El espía de Westerland

I have talked elsewhere of the "Renaissance" involved in the rediscovery of early cinema. Certain names, barely known twenty years ago, stand out as landmarks in that rediscovery, in the new understanding of cinema as a whole that it permits and in the reformulation of cinema-history that it imposes. From Albert Capellani to André Antoine and Gerhard Lamprecht, from Franz Hoffer to Joe May and Ewald André Dupont, the landscape of cinema is steadily repopulating itself with important film-makers who have spent decades in oblivion. Most are Europeans because this was something of a golden age of European film which suffered disproportionately from the subsequent Dark Age of neglect. The US knew how to keep alive the memory of their early films in a way the Europeans did not.

The Russian director Yevgeny Bauer is perhaps the most striking example of rediscovered genius but Georg af Klercker is also a major figure. He does not have the sensibility of Sjöström nor the wit and elegance of Stiller but his role in the development of Swedish film and of European film generally during the teens is a vital one. Happily quite a few of early Af Klercker films are now readily available.

Also available, and of great historical interest, is the 1912 film I lifvets vår, produced by Pathé and directed by a second-rank Pathé director called Paul Garbagni (specialist in "pulp" thrillers - the "Nick Carter" series). This very early Swedish feature is not a very wonderful film but it does, rather delightfully, brings together in its cast three of the great men of Swedish film - Af Klercker, Sjöström and Stiller. It also helps us to understand how Swedish film developed and the role Af Klercker played in that development.

Pathé (still the largest film-company in the world at this time) inherited the role of the Lumières in the dissemination of film throughout Europe (and beyond). It created subsidiaries in Belgium and the Netherlands, in Russia, in Sweden, in Japan...... It also had a US subsidiary which ironically played an important role in the development of the most distinctive of all US film-genres, the western.

Pathé, like the Lumières, tempered its business interests with what seems to have been a perfectly genuine desire to bring on native talent in the countries where it operated. In Sweden Pathé was responsible not only for I lifvets vår but also for Af Klercker's earliest films including this one. After which, in 1915, he went solo.

From the beginning Af Klercker's films, unlike those of Sjöström and Stiller) tend to privilege form over content. För fäderneslandet is essentially built round a series of beautifully composed views of a bridge over a waterfall. This particular "view" already had, like "workers leaving factory" or "train pulling into station", a long cinematic history, going back to a superb Lumière film of the Niagara Falls shot by Alexandre Promio (1896), something of a lesson in photography to the US film-makers in their own backyard. It was already part of that "photographic memory" of cinema that films retained (and retain to this day.)

As far as the plot is concerned, it is partly what was called in the US at this time "a preparedness film" - preparedness that is for war - of which there were many European examples at this time. Ivan is a spy from a country referred to as OEsterland who has been sent to Vesterland to spy out some important fortifications on the border, impenetrable because of the rapids that run between. In the course of his mission, he rather easily seduces two women, the daughter of a government dignitary and a naive peasant girl. Although genuinely attached to the former, he puts everything second to his duty to his country.

It is not always clear where sympathies lie (Sweden was one of the few countries in the world to remain neutral in 1914) since Ivan is the romantic hero but has a rather unpleasant character. At one point, for instance, he quite gratuitously deals out a whipping to a roadside gypsy. He eventually decides to try and blow up the bridge (yet more fine views) and it is his scurvy treatment of the gypsy that proves his downfall since it is the latter, who has been following him, who now stops him and tips him into the torrent, where he drowns. The film ends with a curious tableau of the two women seduced by him both mournful over his dead body.

It is recognisably, from the first shot of the bridge and torrent to the final shot of the grieving women, what is sometimes called a "tableau" film. There are no views in close-up. But the term "tableau" is faitly pejorative and there is nothing old-fashioned about this film. The style is better described as "contextual" since its object is to create a visual context, a mise en scène, into which the viewer is drawn rather than, as in the developing US "action film" tradition, to continually direct the viewer's attention, focus on and glamourise the stars and create suspense. Context as opposed to continuity ermains to this day a distinctive feature of European film.

Af Klercker may not be a Sjöström or a Stiller (Florin, the cinematographer, has for that matter none of the absolute genius of the Jaenzon brothers) but it was he who established the guidelines for the Swedish style of film-making.

He also represents a "bridge", in one direction, via Pathé, to the pioneer work of the Lumières and, in the other, via Sjöström and Stiller, to the great films of the twenties and the continuing (if struggling) European tradition today.