The Girl from the Moorhof (1917)

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Movie
German title The girl from the Moorhof
Original title Tösen från Stormyrtorpet
Country of production Sweden
original language Swedish
Publishing year 1917
length 87 (original), 82 minutes
Rod
Director Victor Sjöström
script Ester Julin
Victor Sjöström based
on the novel "Tösen från Stormyrtorpet" (1908) by Selma Lagerlöf
production Charles Magnusson
camera Henrik Jaenzon
occupation

The girl from the Moorhof is a Swedish silent film from 1917 by Victor Sjöström based on the novel of the same name by Selma Lagerlöf .

action

Helga Nilsson, the daughter of the poor farmer from the Moorhof, starts a job with Per Martinsson as a maid. Although married, Martinsson cannot keep his hands off the pretty young maid and seduces her. When Helga becomes pregnant by him, Per leaves her in the lurch and is even ready to let a perjury in court when it comes to a lawsuit and in the process to determine paternity. At the last moment, Helga can stop him from swearing on the Bible that he is not the child's father, and then withdraws her complaint. Gudmund Erlandsson, who is present at the court hearing and is the groom of Hulda Persson's maid's daughter, is deeply impressed by Helga's behavior and tells his mother Ingeborg about Helga's fate. Before Helga steps into an act of desperation and can kill herself in the face of the "shame" of having had an illegitimate child, Gudmund's parents hire her as a new maid on their farm. Gudmund's fiancée Hulda is exactly the opposite of Helga: spoiled and exalted, and she meets Helga, whose good relationship with Gudmund is a thorn in her side, with increasing rejection. So Helga's stay with the Erlandssons is only of a temporary nature.

Gudmund begins to drink unrestrainedly in view of the fact that his future wife is doing worse and worse in comparison to Helga. In this condition, one day he is involved in a violent scuffle that ended fatally for Martinsson. When Gudmund wakes up the next morning, Per is dead and stabbed. Gudmund's knife blade broke off, and Gudmund, who can't remember anything because of the alcohol consumption, believes that he must have been the murderer of the Helga seducer. He confesses to his own father the act he did not commit. When Hulda and her family heard of these circumstances, they immediately called off the upcoming wedding. Hulda is now showing her true colors and only has contempt for her fiancé left.

Gudmund, who is sure that he will now have to go to prison, visits Helga one last time and talks about the crime and the knife with the broken blade. She immediately recognizes that there was a mistake here and tells Gudmund that the blade broke off when she used his knife to carve yesterday. Although Helga loves Gudmund, she only wants his happiness, and since she does not want Gudmund's relationship with Hulda to break up due to this misunderstanding, she rushes to her to explain the real facts to her. Hulda, in turn, recognizes in Helga's actions that Helga loves her ex and that she herself will never evoke such a deep affection in Gudmund. And so she goes to him and tells the young Erlandsson about Helga's feelings. Gudmund, on the other hand, has long since recognized that Hulda, who only speculated on the prosperity of his family, would have been the wrong choice for women one way or another. Now finally the way is clear for a common future for Helga, the girl from the Moorhof, and Gudmund Erlandsson.

Production notes

The girl from the Moorhof was the first of several film adaptations by Sjöström of literary originals from Lagerlöfs, which heralded the first significant phase of Swedish cinema in terms of film history. The film had its world premiere on September 10, 1917 in Stockholm. At the end of the same year he could also be seen in Norway. In 1918 the film was shown in the rest of the Scandinavian countries, in 1919 as a five-stroke also in Austria and in the same year in the USA. The girl from the Moorhof was probably shown in Germany at the same time, but the exact date of the first performance is not known.

The film was shot in several locations in the central Swedish province of Dalarnas län and in the greater Stockholm area. Axel Esbensen designed the film structures .

Reviews

The film, an early masterpiece of naturalism in Swedish film, received consistently outstanding reviews at the time of its premiere and decades later. Below is a small selection:

“Seldom is one so deeply moved by a fate as in this drama. Despised by everything, a girl, whose ignorance is here exploited by a brutal man, fights for her life and that of her child and, after many hardships, justice wins and a bright, smiling future is the reward. One is surprised at the adorable little pictures, at the shiny game. Moved into the Nordic peasant landscape, you live completely with it and, because of the authenticity of the presentation and furnishings, you forget that everything is just theater. "

- New Kino-Rundschau

Heinrich Fraenkel's Immortal Film found: "One of the most important and inner works from the early days of Swedish films ."

In Jerzy Toeplitz , we read: "The historian Rune Forest Kranz writes that Sjöström's film The girl from Moorhof (1917) to this day impressed by the authentic and unvarnished portrayal of peasant milieu and for a long time was for a number of farmers movies model, often an unmatched . "

In Sjöström's biography, Kay Wenigers The Large Person Encyclopedia of Film reminded us that his literary adaptations brought Swedish cinema world renown in the late 1910s.

The following can be read in a text from filmmuseum.at: “Selma Lagerlöf's work was discovered and cultivated for the cinema by Victor Sjöström: Starting with Tösen från Stormyrtorpet , he made around half a dozen consistently grandiose films based on models by Sweden's perhaps greatest narrator (on which fidgeted this often enough - you know that from writers). Tösen från Stormyrtorpet looks like a sum of the first great years of Sjöström: Here he puts his pantheistic might, his sense of the life of the farmers, the truth of the forests and fields at the service of social criticism. A farm girl gives birth to an illegitimate child and is henceforth cut by the community. A landlord's son takes pity on her and offers a job, whereupon his fiancée and her father begin to cut him. It takes an almost catastrophe to reveal the errors of their thinking to the deluded. "

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neue Kino-Rundschau from September 6, 1919. P. 24
  2. ^ Heinrich Fraenkel: Immortal Film. The great chronicle from the Laterna Magica to the sound film. Munich 1956, p. 396
  3. ^ History of the Film, Volume 1, 1895–1928. East Berlin 1972. p. 252.
  4. ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 7: R - T. Robert Ryan - Lily Tomlin. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 348.
  5. ↑ The girl from the Moorhof on filmmuseum.at ( Memento of the original from April 30, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / filmmuseum.at

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