As far as I can tell, this is the first Swedish Silent that I've watched (I'd previously been intrigued by a solitary still – actually used for the DVD sleeve itself – found in "The Movie", a British periodical from the early 1980s); I've seen a handful of early efforts from neighboring Denmark – and the aesthetic starkness in the predominant style of both countries is pretty similar. It's also the first from Swedish master Stiller (I also own his two other well-known titles, EROTIKON [1920] and THE SAGA OF GOSTA BERLING [1924], that were released on DVD from Kino – and I may very well include the latter in my current Epic/Historical films schedule); incidentally, I've only checked out – and was duly impressed by – two American-made pictures from Victor Sjostrom, the other great director to emanate from this country during the Silent era.SIR ARNE'S TREASURE is best described as a historical melodrama – since the elements typically expected of an epic only really come into play in the scenes involving a fire early on and a sword-fight towards the end. However, one shouldn't overlook the vast and forbidding icy landscape which not only serves as an extremely realistic backdrop to the narrative – incidentally, the quality of the cinematography throughout likens the film to an uninterrupted series of medieval tableaux – but is very much another character in it, since the villains' flight (the perpetrators of a massacre in a household, from which they also abscond with the titular fortune) is prohibited because the sea has frozen over! Notable scenes here include: a cart-wheeling horse falling head-first through cracked ice; the youngest of the thieves having ghostly visions of one of his murdered victims (as it happens, he later falls for the girl's sister…and she with him, which leads to the latter being torn whether to give her lover away or run off with him to Scotland!); the leading man ultimately using the heroine as a human shield against the oncoming soldiers; the closing procession over the ice by the townsfolk to reclaim the girl's dead body (justly considered one of the visual highlights in all of Silent cinema).The plot also effectively incorporates the element of premonition – such as when the fish-hawker's usually docile canine companion senses impending doom and starts to howl, Sir Arne's wife literally hearing from miles away the preparations for the subsequent assault on her abode, the ship captain's tale of a previous case of poetic justice similarly brought on by severe weather conditions, and the heroine being led by her dead sister to the villains' whereabouts in a dream. The print I watched featured nice use of blue (for outdoor night-time scenes) and red (the afore-mentioned blaze) tinting; the newly-composed accompanying score is appropriately sweeping, albeit making use of mostly modern instruments. The main extras on the Kino DVD involve noted film historian Peter Cowie, who supplies an informative background to early Swedish cinema (where he also discusses the seminal contribution of authoress Selma Lagerlof – who was behind the source novel of both this and THE SAGA OF GOSTA BERLING) and, in a separate featurette, focuses exclusively on the film at hand.

I suppose no one can understand film at all without knowing the poles of narrative.One of the dimensions is whether the world is beside the story and viewed by it. Or in some other relationship. The Swedes own one of these poles, their narratives always being buried by heavy fate and guilt about it. Its a very strange thing to see from the outside.The nature of Swedish narrative survives today, because they are so good at nurturing and presenting it. And we watch it for some reason, possibly because of the lightness of being outside the curse. The story here is of three alien murderers who decimate a peaceful household for the titular treasure. One of these thugs later falls in love with the soul surviver, a pretty girl.She feels guilty for surviving, he for murdering and both for falling in love. The meaty part of the story is toward the end where guilt drives fate and the world comes crashing down on them. The whole world contrives against them. Weather freezes. The two societies in play turn against them. Death. Death, but the deaths aren't the greatest tragedy: it is the curse of entanglement, the knowing, and the knowing that others know. And of course those others as a society are cursed.There are many dark images in this. But the key one must be one of the most memorable in all cinema. The getaway ship is frozen in the ice, Shackleton-like. The entire population of the area's women and children stream across the ice intent on recovering her, though they know she has assisted the murderer. The crew turns against their passengers believing them to be the cause of a curse. The weather.That endless stream of dark, determined villagers do indeed recover the girl, a corpse, and stream back home while the ice is dissolving right behind them. Its pretty darn entangling, and conveys the curse. No watchers, only participants.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Very unusual and extremely well done film set during a bitterly cold winter in 16th century Sweden, where three Scottish soldiers of fortune, arrested and imprisoned in "the tower", escape and then hide their identities by wearing hides (and Santa Claus hats) as they pretend to be journeyman tanners roaming the countryside looking for work. But soon these three have committed a horrific crime - murdering an entire household, they steal the treasure chest of Sir Arne, town vicar, rumored to be filled to the brim with silver coins. The only survivor of this terrible bloodbath is an innocent young maiden named Elsalill, who is taken to live with a fish hawker and his wife. But soon she meets one of the men (the youngest and most handsome, of course) who was involved in the crime and begins to have a relationship with him, not knowing who he is - and both are soon haunted by dreams and nightmares of the crime.This film is gripping, haunting, and beautifully photographed, the outdoor scenes in the ice and snow looking just like stark and gloomy picture postcards. Especially memorable in my mind is the scene of Elsalill's dream with the ghost image of her young foster sister who was murdered sort of floating along near her as she walks. The DVD of this features an amazing looking print, brightly tinted in mostly blue and deep sepia perfectly reflecting the bitter cold outdoors and the warmer rooms of the indoor scenes. The music score is excellent as well, and helps set the mood, along with the costuming and period settings, to make this film really feel like a step back to another place and time.

