Sir Arne's Treasure on DVD (review)
mikeg...@gmail.com
like it must fall somewhere between Die Nibelungen and Ivanhoe-- an
epic knightish adventure with a heavier Scandinavian feel. In fact
it's a tale of guilt and doom in the classic Swedish mode, almost a
chamber piece despite its grandiose division into five acts, set in an
historical setting but with some of the same distilled focus and sense
of inevitability as, to pick a recent example, Cronenberg's A History
of Violence.
Three Scottish mercenaries (the main one, incongruously, given the
jaunty name "Sir Archie"; happily his compatriots are not Sir Reggie
and Sir Jughead) escape from captivity in 16th century Sweden and,
driven half-mad by the winter winds and starvation, wind up
slaughtering the entire household of a local lord for his treasure.
Only one young, Lillian Gish-like girl, Elsalill, who hides herself
during the crime, escapes-- but, being Swedish, is consumed by
survivor's guilt.
This being one of those stories (like Crash or Dickens' Bleak House*)
where there are only eight different people in the entire country, the
three, newly kitted out in finery, return to the scene of the crime and
Sir Archie promptly falls in love with the survivor of his depredations
and starts having guilt of his own. I'm betting you can pretty much
guess how that's going to work out for the gloomy couple.
The initial acts of Sir Arne's Treasure take a little mental
adjustment, as there's what we might call a high Guy Maddin quotient
here, of over-the-top Nordic gloom-- the old crone (Mrs. Sir Arne)
repeatedly shrieking "Why are they sharpening the knives at Brorhaven?"
at the dinner table, the use of the phrase "fish wench" in a title, or
a ship captain who believes that his ship is frozen in ice as God's
punishment for some big crime he can't QUITE put his finger on.... The
latter in particular shows the heavily moralistic hand of Selma
Lagerlof (who also wrote Gosta Berling, The Phantom Chariot, etc.), who
was good at setting up ripping plot mechanics but tended to impose a
Victorian religious sensibility which you don't see in the best Swedish
films, such as Sjostrom's The Outlaw and His Wife.
While there's a stark, In Cold Blood-like quality to the depiction of
these violent events in a remote, snowbound location, we're impressed
by the dramatic quality of the events themselves, not by any human
sympathy that has particularly been built up for the characters to that
point. And it is easy to see why distributors in other countries
succumbed to the temptation to trim the film down, as Stiller allows
many of the events to play out in real time, even when relatively
little is going on.
It's when the film narrows its focus to the two main characters and
their guilt-racked interactions that Stiller's deliberate storytelling
begins to really justify itself-- the film is like the long walk to the
electric chair in a Cagney movie from that point on, and the minutely
detailed depiction of everyday activities not only makes the historical
setting seem vividly real, but serves to cut off the possibility of
outlandish movie-style heroics which will bring the story to any end
other than the inevitable tragic one (which, nevertheless, contains a
couple of shocking turns which wouldn't have passed muster for Errol
Flynn at Warner Brothers in 1938).
Mention must be made (as theater reviewers say when they can't think of
a better transition) of the cinematography of Julius Jaenzon, who
pretty much shot everything that was anything in Swedish silent cinema.
The word inevitably attached to Jaenzon's work is "landscape," which
is to say, he and Stiller and Sjostrom were all masterful at using the
forbidding country they lived in to help set the emotional tone of
their scenes. When they want you to feel that someone's lonely, they
stick him out walking on an icy fjord and by God, he's LONELY.
Also, as we all know, the moving camera as an expressive device (rather
than just a way of showing off your fancy set, as in Intolerance)
wasn't invented until The Last Laugh in 1924, so we can all throw out
those pages of our film history books since one of the most striking
things about this film is the extensive use of the moving camera
throughout. Since the moving camera tends to imply the presence of the
director and thus to deny the possibility of free will for the
characters (which is why it works so well in things like noirs, or Max
Ophuls' adaptations of Schnitzler, or Kubrick movies about unstable
hotel caretakers being taken over by malevolent ghosts), it's a perfect
artistic choice for this story, and one that strongly reinforces the
atmosphere of destiny and doom while also keeping our focus on the
mental state of characters who remain front and center within the shot,
rather than on how they physically move from one place to another
within a shot.
That said, based on this and Thomas Graal's Best Film, Stiller does not
seem to have quite so deeply empathetic a feel for internal psychology
as Sjostrom; he has impressive pictorial talents, and directs actors
well, but he seems to be Ingram to Sjostrom's Stroheim, Kurosawa to his
Mizoguchi, and there are moments when we feel we should know what's
going on in a character's head, but don't, quite. Will I still feel
that way after seeing the other two Stiller films Kino has released on
DVD, in what has to be considered one of the year's most significant
efforts at rediscovering a major artist? Stay tuned, we'll see.
