the 1930s and was otherwise content to advise and occasionally act in the Swedish film industry.

He produced three key early works written or directed by Ingmar Bergman, who claimed The Phantom Chariot was his first profound cinematic experience. Bergman returned the favor in 1957 by writing the part of the dying professor in Wild Strawberries as Sjöström's last role – a suitably autumnal one, richly imagined and played. Probably very few among Bergman's fervent international admirers at the time knew his leading actor had once been just as much of a magnetic force in Swedish, even world, cinema.

'Victor Sjöström: Northern Light in a New Light' runs Jan. 16-Feb. 29, PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft, Berk. $4-$8. (510) 642-1124.