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Fragmented Pieces: Writing the History of the Lost Hollywood Films 103
hand in his films, which also seems to mark the imprint of his films “on the
audience, on film history”. 19
The other scene occurs as the king, under pressure from the revolutionaries,
pretends to give in to their demands, but at the very moment where he is supposed
to sign his abdication he, instead, sketches, or rather draws, a caricature
of the leader of the revolution. The leader – and even more the portrait – shows
a striking resemblance to that of Swedish social democrat leader, Hjalmar
Branting, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1921 and died in 1925, the
same year Sjöström’s film premiered. The importance of the portrait is underlined
as it occurs twice in the narration: firstly as chaos breaks loose when the
revolutionaries realize that the king has not signed his abdication, and secondly,
in the prolonged chaos as they search for the king who has disappeared.
Something then appears wrapped in a package that at first seems to contain
the remains of a corpse, but instead turns out to be the portrait sketched by
the king, wrapped in cloth. This creates a complex circuit between portrait and
text, as well as between fiction and reality. It also makes the example a construction
en abîme in Iampolski’s sense. In his phrasing, inspired by Gérard Genette:
“A quote becomes a hyperquote whenever one source is insufficient for its
integration into the fabric of a text.” 20 Thus, a “hyperquotation”, according to
Iampolski, is dependent on the connections not only between image and text
(in this case, the novel) but also includes at least a third part: the relation between
film, novel and reality reference. 21 This, too, connects to Bruno’s discussion
of hypertextuality, which shows various nuances of textual relations, as
well as on the “dialogic palimpsest”, a concept equally derived from Genette,
as the “working on vacuum, gaps, and journeys of intersection with other text
(ur)al forms” does open for new intertextual relations. 22 Yet another dimension
to this circuit is added when Sjöström, back in Sweden in the 1930s, plays the
role of Hjalmar Branting in the film Mot nya tider (Towards New Times,
Sigurd Wallén, 1939), where, significantly, he seems to bear a resemblance to
the revolutionary leader in Confessions of a Queen. (FIG. 16 and 17)
In this sense, this scene in Confessions of a Queen creates an infinite mirroring
effect, where film and reality meet in an ultimate interplay. Thus, Sjöström
clearly seems to have sought to mark his presence in this work, in spite of
the scepticism that he had voiced on its behalf. It is tempting to assume that the
fact that he was not able to do so in any sense that would really make a difference,
especially not compared to the film that he directed immediately before,
led to those ideas of a more marginal influence, but still perfectly discernable
as such.