Der Fuhrmann des Todes

Much said without words.

This is an excellent movie. It was made in color-not color as in today's films, but a special mono-color use (with shadings) that portrayed meaning, mood, sense and time. It should be seen in color, as it becomes an entirely different film. The story, by Nobel prize-winner Selma Lagerlöf, is effectively presented. One never has a clear sense of real, memory or phantom. Changes going on in Swedish society at the time are subtly layered. Most highly recommend. Try to rent it or find it on-line. I saw it in a Swedish film class and I want to add it to my film library.

Had I known this was going to turn out as deeply awesome as it did, I would have perhaps saved it for a time of need. I'm always looking for spiritual visions that permit a journey inwards, but they are so few in the grand scheme that I'm grateful for each and every one. I try to cherish them because they let me watch from the heart. It's why I keep myself from finishing off the rest of Tarkovsky's films - I want to know that there's always a drink of fresh water at hand when I'm parching.

I came to this, like most people I presume, for its reputation as a horror film where the reaper gets out to harvest souls. I collect these as well but for different reasons, and was expecting here something more or less expressionist. As with most silents however, it's not really horror by our contemporary sense; horror in these films comes from more directly abstract notions, guilt, humiliation, spiritual damnation, and it's usually with the intent to distill a life lesson. They may seem outdated now but only because we presume to know these things and so reckon that no further guidance is necessary - while we, self-sufficient modern humans in perfect control of our destinies, continue to live our lives in random iterations.

Here death itself. The journey of the soul in the world inside the soul. Like earlier texts of this journey, Dante's Inferno or the Egyptian Book of the Dead, it is advisable, imperative even, that we read beyond the feverish vision of the beyond. That we read between the collective dream the author has dreamed up as meant to await us and contemplate on why we dreamed in the first place.

The man who dies last on New Year's Eve - at the cusp of new life, and so at the start of a new cosmic round - becomes Death's driver for the coming year, this is the premise. He ferries the vehicle - and us as passengers - where the journey inwards or across can begin. Our man contemplates the chain of events that brought him lying dead before the carriage of death.

The opening chapters in the Book of the Dead that propel the process of rebirth, and which pertain very much here, are thus named: "The chapter of making Osiris S. possess a memory in the Underworld" and next "the chapter of giving Osiris S. a heart in the Underworld".

The man remembers, he had a perfectly good life and family but blew it up like so many we know of. He goes into prison and comes out reborn again with realization of what his deeds brought him. But he has to start again, like every new life he has to build his again from nothing. Instead he drags himself through this next life in a limbo of guilt and seething hatred. It is this unswathing of the spirit across different worlds that matters, and the dissolution in each one granting passage in the next. How strong karmas resonate from one existence to the other, powering the cart. Death's driver is granting the visions after all.

There is a woman in all of this, a nurse for the Salvation Army. From her end, she is looking to hear from god. We see from both ends, her trying to save who she considers a mandate from god and on the other side the man who is wrestling personal demons. If god doesn't speak through him, then he never spoke at all. In a beautiful scene, she spends the night mending his torn soul; when he wakes up, furious at the kindness, he tears it up again for spite.

More great cinema about the karmas metaphysically weaving together the participants: having failed to mend him, the woman literally contracts his illness. And when the man violently attacks with an axe a locked door, his wife on the other side falls to die.

The man finally wakes up from death though, having prayed and thus lay himself prostrate before a higher force. This is likely a part that modern viewers will find hard to swallow. But this is the thing; it is not literal death in these texts, never was. The underworld the soul must travel through to be reborn on the other side is always inside, why it's so often called a 'descent', and so the power to make a full transit by learning again life-value through the different levels always rests with the soul. What the man learns at the moment of prayer is the humility that shatters ego. Of course he is forgiven. One of the final chapters in that ancient Egyptian text reads: "chapter of causing a man to come back upon his house on earth". Notice that the dead man is no longer symbolically referred (and so protected) by the name of the god Osiris, having passed the horrible tribulations, now the deity is embodied inside.

So god does speak after all through this man, but it speaks to her who was looking to apprehend him and so, no doubt, will hear his voice in the miracle. From our perspective seeing deeper into these lives, our perspective itself dislocated from bodies and wandering with the spirits, we know there was no god: the miraculous transformation on the visible level was only the last step in a painful, arduous process of healing the heart. It's a powerful notion, worth two or three Seals (Bergman).

