Victor Sjöström is probably best remembered these days for his moving performance as the elderly Prof Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, but he was also one of the great directors of the silent era – a founding father of cinema in his native Sweden and, for a brief few years before the coming of sound, a wildly inventive Holly­wood filmmaker responsible for Lilian Gish’s finest hour in his haunting The Wind.


The Phantom Carriage (origin­ally Körkarlen) dates from 1921 and finds Sjöström at the height of his powers, delivering a powerful tale of human misery and supernatural forces marked by considerable technical innovation and a fine performance from the director himself as David Holm, a vicious, drunken wastrel whose moral decay is only revealed to him when he is forced to review his life (it’s intriguing to note the influence on Wild Strawberries, in which we see a much older Sjöström once again forced into a reassess­ment of his past through a series of dreams and waking visions).