From Selma Lagerlöf’s 1891 novel (her first), Mauritz Stiller’s Gösta Berlings saga, irritating in butchered versions, sparkles with both feminist and spiritual passion in the three-hour 1975 restoration that’s now widely available on DVD. Here is the silent film that made teenaged Greta Garbo, Stiller’s discovery, a star—indeed, cinema’s greatest female star. Fifteen years earlier, Lagerlöf became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
Gösta Berling is a defrocked Lutheran priest-turned-tutor whose various romantic entanglements result in the punishment of the girls involved, who are routinely tossed homeless into the elements for the sake of male propriety. Will Elisabeth, Henrik Dohna’s wife, join them? Elisabeth and Gösta are one another’s great love.
The narrative style, including flashbacks inside flashbacks, can be convoluted—this, correlative to the hypocritical nature of society. Some shots are brilliantly complex, for example, one at a dance where, within the same frame, a poisonous conversation off the floor continues, a momentous eavesdropping occurs, and a mirror reflects activity on the dance floor: a fractured vision of social decorum and, behind the scenes, plotting and disruption. But the most memorable passages, entirely in the present, revolve around beauteous Nature, a spectacular instance of nighttime arson and, that same night, a horse-drawn flight across ice and snow with a pack of voracious wolves at the heels of the wheels carrying Gösta and Elisabeth.
The imperfect nature of the hero would attract greater interest if Lars Hanson were not so overemphatic as Gösta Berling. Indeed, a good many performances here are exaggerated. But Jenny Hasselqvist is lovely as Marianne, who loses her looks to smallpox (“Do not delude yourself,” she tells Gösta. “You require beauty”), and Garbo is vibrant, profound, deeply moving and very beautiful as Elisabeth.
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This entry was posted on June 20, 2009 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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THE SAGA OF GÖSTA BERLING (Mauritz Stiller, 1924)
From Selma Lagerlöf’s 1891 novel (her first), Mauritz Stiller’s Gösta Berlings saga, irritating in butchered versions, sparkles with both feminist and spiritual passion in the three-hour 1975 restoration that’s now widely available on DVD. Here is the silent film that made teenaged Greta Garbo, Stiller’s discovery, a star—indeed, cinema’s greatest female star. Fifteen years earlier, Lagerlöf became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature.
Gösta Berling is a defrocked Lutheran priest-turned-tutor whose various romantic entanglements result in the punishment of the girls involved, who are routinely tossed homeless into the elements for the sake of male propriety. Will Elisabeth, Henrik Dohna’s wife, join them? Elisabeth and Gösta are one another’s great love.
The narrative style, including flashbacks inside flashbacks, can be convoluted—this, correlative to the hypocritical nature of society. Some shots are brilliantly complex, for example, one at a dance where, within the same frame, a poisonous conversation off the floor continues, a momentous eavesdropping occurs, and a mirror reflects activity on the dance floor: a fractured vision of social decorum and, behind the scenes, plotting and disruption. But the most memorable passages, entirely in the present, revolve around beauteous Nature, a spectacular instance of nighttime arson and, that same night, a horse-drawn flight across ice and snow with a pack of voracious wolves at the heels of the wheels carrying Gösta and Elisabeth.
The imperfect nature of the hero would attract greater interest if Lars Hanson were not so overemphatic as Gösta Berling. Indeed, a good many performances here are exaggerated. But Jenny Hasselqvist is lovely as Marianne, who loses her looks to smallpox (“Do not delude yourself,” she tells Gösta. “You require beauty”), and Garbo is vibrant, profound, deeply moving and very beautiful as Elisabeth.
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Tags: Garbo
This entry was posted on June 20, 2009 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.