The Phantom Carriage
I am currently watching “Le genou de Claire”, and its immediate juxtaposition to “The Phantom Carriage” is striking. “The Phantom Carriage” is Sjöström’s most famous film, and all those artsy people absolutely love it. As an example, my well-loved list on Observations on film art calls the film “the easiest” to include onto their ten best films of 1921 list. Isn’t that enough reason for me to watch the film?
As a matter of fact, though, I was horribly bored by the movie. Maybe it’s a film you have to see on the big screen to be able to fully appreciate its visuals. Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Caligari are similarly supernatural movies (albeit with a completely different philosophy and style) which work best on a big screen with live music. I still remember vividly how I bought a DVD of “The General” and was mostly bored by the film. Later on, I saw the film on the big screen with a huge audience, and we all roared with laughter. I am therefore trying to be careful when passing a judgement on silent films, which are so immensely different depending on when and how you watch them.
But in the case of “The Phantom Carriage” I have a feeling that my opinion is pretty much set in stone. Of course the film is beautiful, and I absolutely loved its visual style and effects – the ghosts look truly ghostly, and everybody in the film is a brilliant actor of the realistic type (very modern and very different both from stage actors and from the flashy Hollywood type acting). But that is all the praise I can bring for the film. The story is based on a beloved book, but unlike many other films from the silent film era with social commentary “The Crowd”, “The Last Laugh” and even “The Box of Pandora”, “The Phantom Carriage” is utterly outdated to the point that it makes almost no sense at all. What makes most stories good is some sort of universal humanity in them, which is why people nowadays are still fascinated with Faust (of which my favorite version is actually Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust”) or any Shakespeare title. “The Phantom Carriage” has nothing of the sort – we are dealing with some man who redeems himself for almost no reason. Why would his wife ever want to go back to him when there is still a risk that he could infect his children with tuberculosis? Why is that nurse Edit in love with him, and why in the world would it be her fault that he didn’t get better? Even if I accept a world in which a meeting with death does not mean that you must necessarily die, the motivation of any of the characters there absolutely puzzle me.
Sure, it’s a film you should see as a movie fan, but when I think about how much fun I have while watching Rohmer’s masterpieces, I suggest we all leave an exercise in film history as “The Phantom Carriage” to people who have a more academic interest in it.