"Ingeborg Holm" displays some exceptionally polished film-making for 1913. That's not to say there's anything new or rare here in film technique. Director Victor Sjöström follows the standards of the day: mostly long-shot framing, fixed camera positioning, almost no scene dissection. One standard I tend to find especially boring is the use of the same camera position for every scene that uses the same set, as with the grocery store scenes in this picture. A couple scenes, however, feature low-key lighting for dramatic effect--a technique also used early on by Yevgeni Bauer (see his 1913 feature-length film "Twilight of a Woman's Soul") and especially by Danish filmmakers. Sjöström (and early Swedish filmmakers in general) was, doubtless, heavily influenced by Danish cinema.
It also seemed to me that scenes in this film didn't linger as much as with other early long films. Many pictures before "The Birth of a Nation" tended to be very slow and theatrical, especially melodramas like this one, but not here. The tableau style, where a title card describes the action of the scene and there are no intertitles within the scene, seems to help this time. Sjöström and cinematographer Henrik Jaenzon also find some good camera positions to exploit the appropriately drab sets and occasional outdoor scenery, and the lighting is very good for the era. It also helps that the print available from Kino is very sharp (with only some deterioration in a few scenes), with a nice musical score.
The film's story is a depressing social drama of a woman who loses her husband, wealth, children and, thusly, her sanity. These events sometime appear very sudden, and it's rather surprising this film doesn't fall completely into the pit of lurid melodrama. Much credit for not doing so must be given to the lead actress Hilda Borgström. Her style isn't naturalistic (she oft employs the common silent film acting bit of standing still and staring into nothing to convey emotion), but she thankfully forgoes much of the histrionics and over-gesticulation that many of her profession transferred to cinema from theatre. I found her performance to be surprisingly engaging. Additionally, Aron Lindgren impressively plays dual roles, as the father and the grown up son.
It also seemed to me that scenes in this film didn't linger as much as with other early long films. Many pictures before "The Birth of a Nation" tended to be very slow and theatrical, especially melodramas like this one, but not here. The tableau style, where a title card describes the action of the scene and there are no intertitles within the scene, seems to help this time. Sjöström and cinematographer Henrik Jaenzon also find some good camera positions to exploit the appropriately drab sets and occasional outdoor scenery, and the lighting is very good for the era. It also helps that the print available from Kino is very sharp (with only some deterioration in a few scenes), with a nice musical score.
The film's story is a depressing social drama of a woman who loses her husband, wealth, children and, thusly, her sanity. These events sometime appear very sudden, and it's rather surprising this film doesn't fall completely into the pit of lurid melodrama. Much credit for not doing so must be given to the lead actress Hilda Borgström. Her style isn't naturalistic (she oft employs the common silent film acting bit of standing still and staring into nothing to convey emotion), but she thankfully forgoes much of the histrionics and over-gesticulation that many of her profession transferred to cinema from theatre. I found her performance to be surprisingly engaging. Additionally, Aron Lindgren impressively plays dual roles, as the father and the grown up son.