A few DVD specific notes: the quality of the early cinematography is
very handsome given the quality of 1919-era film stock. The music
score is modern in style, will probably bug the hell out of some folks
here; I think modern is right to help ensure that the story doesn't
come off like Douglas Fairbanks, but I felt that the score did not help
the earlier, less effective parts of the film flow, and tended to make
the film go in fits and starts. Once the film really kicks into gear,
the score was effective. Extras include a short interview with Peter
Cowie which quickly sketches some context for the film and Stiller's
career; it appears that the first part of this is repeated on all three
Kino releases, while some film-specific material then follows in each
case. Don't watch it before you watch the film, as it has clips of
nearly every significant plot moment.
And now this Scottish mercenary must go slaughter-- oh wait, that's
that other guy.
* Which Masterpiece Theater just showed a bangup BBC version of, by the
way. Charles Dance rules as Tulkinghorn!
Lloyd Fonvielle
> Since the moving camera tends to imply the presence of the
> director and thus to deny the possibility of free will for the
> characters . . .
A moving camera doesn't imply the presence of the director any more than
the camera itself already does, any more than a fade or iris in or out
does, anymore than a superimposition does, any more than an intertitle
does. All are elements of the artificial conventions of cinema.
One could argue just as well that the moving camera, by drawing us into
the space of the film, letting us enter into it more fully in
imagination and experience it as more fully real, tends to obscure the
presence of the director, submerge him in the world he's seduced us into.
And one additional observation. What struck me most about the film was
that, like Von Stroheim in "Blind Husbands" from the same year, Stiller
had by 1919 entirely abandoned the ghost of the theatrical proscenium
arch, especially in interiors, which are composed in plastically
inventive ways and lit with atmospheric complexity.
The ghost of the proscenium continued to haunt Hollywood film for years
after this -- and watching the early Edwin S. Porter narrative films on
the Edison box set one begins to understand why this may have been . . .
but that's a subject deserving an essay of its own . . .
mikeg...@gmail.com wrote:
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Nowhere Confidential:
mikeg...@gmail.com
at least the editor. It's a more conscious shaping of the material
than a cut, the moment when the director says, "Now I'm going to tell
you a story" (or, "And that's the end of the story, and thus my point
is...")
But...
A fade-in or an iris out can be added in post. (Probably not easily in
1919, but whatever.) You could take a Frederick Wiseman documentary or
some raw security camera tapes and add anything else-- but the thing
you cannot add to them is a tracking shot.
A tracking shot, especially in pre-Steadicam days, necessitated a lot
of preparation. The camera was going to go certain places, the actors
were going to be in very exact places. The result is, it's the thing
that most makes us conscious of the camera as a participant,
determining what the characters can and cannot do. When the camera in
All Quiet on the Western Front moves over the trenches in the battle
scenes, it says here is someone watching who cannot be shot at, like
these ordinary men fighting like ants on a hill. When the camera in an
Ophuls film follows wealthy characters through their lavish houses, it
says they are only puppets in a play, controlled by forces-- sex, love,
class-- they do not comprehend. When the camera in a Hitchcock film
tracks through a ballroom and reveals to us the drummer with the
twitch, it says you're watching a puzzle I created and here's the
solution which the characters do not know yet, but I do and now you do
too. When the camera in The Shining starts making Jack Torrance follow
in its tracks, it says he's no longer his own master, the hotel is. We
can forget the camera when it's recording a character; we can't forget
it when it starts nudging him along.
That's a good point about his very non-theatrical staging. It's
interesting because sometimes his compositions can be a little too
neat-- I remember one shot where the shape of the sleigh perfect
nestles against the shape of the frozen ship, like Africa tucking up
against South America-- but it's always in a very graphic way, like
comic strip panels, not in a way like composing for the stage. It's
interesting, go look at the clip from Erotikon on Kino's site and if
they didn't film in a real house, they built a set as big as one,
because he shoots it like a real house, not like a three-walled set,
quite strikingly for 1920.
Lloyd Fonvielle
> Well, a fade-in or an iris also implies the director to an extent, or
> at least the editor. It's a more conscious shaping of the material
> than a cut, the moment when the director says, "Now I'm going to tell
> you a story" (or, "And that's the end of the story, and thus my point
> is...")
>
> But...
>
> A fade-in or an iris out can be added in post. (Probably not easily in
> 1919, but whatever.) You could take a Frederick Wiseman documentary or
> some raw security camera tapes and add anything else-- but the thing
> you cannot add to them is a tracking shot.
But in 1919, you could not add an iris to an existing shot -- it had to
be done in the camera. And a double exposure, of which there are many
in "Sir Arne's Treasure", also had to be done in the camera and would
probably have be much harder to accomplish than a tracking shot,
logistically speaking. I think this is a good example of the way you
are reading your own perception of how a film is made into a particular
aesthetic technique. All aesthetic techniques are by definition
artificial and conventional, even though each viewer might have a
different experience of their artificiality and conventionality.
Shakespeare's characters often speak in blank verse, sometimes in rhyme.
Does this foreground the author, and rob his characters of the
appearance of free will? Even in the comedies? Well, sometimes it
might, sometimes it might not. Some viewers, at some points, might step
back and say, what technically marvelous poetry. Others might simply
experience the characters as fabulous beings who happen to speak in
verse. The tension between these two ways of processing aesthetic
convention is part of all art, especially dramatic art.
