A tour of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio in 1925 shows the people who make the movies there, and gives viewers a glimpse at how movies are made.

In the early fifties Ingmar Bergman got himself a cine-camera, a 9.5 mm Bell & Howell, which he often used both privately and in his work. "Bilder från lekstugan" ("Images from the Playground") embark on these films, giving a diverse representation of one of the greatest artists in cinema.

A masterpiece of comic cinema that shows how the medium can transform and distort, as well as record, reality. Swedish cinema in the period 1917-21 was arguably the most sophisticated in the world, its major figure being the actor-director Victor Sjostrom, whose magnificently downbeat films combined literary adaptation, action, melodrama and astonishing natural backdrops. There are some of us, however, who prefer comedy to action melodramas, Lubitsch to Ford, and for this we turn to Sjostrom's contemporary, Mauritz Stiller, unfairly relegated in history to 'The Man Who Discovered Greta Garbo'.
'Thomas Graal's Best Film' is one of the best comedies of the silent era. It works as an adorable romantic comedy about a concupiscent novelist who falls for his secretary; as a startling social tract, with the dessicated aristocracy giving onto the modern world of cinema, entrepreneurs and the New Woman; as one of the first films about filmmaking - there is an exquisite parody of Griffith's monumental 'Intolerance', as the actor playing a hanged criminal complains about the pain of being hoist from a ceiling.
As early as 1917, before Hollywood was even heard of, we meet the philistine mogul hurling scripts into a wastepaper basket; the hysterical director; the overwrought, melodramatic actors. There is a wonderful scene where Bessie on horseback sees a man attacking a woman on a country road; coming cracking her whip to the rescue, she notices that a film crew are standing beside the roadside; she has mistaken fantasy for reality. This is the film's main theme, and the longest sequence features the title hero writing a screenplay after his mauling Bessie has forced her to flee; he imagines a desperate background of poverty for her from which he rescues her - this is the Best Film of the title.
Stiller's movie shows a thrilling modernity in this sequence as it blurs not only the reality of Graal's writing and the fantasy he imagines, but also intrudes Bessie's own story: she disrupts his narrative just as she disrupts all the forces of (male) power that would try to pin her down. Bessie is one of the great heroines of silent film, permanantly amused by the absurd complacency of the inferiors surrounding her, with a gorgeous, generous grin suggesting both a taste for playfulness, and a voracious sexual appetite. The scene where she flees her father and ritualistically forces him to abandon his paternalistic intentions by destroying the bridge between them is hilarious but provocative.
Graal's screenplay is not merely amusing for the gap between his assumptions and the actual truth. The imagined scene where the aristocratic parents become peasants, the father violent and drunk is subversive in itself (gentry reduced to peasants), but is also an apt metaphor for the patriarchal assumptions of the aristocracy.
Another aspect of the film's modernity is its narration, expressed through intertitles, sarcastic at the expense of the characters, suggesting melodramatic attitudes appropriate to the plot, than showing a very different reality (eg the despairing lover Graal sunbathing merrily on a country lake). There is a ritualistic sexual content (eg the scene in the boat where Graal blows on the window), and a willingness to sidetrack on 'irrelevant' bits (eg the cigarette tricks) that also excite the viewer; while the Surreal/Magritte/Feuillade-like abduction scene, fragmented and seemingly arbitrary, where bowler-hatted servants wait to pounce on Bessie, is spooky.
What makes 'Thomas Graal' a true classic though, and nearer to Sjostrom (who is terrific, his overacting more suited to comedy than drama), is the way the defiant artifice of the drama is shot against natural locations, producing a fruitful, jarring effect - Graal chasing Bessie through a country lane, slipping and losing his hat; a desperate Graal pushing a little old lady and stealing her boat, foreshadowing Seinfeld and a famous loaf of rye. There is a startling scene in a butcher's shop, a gallery of fresh carcass bloating the screen.

A gardener's son has fallen in love with the daughter of one of the workers at the nursery, and the two are married. The gardener then kicks his progeny off the property and begins to act despicably toward his son's wife.

This crime drama is composed of three acts of approximate 10-minute duration each. The story itself, shown in a long flashback style, leads us into the overall reconstruction of the crime, made by a mysteriously masked character.
The film was released 28 August 1916 in Finland. A fragmentary print was recovered in 2001 by the Cinémathèque Française; in 2002 the fragments were preserved, with Swedish intertitles and supplemented with production photographs, by the Svenska Filminstituet in 2002.
Writing about Victor Sjöström and quoted by Charlotte de Silva for the Embassy of Sweden in London, Jon Wengström of the Swedish Film Institute writes, "The pictorial compositions in Havsgamar/Sea Vultures (1916) and the complex narrative structure in the recently rediscovered Dodskyssen/Kiss of Death (1916) show a director in full command of the medium.

挪威著名剧作家易仆生编剧，北欧电影黄金时代的开篇之作。全片實景挪威海岸拍攝，拍攝難度與戲劇張力超越當代。原本平凡的水手，戰時為了養家活口冒險出航，卻被軍人所俘。多年後脫身返家卻人事已非，只有滿腔怨怒相伴。某天，當年俘虜他的仇敵與相隨的妻女海上落難待援，他奮勇而至，卻陷入「復仇還是救援？」的天人交戰。
Terje Vigen, a sailor, suffers the loss of his family through the cruelty of another man. Years later, when his enemy's family finds itself dependent on Terje's beneficence, Terje must decide whether to avenge himself. Based on a poem written by Henrik Ibsen and entirely on location shooting at the Norwegian coast, the film claimed to be the most expensive production and marked the beginning of the Golden Age in the Nordic film history.

A stranger comes to work at widow Halla's farm. Halla and the stranger fall in love, but when he is revealed as Eyvind, an escaped thief forced into crime by his family's starvation, they flee and become two of the many outlaws of Iceland's mountains.

It is extraordinary that this amazing film is not repeatedly shown. It is possibly the best demonstration of the genius (not an assessment to make casually) of Sjöstrom - with David Griffiths, the first person to demonstrate his brilliance by making films.
The film's aware mix of the naive vision of the ancestors sitting in the lodge in heaven, which Sjöstrom's character reaches by climbing a ladder to the clouds, and the grim, realist material of the unfaithful wife's child, alone would make it outstanding but finding this at a stage where it had virtually nothing in the way of antecedent is staggering.
Modern prints may not do justice to the sophistication of the film making. The performances do survive un-dimmed. Curious that Sjöstrom was able to take his mastery to Hollywood when the Scandinavian industry faltered but not to survive the challenge of sound - something which remains a mystery that could stand investigation.

《野草莓》片花

An alcoholic, abusive ne'er-do-well is shown the error of his ways through a legend that dooms the last person to die on New Year's Eve before the clock strikes twelve to take the reins of Death's chariot and work tirelessly collecting fresh souls for the next year.

Crotchety retired doctor Isak Borg travels from Stockholm to Lund, Sweden, with his pregnant and unhappy daughter-in-law, Marianne, in order to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater. Along the way, they encounter a series of hitchhikers, each of whom causes the elderly doctor to muse upon the pleasures and failures of his own life. These include the vivacious young Sara, a dead ringer for the doctor's own first love.