This Blu-ray Disc edition has been transfered in high-resolution digital video from very-good 35mm archival print materials. The picture is evenly-balanced in its greyscale range with color-tints and color-toning applied. There is a very small amount of dust and speckling left in the picture, with some frame jitters and minute exposure fluctations remaining. The overall viewing experience is very-good.

The film is accompanied by two music scores: one is a fine score by Swedish composer Matti Bye performed by a small emsemble, and the other an atmospheric electronic score by KTL.

The supplemental material includes audio commentary by film historian Casper Tybjerg, an interview with Ingmar Bergman excerpted from Victor Sjostrom: A Portrait, “The Bergman Connection,” an original visual essay by Peter Cowie, and a booklet featuring an essay by screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Mayersberg.

This is our recommendation as the best-available home video edition of the film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

The film is accompanied by two music scores: one is a fine score by Swedish composer Matti Bye performed by a small emsemble, and the other an atmospheric electronic score by KTL.

The supplemental material includes audio commentary by film historian Casper Tybjerg, an interview with Ingmar Bergman excerpted from Victor Sjostrom: A Portrait, “The Bergman Connection,” an original visual essay by Peter Cowie, and a booklet featuring an essay by screenwriter and filmmaker Paul Mayersberg.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

North American collectors will need a region-free PAL DVD player capable of outputting an NTSC-compatible signal to view this edition.

This PAL DVD edition is likely the best available European home video edition of Körkarlen (or perhaps the Svensk Filmindustri edition noted above).

The film is accompanied by two music scores: one is a fine score by Swedish composer Matti Bye performed by a small emsemble, and the other by KTL (six-minute promotional excerpt only). The music presented in a very-high uncompressed audio bit rate (unusual for a DVD release), with the KTL excerpt in Dolby Digital sound.

Supplemental material includes The Image Makers [Bildmakarna] (2000) written by Per Olov Enquist and directed by Ingmar Bergman, a fictionalized encounter between director Victor Sjöström, actress Tora Teje and writer Selma Lagerlöf produced on videotape.

While this DVD edition is out-of-print, it is our current recommendation for European collectors. North American collectors will need a region-free PAL DVD player capable of outputting an NTSC-compatible signal to view this edition.

United Kingdom: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 2 PAL DVD edition from Amazon.co.uk. Support Silent Era.

This DVD-R edition, produced for home video by E. Hunter Hale, features two versions of Victor Sjöström’s film Körkarlen (1921); the first in the original Swedish release version, the second being the American release version as edited by Metro Pictures Corporation.

The original version is presented from a good to very-good 16mm reduction print, with English language intertitles, that is fairly speckled and dusty, with scratches, timing marks and other emulsion damage from the archival source print. However, the usual plugged-up shadows of many 16mm prints are not a problem here. Most of the exposures in the source print remain fairly balanced across a broad range of greytones. The video transfer itself runs at slightly faster than natural speed — not quite comical, but some of the edits within a sequence just race by with thoughtless disregard. The transfer could have been slowed down a couple of frames a second to render a more natural and pleasing pace.

Our criticism of this edition is chiefly of the lower-than-usual digital resolution of the picture. The video transfer from the source print may have been more than adequate but the digital mastering of the disc, which may have looked OK when it was being rendered on a PC, looks only so-so on a standard resolution television and noticeably rough on a high-definition television. For those who may not see the blocky aliasing of image details around contrasting angles and curves or around the typefont of the intertitles nor see the smeary coarseness of rendered greytones while the picture is moving, any still frame will reveal an image rife with digital compression artifacts. We suspect that the choice to include two versions of the film on one DVD-R disc with its limited data capacity, rather than release the edition on two discs, led to the over-compression of the picture information in the digital mastering of the DVD.

Video-based expositional intertitles apparently replace original intertitles or narrative sections of the film that were missing in the source print.

The USA release version, known as The Stroke of Midnight, has been mastered from a good 16mm reduction print, which is rather greyed out. As with the first presentation on this disc, the picture is highly aliased due to the low DVD encoding resolution. This version differs from the first presentation in the reediting of the film (changing the order of sequences and individual shots to discard the narrative flashback structure of the original in favor of a chronological timeline structure) as carried out by Metro in 1922. For instance, the David Holm prison sequence that appears 26 minutes into the film in the first version starts the film in the second version. Surprisingly, the running time is nearly identical in this home video edition for both versions.

The film is presented (both versions) with musical accompaniment performed on Wurlitzer theater organ by Blaine Gale, recorded during a live presentation of the film at the Organ Loft in Salt Lake City, Utah. While the musical performance is good, there will be a few distracting coughs from the audience, and the recording mics were placed in such a manner to capture perhaps too much of the mechanical sounds of the organ’s operation. At times it sounds as though someone is closing folding chairs in the background. Nope, that’s just the sound of a theater organ.

The disc is supplemented with the source novel Körkarlen by Selma Lagerlöf, translated as Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness (yet another English title for the film itself). The text of the novel is presented in a series of still frames, divided by chapters.

Despite the very-good quality of the music and the reasonable quality of the source prints, our overall impression of this edition is brought down a bit by the low-resolution picture. The above frame capture shows the smeary, cross-hatched low-resolution picture. Is this disc still watchable? Yes, but the edition could have been of higher quality had another decision been reached. Perhaps this edition could be remastered at an acceptable DVD resolution and released on two discs so that enthusiasts may enjoy the film presentation more than is possible from this existing disc.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is also available directly from . . .

Other SWEDISH FILMS of the silent era available on home video.