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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.
104 Transition and Transformation Fig. 16: A caricature of Hjalmar Branting in Confessions of a Queen? Fig. 17: Victor Sjöström as Hjalmar Branting in Towards New Times.
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FILM CULTURE IN TRANSITION Transiti
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Film Culture in Transition General
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Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener
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