6. “The Best Swedish Film Ever Made” Terje Vigen (Victor Sjöström, Svenska Biografteatern, 1917) Bo Florin
It was January 1917 and Europe was at war. The French film industry, which had blossomed up to that point, collapsed like a house of cards. Denmark, also a cinematographic leader at the start of the decade, had lost ground as well. American films had triumphantly crossed the Atlantic and invaded Europe. Meanwhile, the enthusiasm and expansiveness of the production company Svenska Biografteatern’s first years at the studio in Lidingö outside of Stockholm had ebbed. Calls for public supervision of the industry had long since won a hearing. The censorship board, which had been institutionalised in 1911, continued to irritate producers by cutting out sequences or, worse still, banning entire films. The time had come to try new approaches. On 29 January 1917, Victor Sjöström’s Terje Vigen, based on Henrik Ibsen’s poem by the same name, opened simultaneously at the Röda Kvarn Theatre in Stockholm and Paladsteatret in Copenhagen (and a week later at Bøndernes Hus in Kristiania, Norway). The daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter’s cultural section contained something quite unusual the following day – a review of Svenska Bio’s new film signed B B-n, otherwise known as Bo Bergman, an established poet and a theatre critic for the newspaper (normally film was discussed in the entertainment section of the paper). The article started off by paying tribute to the contribution that Terje Vigen had made to the prestige of filmmaking, “the artistic significance of which has always been the 1 47