> A tracking shot, especially in pre-Steadicam days, necessitated a lot
> of preparation. The camera was going to go certain places, the actors
> were going to be in very exact places. The result is, it's the thing
> that most makes us conscious of the camera as a participant,
> determining what the characters can and cannot do. When the camera in
> All Quiet on the Western Front moves over the trenches in the battle
> scenes, it says here is someone watching who cannot be shot at, like
> these ordinary men fighting like ants on a hill. When the camera in an
> Ophuls film follows wealthy characters through their lavish houses, it
> says they are only puppets in a play, controlled by forces-- sex, love,
> class-- they do not comprehend. When the camera in a Hitchcock film
> tracks through a ballroom and reveals to us the drummer with the
> twitch, it says you're watching a puzzle I created and here's the
> solution which the characters do not know yet, but I do and now you do
> too. When the camera in The Shining starts making Jack Torrance follow
> in its tracks, it says he's no longer his own master, the hotel is. We
> can forget the camera when it's recording a character; we can't forget
> it when it starts nudging him along.
But tracking shots in silent comedy can express the exhilaration of a
character moving in space, behaving in an extraordinarily free way.
It's just a means of expression, and can express many different things.
In "Cabiria", for example, it does little more than emphasize the
three-dimensionality of the sets and thus reinforce our sense of their
"reality" -- which, by the way, is something a bit different from simply
"showing off" the sets. The moving camera is perhaps the most thrilling
and involving technique in movies, so sophisticated viewers are more
likely to notice its formal eloquence (or mannered irrelevance, as the
case may be) -- while less sophisticated ones may just be swept along by
the subliminal momentum it imparts to a shot. Again, it's often likely
to be a combination of the two responses.
And I think you're also downplaying the mere fact of the camera -- even
a stationary one -- as an artificial phenomenon. We take it for granted
as an "impartial" recording device only by convention, forgetting that
someone had to lug it to wherever it is, point it in a particular
direction and decide when to start rolling film with it. By the time
you get to a movie like "Sir Arne's Treasure", with sets created to
reproduce 16th-Century locales, actors in 16th-Century costumes enacting
written-out roles, I think it's hard to make a case that merely moving
the camera adds a special dimension of artifice to the enterprise.
> That's a good point about his very non-theatrical staging. It's
> interesting because sometimes his compositions can be a little too
> neat-- I remember one shot where the shape of the sleigh perfect
> nestles against the shape of the frozen ship, like Africa tucking up
> against South America-- but it's always in a very graphic way, like
> comic strip panels, not in a way like composing for the stage. It's
> interesting, go look at the clip from Erotikon on Kino's site and if
> they didn't film in a real house, they built a set as big as one,
> because he shoots it like a real house, not like a three-walled set,
> quite strikingly for 1920.
Murnau was also treating interiors this way by 1920.
Lloyd Fonvielle
> That's a good point about his very non-theatrical staging. It's
> interesting because sometimes his compositions can be a little too
> neat-- I remember one shot where the shape of the sleigh perfect
> nestles against the shape of the frozen ship, like Africa tucking up
> against South America-- but it's always in a very graphic way, like
> comic strip panels, not in a way like composing for the stage.
A very important distinction. In fact, Stiller's composition is very
close to 19th-Century academic art -- as was Griffith's. (There's a
surviving scrapbook of engravings of 19th-Century academic art prepared
to aid the design of "Intolerance" which shows a direct link between
Griffith's images and this tradition.)
Academic art of this kind was very "cinematic". Walter Benjamin has
remarked that after the invention of photography, academic painters
persisted in believing that they could outdo the new medium on its own
terms, with increasingly realistic reproductions of reality (or imagined
reality, in the case of antique and historical subjects) and an
increasing concern with creating an impression of solidity and depth in
the image. Peter Cowie, in his talk on the "Sir Arne" DVD, describes
Stiller's compositions as almost "stereographic" -- and this is a term
one could apply to the work of any number of 19th-Century academic
painters, like Gerome and Bastien-Lepage . . . as well as to Griffith.
The academic painters seem to have given up with invention of the
movies, which could with movement through the frame, and even of the
frame, create an impression of solidity and depth beyond the range of
any painting. The tradition didn't die out, however -- it persisted in
book and magazine illustration, by artists like Howard Pyle and N. C.
Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, whose work has a "cinematic" quality as well.
Scholarship about the roots of the movies has tended to concentrate on a
development of stage practice into the new medium, but academic painting
played at least as big a role in the process -- always bearing in mind
that academic painting and the purely scenic ambitions of Victorian
theater shared common concerns.
The link to comic strips comes through Winsor McCay, who borrowed
techniques of realistic modeling and deep perspective from academic art
to create the stunning images of "Little Nemo", which seem like frames
from proto movie cartoons, just as Gerome's historical paintings seem
like frames from proto movie epics. It's certainly no accident that
McCay was an early pioneer of movie cartoons.
TomTraubertsBlues
film are getting released like this, but I would love to be able to have
such beautiful copies of The Phantom Chariot, Ingeborg Holm, Terje Vigen,
etc.
Hopefully, I have been out of the loop and these are already on the way.
;-)
Mike