Sjöström was only a year old when his father, Olof Adolf Sjöström, moved the family to Brooklyn, New York. As a boy, Sjöström was close to his mother, who passed during childbirth in 1886 when he was seven years old.
One decade later, Sjöström returned to Sweden, where he lived with relatives in Stockholm, beginning his acting career at seventeen as a member of a touring theater company.
The teenaged Sjöström loved the theater, but after his education he turned to business, becoming a donut salesman.
Fortunately for the future of Swedish cinema, he was a flop as a salesman, and turned to the theater, becoming an actor and then director.
Drawn from the stage to the fledgling motion picture industry, he made his first film in 1912 with the Swedish film company Svenska Bio. They hired him and Jewish-Swedish film and stage director of Mauritz Stiller to helm pictures.
From 1912 to 1915, Sjöström directed thirty-one films. Only three of them survive (it is estimated that approximately 150,000 films, or eighty percent of the total silent-era production, has been lost).
Despite the exigencies of working in an industrial art form, most Svenska Bio films of this period are embarrassments in an artistic sense--turgid melodramas, absurd romances and shaggy dog-style comedies--and there is no reason to think that the director didn't helm his share of such fare.
Even taking that into account, Sjöström managed to develop a personal style.
The reason he became internationally famous (and wooed by Hollywood) was the richness of his films, which were full of psychological subtleties and natural symbolism that was integrated into the works as a whole.
Between the late 1910s and the early 1920s, Sjöström directed another forty-one films in Sweden, some of which are now lost.
Those surviving include three silent films, the last being the 1921 Swedish silent black and white drama/fantasy horror film 'Körkarlen' (literally 'The Wagoner' or ''The Phantom Carriage'; also known as 'Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness').
Set on New Year's Eve, the driver of a ghostly carriage forces drunken man David Holm (Sjöström) to look back at his wasted life.
The last person to die on New Year’s Eve before the clock strikes twelve is doomed to take the reins of Death’s chariot and work tirelessly collecting fresh souls for the next year.
The alcoholic, abusive ne’er-do-well is then shown the error of his ways, while the dying but pure-of-heart Salvation Army sister Edit (Astrid Holm) believes in his redemption.
It was this extraordinarily rich and innovative silent classic (which inspired Ingmar Bergman to make films) is a Dickensian ghost story and a deeply moving morality tale.
'The Phantom Carriage’ is a showcase for groundbreaking special effects, especially its advanced (for the time) narrative structure with flashbacks within flashbacks.
The film was based on Nobel Prize-winning Swedish author and teacher Selma Lagerlöf's 1912 fiction novel Körkarlen (Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!).
Lagerlöf was commissioned to write it by a Swedish association as a means of public education about tuberculosis.
During the time of the film's release, Sjöströman used the anglicized name, Victor Seastrom, (a phonetic pronunciation in a country with limited word fonts).
He eventually became a major American director, a pro-to David Lean, who was renowned for balancing artistic expression with a concern for what would play at the box office.
Three years after the release of 'The Phantom Carriage', Sjöström co-wrote, co-produced and directed his first MGM film. This was the 1924 American silent black and white psychological thriller mystery film 'He Who Gets Slapped', starring Lon Chaney.
Upon release, the film was not only a critical success but a huge hit as well, getting the new studio off onto a sound footing.
Afterwards, Sjöström was highly respected by American film producer Louis B. Mayer and also by American film producer and production head Irving Thalberg. Both shared Sjöström's concerns with art that did not exclude profit.
Sjöström became one of the most highly paid directors in Hollywood, reaching his peak at the end of the silent era (when the silent film reached its maturation as an art form.
Aside from Sjöström's other filmmaking trademarks, he also dealt with such major themes as guilt, redemption and the rapidly evolving place of women in society.
Sjöström was masterful at eliciting sensitive performances from actresses. This included two collaborations with pioneering American actress of the stage and screen (as well as a director and writer) Lillian Gish.
The first was with the 1926 American silent black and white drama film ''The Scarlet Letter'. The second was with with the 1928 American silent black and white romance drama/Western film 'The Wind', Sjöström's last masterpiece.
Besides Gish and Cheney, Sjöström had directed a handful of other stars of that era. This included Greta Garbo (of whom Stiller discovered and brought to America).
This also included American actor, director and screenwriter John Gilbert and Canadian American actress and Hollywood star Norma Shearer. This was in another eight films in America before Sjöström's first talkie.
Uncomfortable with the modifications needed to direct talking films, Sjöström returned to Sweden where he directed two more films before his final directing effort.
Although he made two more films in Sweden in the intervening years, Sjöström's career as a director basically ended with the sound era. He returned to his first avocation, acting in Swedish films, in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.
Over a fifteen-year period, Sjöström returned to acting in the theatre, performed a variety of leading roles in more than a dozen films and was a company director of Svensk Film Industri.
Aged seventy-eight, Sjöström gave his final acting performance, probably his best remembered, as the elderly but crotchety retired doctor Professor Isaak Borg.
This was in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 Swedish black and white drama/romance film 'Smultronstället' ('Wild Strawberries').
For his performance, he later won the National Board of Review's Best Actor Award. Bergman once said that if Sjöström had not agreed to do the film, he would not have made it at all.
In his professional life, Sjöström was a workaholic, and in his private life was reticent about his films and his fame. However, he remained intensely devoted to his wife Erastoff and his family.
In 2017, 'He Who Gets Slapped' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Today, biographers see the truncated relationship with Sjöström's parents as being essential to the evolution of his dramatic trope of strong-willed, independent women in his films.
Sjöström was one of the most prominent Swedish film and theatre personalities of the 20th century and a constant source of inspiration for Bergman. Sjöström was also Sweden's most prominent director in the "Golden Age of Silent Film" in Europe.
Sjöström contributed significantly to the international preeminence of the Swedish silent film in the post-World War I era.
Influenced by the novels of Lagerlöf, whose art is rooted in sagas and folklore and imbued with a reverence for nature, Sjöström’s films were lyrically beautiful expressions of man’s relationship to nature and to society.
Many of Sjöström's films from the period are marked by subtle character portrayal, fine storytelling and evocative settings in which the Swedish landscape often plays a key psychological role.
The naturalistic quality of his films was enhanced by his (then revolutionary) preference for on-location filming, especially in rural and village settings. He is also known as a pioneer of continuity editing in narrative filmmaking.
Often referred to as "The Father of Swedish Cinema", Sjöström worked primarily in the silent era. Today, he ranks undisputedly as one of the masters of world cinema.
Sjöström has been active from 1912–1957.
#borntoact
#borntodirect
@SFSverige
@librarycongress
@Criterion
@tcm
@MuseumofModernArt
@filmforumnyc
@Britannica
@letterboxd
@wikiwandapp
No comments:
Post a Comment