2023-09-09 19:39:00
The Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation is devoting a magnificent retrospective to the filmmaker, whose films are particularly interested in marginalized people and their redemption.
Capturing life in its tremulous brilliance, taming movement, invisible powers, light… Among the exploits of the fire thieves who were the pioneers of cinema, there is one whose contribution was made by Swedish filmmakers, and in particular Victor Sjöström (1879-1960) will be immense: giving an account of nature, as a landscape and especially as a telluric and unleashed force. The dynamism of the elements, the impalpable air, the undulating lability of the sea, the immensity of a setting which always seems to overflow the frame, and challenges the filmmaker to contain it…
The importance of exteriors in Sjöström, of a rustling and vibrant world that we feel pulsating on the edge of the film, marks the specificity of cinematographic art (that is to say freed from the fixity of the theater to which by definition nature escapes), at the same time as it confronts him with his own limits, with what ultimately resists all representation. This art combines the power of literary evocation with attention to the world, with a delicate and precise realism, a magnificent retrospective of his works at the Jérome Seydoux-Pathé Foundation in Paris gives the measure.
If, with Griffith in the United States or Murnau in Germany, he is one of those filmmakers who invented cinematographic grammar by claiming its own singularity, Sjöström nevertheless comes from the theater, where he established himself through his productions as much as through the insane charisma of the actor that he also was, this mineral and animal presence, and this performance of incredibly modern sobriety. In 1912, Charles Magnusson, a leading figure in Swedish cinema at the head of the production company Svenska Biografteatern, attracted him into his purse, alongside Mauritz Stiller.
The individual is atomized in space
He then moved on to directing with The Gardener (1912). Beneath the trappings of melodrama, we can see the seeds of what will make the strength of its cinema: the importance of the natural setting, the immanence of the frame, the violence of the social body, often quick to reject its weakest cuttings, as if There were individuals that society was unable to assimilate, people that the twists of fate had marginalized and for whom transplantation proved impossible. This frame also irradiates Ingeborg Holm (1913) – the only one of his silent films to have escaped the flames during the fire which ravaged the company’s warehouses in 1941 (the others having been lost or miraculously preserved thanks to distribution copies of the time).
It relates the descent into hell of a woman, downgraded following the death of her husband, and who without resources, is forced to abandon her children to public assistance (more of a prison institution). As the story progresses, the interiors become stripped, the frame becomes empty and the individual is atomized in space. Cinematography still only knows still shots, but Sjöström energizes the action through a skilful use of depth of field, and a distancing from any theatrical emphasis to keep situations only sappy, refined and natural. The cutting realism that emanated from it had such an impact that it led to a modification of social laws in Sweden.
It will not take more to make Sjöström’s work a cinema of the margins, riveted to the fate of those left behind, poor, hermits, former convicts (Terje Vigen, 1917), smugglers (Les Autours de la sea, 1916), unmarried mother (The Girl from the Peat Bog, 1917), drunkards from the slums (The Phantom Cart, 1921), former scientist turned clown reenacting under the big top of a circus the humiliation which precipitated his downfall (Larmes de clown, 1924), an outlaw living in self-sufficiency in the heart of grandiose nature in the solitude of the heights between rocky peaks, bubbling geysers and snowstorms (the superb Les Proscrits, 1918, a title which from then takes on the meaning of a profession of faith).
A probable inspiration from Kubrick
Adapted from a poem by Ibsen, to which the spectacle of a turbulent sea off the Norwegian coast forms a visual counterpart, Terje Vigen, to which Sjöström lends his own features (as he will do in many of his films), above all inaugurates these beings measuring themselves against the torment of an indomitable nature, alone against all, victim of injustice, of the clashes of existence – the death of loved ones, war or prison which tear them away from the life of the community, to create a gap in its existence, a temporal gap that is impossible to make up for. With the key being the idea that all redemption emerges from the inconsolable, from a fault that can never truly be repaired.
A rare Sjöström film essentially shot in a studio and where the landscape is above all mental, The Ghost Cart (1921) and its complex structure, all embedded in flashbacks, continues this reflection, emphasizing the dual nature of man torn between good and evil, through a process of superimposition of sublime poetry, where the world seems to split and open to the supernatural. Here the storm is in a skull, particularly in this astonishing sequence – which must have inspired Kubrick in The Shining – where Sjöström/David Holm smashes with an ax the locked door behind which his frightened wife and child have taken refuge…
But most often the fury of the elements echoes that of feelings. High point of his career as a filmmaker, notably when, at the invitation of Louis B. Mayer, Sjöström went to Hollywood where he directed around ten films for MGM, The Wind (1928) – an immense masterpiece with Lillian Gish where realism is tinged with fantasy – seems to accomplish this main idea, through the fate of Letty, a young woman plunged into an arid and hostile corner in the depths of America, swept by the dizzying breath of the wind and the dunes of dust and sand that it carries in its path. Her face hallucinated, her body and mind always on the verge of tottering, she seems to carry on her shoulders the destiny of all humanity, strong even in her fragility in the face of the immensity of this grandiose nature which surpasses her.
“Victor Sjöström Retrospective” at the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation until October 10.
#Swedish #filmmaker #Victor #Sjöström #tenor #North #Libération