Hämnaren

Swedish film, 1915, directed by Mauritz Stiller.

I saw the film at MoMA on Sunday, January 16, 2005, and wrote these notes:

This is a recently discovered print of this film, and in pretty good shape. The plot concerns a Jewish girl whose Swedish seminarian lover jilts her. When her father finds out, he kicks her out, so of course she dies in penurious childbirth, attended only by the Jewish boy who loved her all along. Baby boy grows up in his Jewish grandfather’s home, eventually falls in love with a Christian girl, who turns out to be his half-sister.

Cinematically, the most interesting thing is the way Stiller uses the space being shot by the camera. Presumably because of technical constraints, the camera just sits in place and grinds away while action occurs. But Stiller shows how you can still make the space before the camera lively and plastic. The best example is the scene in which the girl, tossed out by Papa, goes to the gate of the seminary in hopes of seeing her lover again and talking him back into her life. As she stands shyly to the side of the gate (camera left), the screen fills with a crowd of young men going lightheartedly off for the afternoon, their confidently upright postures and snappy dress contrasting handsomely with the figure of the girl, who soon disappears behind all these fellows. Then the father-to-be is seen in the group, then the group is finished exiting, and then the girl herself, dowdy and stooped and small against the seminary wall, is seen alone. She gathers her small courage and walks diagonally off left, leaving the scene empty of humans. Pretty striking.

Another cinematic effect, mighty hokey, occurs when the seminarian marries his proper Swedish bride, in a church where one sees a Madonna on the wall where in a Catholic church one would see the retable. The ceremony begins, but then the young man is stricken when he looks up and sees – yes! – the Jewish girl and her baby in place of the Madonna and child.

His reaction is guilt-ridden, but he is not guilt-ridden enough to, say, find that baby and see that he is properly supported. Indeed, the film is suffused with Christian ambiguity over mistreatment of Jews, which is puzzling since I imagine from the director’s name that he must be Jewish. For example, at the end, the boy finally encounters his father – quondam seminarian and now minister of the Gospel – and instead of punching him out for mistreating his mother falls into his arms: “My son is mine,” the minister proclaims, while the much-abused grandfather, whom the film characterizes as a heartless usurer, weeps.

The titles divide the film into “Acts” just as in the 1918 The Mandarin. This must have been the practice in Europe – in the D. W. Griffith epics of this era there is nothing so stagey.

There is information on Stiller in the Internet Movie Database.