FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

From Scientist to Clown – He Who Gets Slapped 61
clown’s destiny actually did inspire his old friend and colleague in Hollywood,
Hjalmar Bergman, though not without an undertone of bitterness and irony.
In his book on images of Sweden in the United States, Jeff Werner discusses
the fact that the film seems to have been interpreted by some critics as a hidden
self-portrait, where the clown in the film is a portrait of Sjöström, the director,
himself, and the slaps represented the injustices that he had endured in Hollywood.
Such an interpretation, however, seems to transfer misunderstandings,
failures and disagreements alike to a purely personal level. 53 But, as Werner
also writes, “both Sjöström himself and his critics more often saw the problems
as an expression of cultural differences”. 54
An important aspect of its Swedish afterlife is of course the fact that Ingmar
Bergman drew considerable inspiration from this Sjöström film; firstly, as the
programme directors for New York Film Festival in 1969 stated, that: “this tale
of humiliation in a circus reminds one curiously of Bergman’s The Naked Night.
Not so curiously, actually, considering the close relationship between Bergman
and Seastrom. But the phantasmagorical circus scenes which are the exciting
heart of the film are unique in film history.” 55 Matthias Christen also links He
Who Gets Slapped to Bergman’s Gycklarnas afton [The Naked Night, aka
Stardust and Tinsel], as this film has clearly drawn its inspiration from plot
structures deriving from He Who Gets Slapped and its predecessors. 56 Secondly,
in Wild Strawberries, the last role created as actor by Victor Sjöström,
it is clear that Bergman in his script for Sjöström obviously also draws the parallel
to Sjöström’s own script, as he includes Isak Borg’s nightmare of his humiliation
during an academic public defence; here, however, it is not the scientists
but the woman supposed to be dead who laughs at him.
In retrospect, it is clear that He Who Gets Slapped was Sjöström’s greatest
success during his career in Hollywood, and it was only his second film in the
new system. 57 When Sjöström talks about his work on the film as a positive
experience, as quoted above, he seems to offer little support for such an interpretation
at this stage of his career. Still, there is evidence to interpret the film, at
least partly, as a comment on the Hollywood system. However, it seems more
apt to interpret the symbolic clown, the visual narrator, as Sjöström’s alter ego
in the narration, and perhaps also to see “He” as a personification of Hjalmar
Bergman, an anticipation of Jac the Clown, both figuring and mirroring the ironical
twist that Hjalmar Bergman would provide to the clown story.
This tale of life narrated through the circus metaphor is at the same time the
most elaborated narration, both stylistically and thematically, that Sjöström actually
accomplished throughout his whole Hollywood career. He has provided
a highly original account not only of the clown theme, but also of the question
of cinematic globalization, one that is relevant to the question of production