silver nitrate notes

Victor Sjöström, The Phantom Carriage, and the Ghost Shot Four Times

31 may 2026

Ingmar Bergman watched The Phantom Carriage (1921) once a year for most of his adult life, and when he needed a face old enough to carry the weight of Wild Strawberries in 1957, he hired the man who had directed it. Victor Sjöström (1879-1960) was by then a retired elder of Swedish cinema. Thirty-six years earlier he had stood on the other side of the camera and made the film Bergman would spend a lifetime rewatching, a ghost story that is also a temperance tract, a piece of trick photography, and one of the few silent films I would put in front of someone who claims silent cinema cannot frighten.

The premise comes from Selma Lagerlöf's 1912 novel: the last sinner to die before the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve must drive Death's cart for the coming year, collecting souls. David Holm, a tubercular drunkard played by Sjöström himself, dies at exactly the wrong moment, and the previous driver arrives to hand over the reins and walk him back through the wreckage of his own life.

The reason the film still works is Julius Jaenzon (1885-1961), Sjöström's cinematographer, and the patience with which he built its ghosts. The cart, its driver, and the souls it gathers are all double exposures, made in the camera rather than in a lab. Jaenzon would expose a portion of the negative, wind the film back by hand, mask off part of the frame, and expose again, so that a transparent figure could walk in front of a solid wall and then behind a solid chair within the same shot. The drowned sailor rising from the seabed is reported to have taken as many as four separate exposures stacked on one strip of film, every pass aligned by hand with no way to check the result until the negative came back from the bath. There is no opticals house doing this work later. It is all happening at the moment of shooting, which is why the ghosts have weight. They occupy the room.

What surprises a first-time viewer is the structure. This is 1921, and Sjöström is already telling the story in flashbacks nested inside flashbacks, the dying man's past unfolding in layers as the cart driver walks him through it. The technique we associate with much later cinema is here, fully worked out, in a Swedish silent that most people have never heard of. Sjöström does not use the device to show off. He uses it because the film's subject is a man being forced to see his life from outside himself, and the only way to film that is to keep stepping back from the present into the things he would rather not look at.

Sjöström the actor is the other half of it. He plays David Holm as genuinely repellent, a man who coughs on his own children and breaks furniture and infects the Salvation Army sister, Edit (Astrid Holm), who is trying to save him. There is no softening. The performance refuses the easy sentiment the temperance plot invites, and the refusal is what gives the late turn toward grace its force. You have to have believed the man was lost.

The line runs straight from here to Bergman, who cast Sjöström precisely because the old man's face already carried this film inside it. The cart on the shoreline, the figure looking back at a life it can no longer change, the camera that walks a man through his own memory: Isak Borg's journey is this film, finished by the man who started it. Bergman knew exactly what he was doing when he made that call. He had, after all, watched it every year.

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sources
[1] Lagerlöf, Selma. Körkarlen (translated as Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness). Stockholm, 1912.
[2] Forslund, Bengt. Victor Sjöström: His Life and His Work. Trans. Peter Cowie. New York: Zoetrope, 1988.
[3] Florin, Bo. Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood. Amsterdam University Press, 2013.
[4] Bergman, Ingmar. The Magic Lantern. Trans. Joan Tate. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988.