The Phantom Carriage / The Image Makers

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Film Description

A pairing of Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage (1921) and Ingmar Bergman's The Image Makers (2000).

The Phantom Carriage is simply one of the finest and most haunting films of the silent era. It's set on New Year's Eve, when three drunkards evoke the legend of the phantom carriage, which tells that the last person to die in the year, if he is a great sinner, will spend the following year driving the carriage that picks up the souls of the dead. One of the three men, David Holm, played by Sjostrom himself, dies at the very last stroke of midnight... With magical special effects, Sjostrom evokes a world of shadows and crafts a tale of repentance and a love wasted through alcohol.

The Image Makers is Bergman's television play that takes place one Autumn day on the Swedish Filmstudios lot, where the author has come to finish writing some scenes for Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage, and the lead actress is there to give her approval. Everyone is tense about the meeting.

Film Information

DVD Extras

2 discs.

Technical Details

Reviews & Articles

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Review by Graeme Hobbs on 8th January 2008

This is one of the great films of the silent era, marrying a morality tale on the perils of drunkenness with outstanding technical innovation on a ghostly theme. It takes place on New Year’s Eve. Edit, a dying Salvation Army sister requests her companions to bring David Holm to her, Holm being a boorish drunk and consumptive who ‘coughs into people’s faces in the hope of finishing them off’, Edit herself being one of those people.
Holm is drinking in the graveyard with his cronies, telling of a phantom carriage that collects the dead, its driver being the last unredeemed person to die before the year’s end.
The double exposures of death’s servant then loading the carriage with its cargo of bodies create unforgettably haunting images.
Ingmar Bergman said that The Phantom Carriage influenced his own work ‘down to minute details’. Appropriate then that it is here paired with his own TV film from 2000, The Image Makers, about Sjöström and Selma Lagerlöf, writer of the novel on which his film was based.

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Article - "Film Preservation: The Nitrate Era " by R. Dixon Smith
Monday 7th April 2008

The year is 1908. The steady torrent of coins increases daily in nickelodeon parlors throughout the world, and every two months the entire population of the globe is exceeded by the number of people patronizing the world’s movie theatres.

But within several...  View article in full

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