Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 1

  “Whatever you do now that you think is new was already done in 1913.” - Martin Scorsese

  For all this movie's remarkable emotional power, it consistently remains fascinating to revisit because of it's superficially outdated and outmoded mis-en-scene. Superficially, because in this pre-Griffith cinema (in regards to his influence) Sjostrom is looking for ways other than cutting and juxtaposition in order to express ideas. Every sequence in this film is done in master, yet these shots aren't proscenium arch shots. Rather each shot is from a very specific angle where every object matters regarding its placement in the frame. So too with the movements of bodies: characters will come in and out of positions, sometimes so subtly that we do…

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  Review by Anna Imhof 🌸 8

  Not gonna lie. As much as I love silent film, these super early works (basically anything before 1915) are dramatically not always very captivating, with little sense for pacing and lacking structure in general. Historically of course they are interesting, and I think anyone with a serious interest in cinema should travel that far back to get a better understanding and a higher appreciation for the art form, but when I get bored it's hard for me to keep up my focus, and then I start thinking about 300 other things and before you know it the movie is over without me really having experienced it.

  I used to blame this on myself, used to tell myself I need to…

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  "Sjostrom’s compositions remind me of what Daniele Huillet called the ‘decisive point,’ upon which the camera would be placed on a specific angle and where each further shot for a given character would merely be variations on an angle - never movements. Here this appears to be for the purpose of having a precise point upon which multiple elements can convalesce within the frame. This in-effect is then a kind of pre-Griffithian, alternate narrative cinema, a cinema without cutting - rather than the juxtaposition of two images giving birth to an idea, the juxtaposition often takes place within the same frame. "

  
  
  

  More with illustration here: nbahadur.tumblr.com/post/148737967914/this-close-up-in-ingeborg-holm-appears-three-times

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  Review by Avirup ★★★½

  75/100
  
  Really really good for such an early feature length film. The melodrama is solid and there are some genuinely touching moments. It drags a bit in the middle but the ending is quite powerful.

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  Review by James 🇺🇦 ★★★★

  Ingeborg Holm is a film you have to watch in context to fully appreciate its significance. Victor Sjöström wasn't just a pioneer of the Swedish film industry but of narrative cinema itself, operating here in a pre-Eisenstein, pre-The Birth of a Nation world when the seventh art was still in its infancy, the language and tools barely established beyond setting up the camera and rolling.

  Because of this it looks incredibly dated and primitive, even when compared to films made just a few years later, but in a truly fascinating way. There's a naive purity to this social melodrama; Sjöström then still uniformed about the possibilities of editing, montage and varying shot types, thus everything unfolds via a single wide…

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  Review by Tyler ★★★★½

  Hardly as primitive as a film from 1913 perhaps should seem, given that even the concept of a multi-reel feature had only really been firmly established in the cinema just a few years before... yet, in such short time, narrative film had been born and somehow evolved directly into this, what may be the summit of emotionally crushing filmmaking in the early era. Sjöström sows deep into the horrors of inequity, bordering just nearly upon misery porn, yet it remains grounded in both its regional and realistic roots. We’re asked — forced? — to watch a woman descend into the depths of poverty after her husband’s death. First, her money goes. Then her house. Then her children. Then her dignity.…

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  Review by Miguel Fernandes

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Onde estão os olhos dos nossos cinéfilos quando dizem que Orson Welles e Gregg Toland inventaram a profundidade de campo? Basta ver este filme de Victor Sjöström para se perceber que por trás da "primitividade" há uma dinâmica parecida com aquela que consagraria Welles em sua primeira obra-prima, monumento do Cinema Moderno (Cidadão Kane).

  Mas Ingeborg Holm não é pejorativamente primitivo, tampouco Sjöström; não sejamos enganados pela dubiedade desta palavra. O que quero dizer é que este filme possui algo do Primeiro Cinema e, ainda assim, alimenta-se de um conceito essencial ao Cinema Moderno. Olhemos, por exemplo, a introdução, os primeiros minutos de Ingeborg Holm, que tanto se assemelham a um produto que o Cinema de outrora filmaria: as ações…

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  Review by Jandy Hardesty ★★★½ 2

  This feels very advanced for 1913, though 1913 is proving to be a huge leap over 1912 in a lot of ways. The heartbreaking situation of a young husband and father suddenly dying right after starting a new promising business venture and leaving his family not only fatherless but quite in debt is played with emotion that feels real despite being overplayed a few times. The family is separated when the mother had to go into the workhouse, and I tell you, literally tears when the youngest child doesn’t recognize her after being in foster care for a while. Probably doesn’t help that my younger daughter is about the same age and that would just be so devastating. Victor Sjöström is onto something here and I’m really looking forward to seeing his later films (this may be the first one of his I’ve seen?).

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 4

  It's basically like a Ken Loach movie but done as a silent film.

  My Top Films of the 1910s
  My Top Silent Films

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★★

  Ground zero for sensitive, intimate domestic melodrama in feature length. Workmanlike, but quite good.

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  Review by Sol ★★★★

  Ingeborg Holm is a drama film directed by Victor Sjöström, based on a play by Nils Krok (which is said to be based on a true story).

  It follows the story of Sven Holm and his wife Ingeborg, both happily married with three children. When they are about to open their store in Stockholm, Sven contracts tuberculosis and dies.

  Ingeborg initially tries to run the store herself, but so much pressure works against her and she develops a debilitating ulcer. She decides to turn to the nursing home for help. The board of the asylum for the poor does not give him enough help to survive outside the asylum. Unfortunately she has to sell the shop and her house, and…

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  Review by desdemoor ★★★★

  1001 films that will reward your time boxd.it/1FRRk (9th edition 2021).

  This well-constructed and sensitively acted film, rather untypical of its time, is an early work of director Victor Sjöström, better known for the magnificent Hollywood-made The Wind (1928) and for starring in Ingmar Bergman's Smultronstället (1957). It's sometimes called "the first true narrative film" although there are arguable precedents.

  With its stark and unsentimental portrayal of the decline of a respectable mother who ends up in the workhouse and separated from her children when her husband dies unexpectedly and her business goes bankrupt, it's something of a precursor of social realist cinema. Like several later films foregrounding social issues, it's credited with helping influence public opinion in bringing about…