WELCOME TO OUR NEXT SCREENING
Victor Sjöström's
THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE
(Körkarlen)
(Sweden | 1921 | 106 mins | G)
Wednesday 3 September, 7.30PM, University of Otago’s Castle 1 Lecture Theatre**
An alcoholic’s life is changed through love and an encounter with the Grim Reaper in this film of uncanny beauty and inventiveness.
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| | “Ingmar Bergman called The Phantom Carriage “one of the major emotional and artistic experiences of my life,” and he drew upon it both visually and thematically for his own Wild Strawberries, which starred Carriage’s director and lead actor, the great Victor Sjöström. Adapted from the novel by Nobel Prize-winning Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, The Phantom Carriageis based on a legend that the last person to die before the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve is doomed to take up the reins of Death’s chariot” (David Sterritt, TIFF Lightbox). |
| “The movie is electrifyingly realistic in terms of acting and nuance, while also being proudly expressionistic in its fantasy—as when, via double-exposure, the Grim Reaper parks his carriage in the ocean to retrieve a woman’s soul left over from a shipwreck. All told it’s a consistently gorgeous movie, with cinematography by Sweden’s dominant eye, Julius Jaenzon, lighting the semi-transparent ghosts as carefully as the ‘reality’ and indulging in genuinely inspired imagery” (Kate Stables, Sight & Sound). |
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FURTHER REVIEW
"Sjöström was not the first major Swedish artist to evoke the spirit world through photography. August Strindberg, as well as creating modern drama... experimented with photography throughout his life, even inventing... a camera that enabled him to take “psychological portraits” endowed with “mystic meaning” or “visionary suggestion”... The Phantom Carriage is remarkably faithful to its source, and the double exposures and other effects can be seen as at once... marking the film world’s threshold points: the narrative begins with the Salvation Army’s Sister Edith [Astrid Holm] at “death’s door”, the first of many doors that physically, psychologically and spiritually block characters; while most of the first hour is set in a graveyard.... |
| Sjöström’s work has frequently dramatised themes of declining fortune and the redemption of “bad” or hardened men, and The Phantom Carriage fits neatly into this pattern. But another reading is possible: the film’s systems of transference, repetition, parallelism and circularity; its course of moral and physical infection that spreads to every character; its world where the family is a site of violence, disease and threat, are most chillingly emblematised when Holm hatchets down the kitchen door to stop his brutalised wife from fleeing him. The power of this inexorable scene overshadows the narrative’s final reconciliation and redemption, and Holm’s second resurrection in the world we’ve been shown is serial, without end" (Darragh O’Donoghue, Senses of Cinema). |
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–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Finally, watch great director Ingmar Bergman discuss his reactions to The Phantom Carriage! ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
ABOUT THE DUNEDIN FILM SOCIETY
ADMISSION
Free to members.
TO JOIN
To purchase a Half Season membership:- complete a membership form from our website and pay by online bank transfer (06-0942-0696013-00);
- or join at the door before any screening (cash only).
- you can also join at the OUSA office reception at the University of Otago (cash only).
Alternatively, you can purchase a Three-Film sampler ($25), which can be also be shared to bring two friends to one screening. The sampler does not expire and can be used over multiple years.
Membership includes generous discounts at Rialto Cinemas (from Monday to Friday); and FREE entry to the 2025 screenings of all other affiliated New Zealand Film Societies. Each member is entitled to ONE FREE GUEST ADMISSION to a single screening.
**To get to the Castle 1 Theatre: walk up between the University of Otago’s Arts building (Burns) and Information Services building (Central Library), on Albany Street.
WE WELCOME YOUR FEEDBACK!... on this screening, or any other Dunedin Film Society showing, on dunedinfi...@gmail.com –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– |
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