Watching 'Master Arne's Treasure' is, at times, like watching a moving gallery of pictures by Hammershoi, Kroyer or Spilliaert. The film's greatest set-piece has the anti-hero Sir Archie walking at night in a vast snow-scape. The frozen snow seems to be moving like a river away from him; in any case, its stark luminosity in the dark gives it an eerie unstable appearance; against this backdrop, Archie seems unnatural, as if his physical presence doesn't fit properly in his surroundings, like his image has been cut out and pasted ineptly onto a back projection. This prepares us for the ghostly emanation of his conscience, the young girl he brutally murdered for money.'Treasure' is one of the most shocking films of the silent era. This is partly because we are set up to identify with characters who then commit an unspeakable crime. Three Scottish aristocrat mercenaries in Sweden (reversing the Viking pillage in Britain?) are put in a military prison for conspiring against the King. Remarkably, they take this is good spirit, and spend their days in homoerotic bouts of leap-frog. This immediately endears them to the audience - a willingness to play in the most oppressive conditions. Such flippancy certainly antagonises the prison warder, who snarls and pokes his spear in at them: they manage to hold him, steal his keys and escape.'Treasure' begins as Renoir's later masterpiece 'La Grande Illusion' ends - soldiers escape from a foreign prison, tramping through the heavy snow before finding refuge in a wood-cabin. By this time, however, our heroes are starving, and play is replaced by violence as they eat and drink for the first time in months, to the horror of the wife of the house. When her husband comes home, the men are unconscious with wine, and he throws them out.Like the films of colleague Victor Sjostrom, Stiller frames his films in a natural context. But here, nature is more than simply nature, it is an embodiment of a moral order. The film begins with a snow that freezes and paralyses an entire society, and ends with a thawing that cannot take place until the crimes of the malefactors are revealed. They hope to escape to Scotland in a ship surreally stranded in sea-less ice; even when the rest of the ice breaks, it remains stubbornly immovable until the criminals are apprehended.The crime isn't shown, and we are first alerted to it by a vision of Arne's wife, who sees men sharpening their knives. This is a film full of visions (when the crime is eventually shown, it's in a vision), some of them emanations of conscience, others 'Hamlet'-like messages from the grave, revealing the murders. Christian morality plays some part in conjuring up these visions, with Arne's wife's vision a token of guilt, and Arne's treasure, said to have been stolen from monastaries throughout the country, has a negative fetishistic power.The difference between this supernatural realm and the vivid, material evocation of provincial life (dinners, dances, taverns, craftsmen, dogs etc.) is expressed in the strange, haunting imagery. In fact, the two frequently combine, especially at the end, when the death of the orphan produces a funeral cortege, a black worm of mourners slithering on the vast snow, that is both ritualistically 'timeless', strange, yet rooted in local traditions. The film's melodrama - the great suffering of its heroine, the arbitrary intrusion of brutal events, the cynical self-servingly remorseful anti-hero, the almost Kafkaesque proliferation of the military - thus becomes a kind of chilling horror story.