Ingeborg Holm (1913)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/4/2016

We finished off 1913 in our chronological movie viewing with Ingeborg Holm. This film was directed by Victor Sjöström (later Victor Seastrom after moving to Hollywood.) He directed many other famous films, including The Phantom Carriage, He Who Gets Slapped, and The Wind, and also was the lead actor in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries in 1958. But that was almost half-a-century after he directed this film, which is probably the most naturalistic we’ve seen to date. The plot revolves around the title character (played by Hilda Borgström), whose husband has just taken out a loan to open a general store. Unfortunately he falls ill and dies a few scenes after prominently coughing, and she loses everything and is forced to enter a workhouse, and place her children into foster homes. And then things get worse from there. (“I hope this never happens to us,” said Alli.) It’s played less sentimentally than it sounds, at least through the first three-quarters, and is probably the best film we’ve seen from 1913 (though the first few episodes of Fantomas were more entertaining.)

Next week we start 1914 with D.W. Griffith’s first full-length feature: Judith of Bethulia. I’ve also added a slate of films representing 1915 to the spreadsheet, which takes us out through late May. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT