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tions constructs with its spectator: the recurring look at the camera by actors.
This action, which is later perceived as spoiling the realistic illusion of the cinema,
is here undertaken with brio, establishing contact with the audience.” 28 In a
decade obsessed with “natural effect”, where overt narration, in general, had
become reserved for certain codified moments, such as in the beginning and
ending of the film, looking into the camera was banished. 29 Just like the intertitles
mentioned above, this clear break with the norms in the dominant system
of production calls for interpretation. They make He Who Gets Slapped into
another kind of film than most of its contemporaries. It is not a continuous fictional
story, made in the invisible style that had by this time been established as
Hollywood’s landmark. 30 Rather, the film seems to aim at delivering a general,
philosophical statement on the conditions of life on the globe, using the clown
as metaphor; it is construed as a film essay in a style that would reappear much
later in film history.
Transformed Identities
From Scientist to Clown – He Who Gets Slapped 53
This construction of the film as an essay is, as has already been discussed, to a
large extent based on the consequent use of certain devices which privilege the
intersection between style and thematics, between cinematic form and general,
philosophical content. In a ground-breaking analysis from 1985, Swedish film
historian Örjan Roth-Lindberg discusses Sjöström’s visual fantasy in He Who
Gets Slapped, concentrating, in particular, on his aesthetics through some carefully
analyzed examples of dissolves which, as it turns out, also contribute to a
complex play with identities and transformations. 31 In He Who Gets Slapped,
the dissolves occur on five occasions. The first and the second dissolves have
already been discussed above – the image of the symbolic clown with his large
ball dissolved into a man who turns out to be the film’s main character, the
scientist Beaumont, spinning a globe, as well as the clown with his ball being
dissolved into a globe which, in turn, is dissolved into a circus ring. The third
instance is made up of a series of several transformations, some of which take
place through dissolves. The scientist, who has now become the clown “He”, is
in the ring in front of a group of other clowns. The image dissolves, and instead
of the clowns the spectator now sees an academy of scientists with stiff appearances,
a visual memory of an earlier humiliating situation that “He” found himself
in. After a cut back to “He”, there is a new cut to the men, who are now
wearing clown hats and laughing. After yet another cut to “He”, the same scientists
in clown hats re-emerge. This image is finally dissolved into the original
group of clowns. On the fourth occasion, we see the film’s villain, the Baron