Miss Julie-1951

According to film scholar Peter Cowie, Alf Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie inaugurated “a new cinematic language”. Alf Sjöberg one of the brightest stars in Scandinavian film scene in the ‘40s and ‘50s, is now rather overlooked for the simple reason Ingmar Bergman is far greater draw than he. (see Sjöberg, Bergman and Swedish films). Of his oeuvres Miss Julie is a classic. Alf Sjöberg won the Grand Prix du Festival at the Cannes Film Festival twice: in 1946 for Torment (Swedish: Hets) (part of an eleven-way tie), and in 1951 for Miss Julie (Swedish: Fröken Julie)
August Strindberg owed much to Émile Zola’s “Le naturalism au théâtre” and in the works of the Goncourt brothers. This 1888 play belongs to the period of naturalism in theater begun around 1880. Their dictum was to depict life through a temperament and to maintain a strict dramatic form resting on the three unities of time, place, and action. In Miss Julie, for instance, Strindberg confines the entire action to the estate kitchen, the conflict takes place in a short time span during Midsummer’s Eve, and dramatic potential of power play is delineated by three characters: Julie, the twenty-five-year-old countess; Jean, her father’s valet; and Jean’s fiancé, the robust cook Kristin. Naturalism also decreed that a drama demonstrate a law of nature—in this case it was the survival of the fittest: the likes of Jean will live on while Julie, the product of an effete aristocratic family, will succumb.
Two different mediums
Before I get on with the details of the film proper let me point out a few points that distinguish film treatment of a play as ground breaking as that of Strindberg. In the manner film exploits the basic theme more trenchantly Sjöberg shows his superlative talent. He came originally from the stage and showed his genius could transcend the limits of theater by letting the camera to explore the nuances of self destructive love as essayed by willful countess and her valet.
The film opens as in the play on midsummer night of 1874 on the estate of a Count in Sweden. The film roams freely over the grounds of the count’s estate, unlike the claustrophobic mood of the theater. The evocative mood awakened by the festive atmosphere of solstice, the torpor and heat in which inhibitions are lowered, only film can bring about effectively. One may compare it with Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).
In theater the directness of actors and speech must work despite of a confined architecture and painted scenery; the all- enveloping intimacy in which the actors create reality is all that they have in order to succeed. Their stylized gestures and rhythmic speech are their props. Whether it is an Ibsen or Pinter play, speech and truth of action in stylized acting or natural, reality is in carrying the audience along till the very end. In the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes cleverness of the makers of Emperor’s new clothes succeeded. In such immediacy of a make- believe world, reality was broken by the child who shouted, ‘the emperor is naked’. In short reality of the theater doesn’t suffer audience to drift into fantasy or introspection. Not so with cinema. To quote
‘Cinema is peopled with ghosts and chimeras who weightlessly defy the boundaries of space and time. This abrogation of external laws pulls the medium into the realm of introspection, imagination, and dreams.’(Peter Matthews-criterion 21 Jan’08)
Basic themes
The film as with the play essays power play of power, class and gender. The frolic of the lower classes typified by the solstice is a counterpoint to the hidebound social mores under which Miss Julie exists. This underlying tension runs throughout in visual terms as well as in the development of two protagonists. Julie takes added delight in playing her games with Jean, seeing fit to consistently demean this servant through such acts as forcing him to shine her boots. He submits to her will since his station requires it.
Taught by her mother to hold all men in contempt, Miss Julie nonetheless gives herself to him and it is a point where balance of power shifts. The affair with valet Jean (Ulf Palme) shows what is her future. He wants her to elope with him to Switzerland where he expects her to entice customers to the inn that he intends to set up. His victory over her can never be that of one of an equal to her either in class or in aristocratic unflappability. Only he needs hear the ring of two bells and in Pavlovian reflex he reverts to his servile upbringing.
The tension of their doomed romance is revealing in in their dreams: Jean speaks of a recurring dream where he is ever trying to climb a tree and the countess is free falling. Such contrasts, in Sjoberg’s handling render disparity of their childhood, taking us into the past, illustrating the events and people who came to shape both Julie and Jean’s disparate outlooks on life. Raised a servant’s son and scorned by those above him, Jean is subjected to cruel humiliations early on in life which has the dual effects of both fostering contempt for the ruling class he lives under but also shapes him into a poltroon. And with Julie, her life is genuinely shaped by the sins of the father and mother; in her case, an emotionally weak father and psychologically unbalanced mother’s own war of attrition shaped and trained the young girl to distrust all men. (Strindberg points out with painful clarity the ways in which children become the weapons through which their parents can strike hardest and deepest at each other.)

‘The chief innovation that Sjöberg brings to his Miss Julie is the seamless way in which he presents both main characters’ past and present in a unified whole; as Julie begins to reminisce over her own childhood, the camera pans away and we are taken into the past only to be brought back into the uncomfortable present in one continuous motion, which speaks to the ever-present nature of memory in our lives as we live out in real time. This seamlessness injects a dreamy surrealism into an otherwise, caustic realism as well as foreshadows Bergman’s own use of this approach in films like Wild Strawberries.

However, the film’s dramatic core is sustained by Bjork and Palme’s performances as the main characters. Powerfully open emotionally, Bjork is expert at imposing the character’s will believably in the first half as well as transitioning into the shattered psyche that exposes her vulnerability and leads her to the tale’s tragic denouement'.
Cast:
Anita Björk ... Miss Julie
Ulf Palme ... Jean
Märta Dorff ... Kristin, cook
Lissi Alandh ... Countess Berta, Julie's mother
Anders Henrikson ... Count Carl, Julie's father
Inga Gill ... Viola
Åke Fridell ... Robert
Kurt-Olof Sundström ... Julie's Fiancé

Max von Sydow ... Hand
Margaretha Krook ... Governess (as Margareta Krook)
Åke Claesson ... Doctor
Inger Norberg ... Julie as a child
Jan Hagerman ... Jean as a child
Technical
Produced by
Rune Waldekranz .... producer (uncredited)

Original Music and arranged by
Dag Wirén

Cinematography by
Göran Strindberg

Film Editing by
Lennart Wallén

Art Direction by
Bibi Lindström
Bergman and Sjöberg, Swedish films
Alf Sjöberg (21 June 1903 – 16 April 1980) was a Swedish theatre and film director.
Born in 1903, Sjöberg was in the thick of artistic developments of new medium of cinema. Victor Sjöström( The Outlaw and His Wife-1918) and Mauritz Stiller( Sir Arne’s Treasure-1919) were engaged in making Swedish cinema a force to reckon with. Hollywood sensing threat bought over Sjöström and Stiller along with his protégé Greta Garbo to MGM. Into this breach stepped in Alf Sjöberg, trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, and he caused a sensation with his very first work, The Strongest (1929), an intense fable of seal hunters in Greenland. But the mortal blow to the industry had been struck, and he retreated to the boards, mounting acclaimed, innovative productions of Strindberg and Shakespeare through the 1930s. Meanwhile, Swedish cinema entered a struggling, populist phase. The smash of the decade was Gustaf Molander’s glossy soap Intermezzo (1936), soon to be remade for David Selznick -( once again,this time plundering its ingenue star, Ingrid Bergman).

Ironically, Sweden’s neutrality during the Second World War turned the grim situation around. A ban on foreign imports deemed propaganda (that is, nearly everything from the Axis or the Allies) gave domestic filmmaking a sudden shot in the arm. Determined on a renaissance, the visionary head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling, symbolically enthroned a repatriated Sjöström as the company’s artistic supervisor, then wooed another indispensable auteur. Sjöberg had been tempted back to cinema for an urgent, antifascist melodrama, They Staked Their Lives (1940), and consolidated his prestige with The Road to Heaven (1942), a stark medieval allegory that holds more than an embryonic hint of a later folktale about a certain chess-playing knight. At the time, the author of that classic was a hustling junior in the script department of SF, and Dymling had an inspiration: why not arrange a creative marriage between this whiz kid Bergman and the veteran Sjöberg? The result was Torment (1944) The young Bergman came to represent the youth and Sjöberg, the Establishment. In Sweden as elsewhere, the war’s trauma had propelled youth culture—and though Bergman could be profitably sold as a rebel than Sjöberg.
Whatever might be said of Bergman’s burgeoning talent it was unlike that of Sjöberg who had cut his teeth on 1920s German expressionism. His camera mobility and deep-focus framing is evident in Torment.
Bergman would absorb some aspect of his technique for Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and The Silence (1963), eventually conceding that “Alf Sjöberg . . . taught me a great deal.” If it was a case of oedipal rivalry, then momentarily the father outpaced the son. Screwed over on Torment, Sjöberg recouped with Iris and the Lieutenant (1946) and Only a Mother (1949). Despite his success with films Torment (1944) and Miss Julie, Alf Sjöberg was above all, and foremost, a stage director; perhaps the greatest at Dramaten (alongside, first, Olof Molander and, later, Ingmar Bergman). He was a First Director of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theatre in the years 1930-1980, where he staged a large number of remarkable and historic productions. Sjöberg was also a pioneer director for early Swedish TV theatre (his 1955 TV theatre production of Hamlet is a national milestone).
A clue to the weight of two directors one only needs to watch Torment where Bergamn’s part only called for script and some four days shooting towards the end. Yet Bergman has become saleable and his name appears more striking than that of Sjöberg.
Sjöberg died in a car accident on his way to rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm.
Versions of Miss Julie
* The first, Fröken Julie by the Swedish director, Alf Sjöberg in 1951.
* Another version was produced in 1971 by Tigon British Film Productions. It starred Helen Mirren as Miss Julie.
* A version was directed by Mike Figgis with Saffron Burrows in the role of Miss Julie and Peter Mullan in the role of Jean in 1999.
(Ack: independentfilmquarterly, Brigitta Steene, Miss Julie: The Three Bergs-peter Matthews, criterion collection
answers.com, wikipedia,)
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