Ingeborg Holm

Beautiful background music added to this Swedish silent film from 1913. This is first silent film I've seen and I didn't know what to expect. To my surprise, I was able to stay engaged for the full 73 mins and ended up enjoying the style in which the film is presented. The story of a widowed mother tugs at your heartstrings and is a bold commentary on the treatment of lower-class individuals (particularly women) at the time. Would recommend this film to anyone interested in deepening their understanding of European film from the early 20th century. I would not recommend this film to anyone looking to tune out to a relaxing (somewhat short) film.

In conjunction with its release of THE OUTLAW AND HIS WIFE, Kino has also given us this splendid double bill from Victor Sjostrom (Seastrom in America) who was truly one of the world's great directors. His influence on other Scandinavian filmmakers (Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer to name two of the best known) is clearly evident although with INGEBORG HOLM (1913) you could say he influenced many others as well. This film is incredibly well made for a film of its vintage. Although the camerawork is first rate it's the restrained naturalistic style of the acting by star Hilda Borgstrom along with the seriousness of the thematic material that really makes you sit up and take notice.

D. W. Griffith had explored social themes in his Biograph shorts before this but never in a feature length film and similar socially concious movies like TRAFFIC IN SOULS (also 1913) were not as dramatically sophisticated. The story of a widow whose husband leaves her bankrupt and is forced to live in a workhouse where she must give up her children to foster parents, works as both social indictment and dramatic tragedy. It's hard to watch this film and not become emotionally involved in the plight of the title character. The score by David Drazin is simple but effective using primarily piano with a few synthesized strings.

The other film on the disc, A MAN THERE WAS, dates from 1917 and is based on an epic poem (TERJE VIGEN) from the great Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen (PEER GYNT). The English title cards are even an approximation of his poetic writing style which may be tough going for some but they add quite a bit to the visual narrative. Full of lots of natural location shooting including the open sea, MAN explores a variety of powerful emotions as a fisherman during the Napoleonic Wars is wrongfully imprisoned which results in the death of his family.

Many years after his release he is presented with the opportunity of saving the family of the man who sent him to prison. Donald Sosin's piano score is very effective especially during the sea sequences but it would have been nice to have a chamber or orchestral score to accompany the film. Nevertheless this is an important set from one of the great early film pioneers and as such should not be missed...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

I dont know if netflix got involved before or after the restoration .but this a great achievement for1913 may be I'm a wimp but the end made me cry. More like this netflix please

Victor Sjöström's early feature film "Ingeborg Holm" is not only considered by many the first film in the golden age of Swedish cinema lasting from 1913 to 1924 but also the real beginning of Swedish cinema in general. A film scholar, Peter Cowie, for one, claims that the film marks the highest achievement of the seventh art before David Wark Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) which was to follow two years after. Although "Ingeborg Holm" is not as well known as many of its contemporary films, it surely stands out from the crowd to anyone who has seen more than a few films from the period. "Nothing like this was being made in 1913," writes Peter von Bagh, a Finnish film historian, capturing the historical importance of the film. The film's authenticity, realism, and moral seriousness have even been seen to bear far-reaching connections to Italian neorealism.

As many of the films of the Swedish golden age, "Ingeborg Holm" is also based on a literary source. It is based on a play by Nils Krok. The story concerns a married woman, Ingeborg Holm whose husband dies just after earning credit for establishing his own business. After the death of her husband, Ingeborg falls to the bottom of the society, loses her children to foster parents, and eventually ends up in an asylum.

The film is very raw and poignant in showing the grim consequences of social actions. It never, however, turns its back on the individual. Although it can be seen as a story of one woman's abasement, it grows into an intimate treatise on the sickness of a society that lacks humanity and tenderness. The shot of Ingeborg losing her children as a bureaucratic official calmly signs the documents in the background is definitive to say the least. The social reality as well as the psychological turmoil and suffering ignored by the society are relayed in a stark and riveting fashion. The scene bears a visual parallel to an earlier scene in which Ingeborg's husband dies in the foreground, while their children are innocently playing in the background of the image -- in another space, almost as if in another time, too.

Already the first film of the movement gives us its basic lessons: acting is more realistic than theatrical (to as large an extent as one can imagine given the film was made in 1913), moral themes are presented with the utmost seriousness, and emphasis lies on the simplicity and careful precision of mise-en-scène. Above all, the power of light is vital which was to be consummated in Sjöström's subsequent films such as "Terje Vigen" (1917) and "Körkarlen" (1921). In the beginning of the film, Ingeborg tries to continue her late husband's business, but fails, and we see the darkness in the grocery store almost swallowing her whole from the scarce source of light in the space.

Overall, and quite surprisingly, "Ingeborg Holm" lacks a sentimental or overly melodramatic tone. Sjöström's tone is subtle and restraint which once again reminds one of Italian neorealism. Although the film has no drama of nature which one so closely associates with the golden age of Swedish cinema, it uses a lot of outdoor on-location shooting, and its grimness, sobriety, and artistic excellence bring the style of the movement to mind very vividly. All in all, the film stands as a perfect instance for Peter Cowie's seemingly exaggerated claim that "there is no more stirring feat in the entire history of silent film than the Swedish achievements between 1913 and 1921." Sjöström's "Ingeborg Holm" is precisely this to any film enthusiast: something utterly stirring.

The classic narrative films so familiar in "The Golden Age of Hollywood" movies had its beginning in October 1913 with Sweden's "Ingeborg Holm." Writer/director Victor Sjostrom adapted the Nils Krok 1906 play about a family who sinks to the depths of poverty after the father dies just as he assumes ownership of a store.

What sets "Ingeborg Holm" apart from the movies produced previously to the autumn of 1913 was the breath of its plot. Instead of taking a slice of a full-scale biography of the characters and producing a film on one particular stand alone event, here Sjostrom portrays an entire family's history, beginning when the head of the household receives bank funding to begin his enterprise. He continues the plot until years later, concluding in an emotional reunion with the mother and her long-absent son.

"Ingeborg Holm" fits all the criteria in cinema's full narrative definitions. A classic narrative begins by introducing all the characters who will propel the plot forward, just as Sjostrom illustrated with the comfortable middle-class family embarking on its new enterprise. Narratives contain a triggering event which shakes things up. Here, the father dies and his assistant at the store rips off the family's profits. Sjostrom continues the narrative plot by showing the mother-led family sinking into poverty, with the kids shunt off to the poor house. Events lead up to the conclusion, where the director visually reveals Sweden's lack of a safety net for the country's poor caused by, through no fault of themselves, their hardships.

Hollywood would follow Sjostrom's pattern of full narrative movies, especially during its classic 1930's--1950's golden age. There are variations of the narrative pattern in movies today, but the Swedes were the first to put into practice on film what literature and drama had been delivering for centuries.

Today's movie viewers may be familiar with Sjostrom by his last appearance on the screen in Ingmar Bergman's 1957's "Wild Strawberries," where he had the leading role of an aging professor who rediscovers his past through a journey to receive a honorarium.