The Phantom Carriage: A revaluation

Although Victor Sjostrom's extraordinary film The Phantom Carriage is widely celebrated as one of the major achievements of Swedish silent cinema, it has received very little extended analysis. In its time, the film was extremely famous and was praised by critics in many countries. Film histories and surveys of Swedish cinema largely agree on the films stature and invariably refer to its complex use of flashbacks and its remarkable multiple-exposure special effects, but rarely go further. Here, Gibbs and Pye present an audiovisual essay, which argue for a revaluation of Sjostroms achievement in The Phantom Carriage. They attempt to bring a critical and interpretative approach to the films style into conversation with historical accounts of the evolution of film form that are central to recent silent cinema scholarship.