Loading
Sjöström, Svensk Filmindustri, 1921, from Lagerlöf's Körkarlen. On New Year's Eve David Holm (Sjöström), a violent drunk, is struck dead in a graveyard as the clock hits midnight. Death's coachman, who died the year before, makes him look at the wife he beat and the Salvation Army sister dying of tuberculosis. Julius Jaenzon and lab man Eugén Hellman layered up to four in-camera exposures so the ghosts walk behind furniture and then in front of it. Lagerlöf wanted Landskrona; he built the town at Filmstaden. SFI's print is the one people mean.
In three programmes
The camera is a ghost. Exposures laid on top of one another let the coachman walk through a wall and the dead stand behind the living. Sjöström plays the drunk himself and does not ask you to like him. The clock striking midnight in the graveyard is the moment.
Guilt on ice. Sjöström plays the drunk, Jaenzon lays the exposures, and the coachman walks through a wall to collect a man who is not ready. The axe through the door is the scene Kubrick borrowed. The wife on the other side of it is the film.
The Supernatural and the Occult
The coach is a double exposure. Jaenzon and Hellman layered exposures until the coachman could walk through a wall and stand behind a chair. The dead are transparent and the drunk is not. Watch the clock hit midnight in the graveyard. The technique is the ghost.
Cast & crew
Further reading
Loading films
