Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: 'The Phantom Carriage: KTL Edition'

"Where has this movie been all my life?" That's what I'm thinking as I'm watching this gem of a DVD, featuring a beautifully tinted and scrupulously transferred version of a 1921 picture directed by and starring the great Victor Sjostrom. The Phantom Carriage is as striking and haunting a vision of the supernatural as Murnau's Nosferatu or Dreyer's Vampyr. And yet I don't recollect its being mentioned in what was my first movie Bible, Carlos Clarens' An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films (and I can't check, because the book's in a box at the office, awaiting a move to another floor). How often do you feel a film taking its place in a pantheon as you're watching it?

So there's that, to begin with.

The picture, adapted by Sjostrom—a defining figure of Scandanavian cinema who is also responsible for several American silent masterpieces, the 1928 Lillian-Gish-starring The Wind among them; later in life he appeared in the lead role of Bergman's Wild Strawberries—from a novel by Selma Lagerlof, has a narrative that falls somewhere between A Christmas Carol and It's A Wonderful Life. As a Salvation Army worker lays dying on New Year's Eve, she requests the presence of one soul she did not save, a drunk named David Holm, who happened to have passed to her the consumption that's about to take his life. Holm (a staggering performance by Sjostrom), however, has his hands full. Down where the drunkards roll, he and some compatriots recall the legend of the phantom carriage—a carriage that collects all the world's dead, and is driven for one year by the last person to die on New Year's Eve. After David takes what looks to be a fatal beating from his fellow reprobates, what should pull up just then but that selfsame carriage; at the reins is a former friend, who tells David that it's his turn. Unless he takes one final opportunity to reform...

The complex narrative structure contains several flashbacks within flashbacks, but Sjostrom's filmmaking has an oft-terrifying immediacy throughout. There's one particularly striking scene near the end, in which Holm's wife locks a drunken David into another room to keep the violent man away from the children; David goes nuts and hacks at the door with an axe. I can't imagine that Kubrick didn't recall this film when planning The Shining...

The U.K. Tartan Video "KTL Edition" is so called because of the original music score accompanying the movie, performed by the duo KTL. KTL is made up of Sunn 0))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley and electronics master Peter Rehberg, who first came together to compose music for a theater production called Kindertotenleider, hence KTL. "Kindertotenleider," by the way, translates out to something like "Songs on the death of children." Don't worry, it's not some crazy Mansonite thing—it's from Mahler! In any case, KTL's music is a somewhat more minimal, less overtly rock-based variant on the doomy drone metal propogated by Sunn 0))) and its various orbiting bodies. O'Malley and Rehberg's approach to scoring here is unusual; the music, largely guitar pickings and motifs, with some obscure sampling and such creating a lugubrious sonic bed, doesn't overtly shift with each scene or change of mood; the musicians are treating the film as an art object and creating a tonal setting for it that honors its whole rather than the sum of its parts. It won't please everyone's ears, but for those who go for it, it's best heard at near floor-rumbling volume. I found it entirely riveting. The KTL Edition's packaging, designed by O'Malley, is terrifically striking.

For those not attracted by the prospect of the KTL soundtrack, the picture's also available, again in region-2 only, with a more traditional orchestral score from Tartan, as part of a two-disc set that also features Ingmar Bergman's television play about Sjostrom and The Phantom Carriage, entitled The Image Makers.

Comments

[cinetrix]

Nice Richard Thompson reset, GK.

[Nathan Duke]

"The Phantom Carriage" is an odd, haunting film. I first ran across it in the 1,001 Movies to See Before You Die book and ended up finding it at Kim's Video at St. Marks Place. I'm surprised it isn't a better known film.

[D Cairns]

Sjostrom is an incredible filmmaker -- He Who Gets Slapped with Lon Chaney is my all-time fave movie, and his Swedish work is both surprisingly varied and surprisingly consistent.

[Mike Grost]

"The Outlaw and His Wife" (1917) is one of the great classics of silent film.
We need a lot more of Sjöström's work available on DVD.

[Daryl Chin]

THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE was actually very well known in the 1960s: it's listed at the end of Bosley Crowther's book on the 50 Greatest Films (it's included on his supplemental list of 100 notable films), and was always cited in the original reviews of Bergman's WILD STRAWBERRIES and THE MAGICIAN.

It was included in the Janus Films retrospective that toured the country two years ago, so the assumption that a Criterion Collection DVD edition may be forthcoming in the US is not unreasonable.