So it's really only us who can mend ourselves. It's a lesson, make no mistake, but a lesson worth keeping. Simply said, it sounds trite - most anything does if the words are not right. The man was told after all, no doubt he understood in some capacity, but it meant nothing. Which is why it's important to journey from the heart.

Something to meditate upon.

The premise of this movie is intriguing, and based on an old Swedish legend which said that the last sinner to die on New Year's Eve would have to spend the next year driving Death's carriage picking up the souls of people who die. From the beginning we're pulled in to this story by both its special effects and its storytelling. The scenes with the phantom carriage wheeling around, including one over the water to retrieve a drowned soldier, as well as those with a transparent Tore Svennberg and his ominous cloak and scythe, are fantastic. Director Victor Sjöström's use of flashbacks was ahead of its time, and he gradually reveals everything behind a young Salvation Army worker's request to see a man before she dies.

Sjöström also plays that main character, and gives us a great performance in depravity. Among other things, he scorns help from charitable women in the Salvation Army by ripping up repairs to his jacket one spent all night mending, openly tries to pass along his disease (consumption) to others, and after tracking down his wife and small children, hacks down a door with an axe to get at them. It's pretty dark stuff. As he faces an avalanche of guilt over the consequences of his actions and his own impending fate, can he be redeemed? It's a weighty question that would later absorb Ingmar Bergman, who idolized Sjöström, and the link between the two provides additional interest. Aside from the influence the film had on Bergman, 36 years later Sjöström would play the main character in 'Wild Strawberries'. It's also notable that 'The Phantom Carriage' was one of Stanley Kubrick's favorites from the silent era, and that he, too, was influenced when he put together Jack Nicholson's axe scene from 'The Shining'.

As with many of the films from this time period, it drags in places to modern eyes, as interchanges between characters via intertitles and elongated facial expressions sometimes get a little tedious. It's also ultimately a morality tale, which may put some viewers off – and yet, I found the devotion and faith of the Salvation Army sister, as well as the prayer to 'mature one's soul' before dying to be uplifting. We see the dual nature of man in the film, good and evil, and it's put into the larger context of our mortality. It's fantastical, and yet we realize that someday death will come for us all, and whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we hope that we've done good things for others in the world. Well worth watching.

One of the best silent dramas I've seen. As dark and shadowy as anything the German Expressionists produced, but featuring performances that were quite understated and naturalistic for the day. No camera mugging and no unintentional laughs due to wild-eyed arm-waving histrionics. Sjostrom gave a convincing performance as the drunken, mean-spirited and frightening David Holm.

Set mostly at night in a dingy Swedish slum, the film had a very claustrophobic set-bound feel to it, aided by the low key lighting and extensive use of irising.

There was a deep, and typically Scandinavian, sense of despair and hopelessness to the narrative: the film begins in a rather grim present, and then we're told David Holm's story in a series of flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks--a pretty complex story structure for 1921), where his character is offered numerous chances at redemption, but he doesn't take them, and we know he won't take them, because we've seen him die drunk and wretched and mean as ever in the present. The penultimate scene is as dark as any I have seen in all of cinema.

The writing and directing is tight and intelligent, even by today's standards. In several instances, Sjostrom skillfully sets the audience up to suspect one thing, and then pulls out a surprise. The ending might not be such a surprise to some viewers, but I didn't see it coming.

This movie deserves a full restoration and DVD release. Or even a crappy budget release. It just needs to be out there so people can see and appreciate it.

9.5/10, which rounds up to 10/10

It's undeniable that The Phantom Carriage's influence precedes itself. From its iconography of the grim reaper, it's Christmas Carol-esque tale of repentance, to echoes of Jack Nicholson chopping down the door in The Shining. If The Phantom Carriage is known for anything, it's for being Ingmar Bergman's source of inspiration for what his films would later muse upon. He would later recruit director and star Victor Sjostrom to lead on of his most acclaimed films Wild Strawberries. Of course, we already know how profound these concepts are nearly 100 years later and their importance is still imbedded in the film. It's fascinating to watch inventive techniques of translucence portrayed on screen too, though admittedly the prior year's Caligari is more impressive. Its real problem is undisciplined structure and its resulting poor pacing, but these are archaic issues of silent cinema that required a few years of trial and error. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is palpable, the ideas are timeless and it oozes with passion from Sjostrom, if not as nightmare worthy as the next year's Nosferatu.

8/10