FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

56 Transition and Transformation
sentation from the New York Film Festival in 1969 –“a dazzling white-on-white
technique”. 36 Lunde also argues that no thorough analysis has previously been
devoted to this film, although he actually quotes Roth-Lindberg’s in-depth analysis.
Another problem with Lunde’s analysis in this connection is that he seems not
only to want to reread He Who Gets Slapped from the perspective of critical
whiteness studies, developed in a later scholarly context, which in itself may be
a both interesting and valid approach to the film, but also to prove that Sjöström
himself conceived his film in this perspective of whiteness, as a kind of cinematic
critical whiteness study avant la lettre. He bases his convictions on Sjöström’s
transnational identity; his growing up in the United States and thus in a
certain sense being a re-émigré, returning to the country of his childhood when
going to Hollywood.
Apart from this general observation, however, the only contemporary source
to prove his engagement with questions of ethnicity is a rather meagre one: the
comment cited by Lunde from Märta Lindqvist’s interview with Sjöström,
where he talks about his wife, Edith, taking English lessons “in an evening
school together with Negroes, mulattos, Chinese, and other colored individuals”.
37 Lunde’s translation “colored”, however, does not render the slightly
ironic touch of the original expression “kulörta individer”, a Swedish term
used mainly in connection with coloured lanterns. The quotation in Swedish
would rather suggest a “motley collection” of different individuals. As proof of
Sjöström’s engagement with – or even the degree of his awareness of – questions
of hybridity, transnationality and whiteness, which Lunde seems to imply,
could barely be considered as convincing.
Another problem occurs when trying to review the full consequences of
Lunde’s analysis. If he is right, and Sjöström in He Who Gets Slapped is consciously
developing a cinematic discourse on whiteness, then this discourse
seems an extremely pessimistic one. If He appears as Sjöström’s own point of
identification in the film (as Lunde seems to suggest), what happens to this
whiteness – and indeed to the possibility of integrating Swedishness in an
American context at all – since He dies at the end of the film? From what followed
during the next six years in Hollywood, little seems to confirm this pessimistic
view of Sjöström’s position in the new cultural context.
But even if whiteness could be a possible historical context in which to interpret
the film – which after all might be plausible – how about considering its
being part of another historical tradition: that of circus films, a context that
seems just as relevant? This tradition contains several early films from the silent
era, but a number of later examples followed He Who Gets Slapped, which
have been pioneering, not only in developing the clown character, but also the
circus theme. Among the early films, some are Scandinavian, such as the Danish