The Silent Cinema: Phantom Carriage (1921)

Directed by Victor Sjöström. Cast: Victor Sjöström, Hilda Borgström. Tore Svennberg, Astrid Holm, Concordia Sleander, Lisa Lunholm, Tor Wejden, Eina Axelsson. Released January 1, 1921. Running time: 104 minutes.

Victor Sjöström's "The Phantom Carriage" is one of the true masterworks of silent cinema, coming from Sweden during that country's particularly fertile period in motion picture production. The story deals with three men drinking, and evoking a legend where on New Year's Eve, the last person to die has to spend the entire next year driving a chariot and picking up the souls of the dead.

From this premise, Victor Sjöström presents a layered, atmospheric piece of visual cinema that continues to resonate as one of the most deeply fulfilling movies of the silent era. Just on a purely visual level, the way Sjöström frames each shot, how he uses the background and foreground, and what he does with the negative space, are all very striking. His narrative structure is not always linear, providing flashbacks to set up the proceedings and offering segments that are more loosely episodic. But it all comes together in a very artful, compelling way.

Based on the 1912 novel "Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!" by Nobel prize-winning Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, "The Phantom Carriage" is most striking when employing the visual effects to show the carriage and the transparent figure that controls it. This spirit, walking through walls, retrieving a victim (who becomes transparent as he is lifted into the spirits arms), and departing on its carriage, is truly breathtaking in its visual presentation. The film was shot in only a few months during the Spring of 1920, but its post-production was long and arduous due to the visual effects (the shot of the carriage's image going across a rough sea is another of the film's most remarkable moments). The use of double-exposure alone must have made a harrowing challenge for this early in cinema's technological development.

There is a gif going around social media that compares a scene in "The Phantom Carriage" of a door being broken down with an axe, to a similar scene in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining." This is quite remarkable and Sjöström's film is obviously an inspiration for Kubrick's. There are also scenes that likely inspired the work of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, most notably his films "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries."

"The Phantom Carriage" is one of the quintessential films of the silent era, one that shows the motion picture as already somewhere near perfection at the outset of the 1920 -- the last full decade of regular silent movie production. Silent cinema is an art unto itself. "The Phantom Carriage" is an example why.