Notes on the Cultural Context of Reception: ?The Girl from the Marsh Croft?, 1917

Abstract

If we viewed Victor Sjostrom's The Girl from the Marsh Croft (Tosen fran Stormyrtorpet), a film produced in Sweden in 1917, few would dispute that the film incorporates features typical of the classical style. Nor, in all likelihood, would we question, on the evidence of the scene where Gudmund tells Helga that his mother wishes to speak to her (to terminate her employment with the family as it transpires, Fig. 1), that the action of the film is set in the nineteenth century. We would be wrong, however, in drawing this inference. Later in the film, Gudmund goes into town where he becomes drunkwith a group of friends. Leaving the bar (which is lit by electric light, Fig. 2), Gudmund becomes involved in a street brawl which, lit by gas street-lighting (Fig. 3), locates action in the contemporary or near-contemporary period. If the present-day viewer infers that the film is set in the nineteenth century most likely on grounds of dress and set design (one of the items of traditional furniture, a bed, which appears periodically in the film is dated 1837) he or she has misread the cultural context which the film presumed which, neither rural nor yet fully modern, is encapsulated in the scene where Gudmund, in his Sunday-best suit, talks with Hildur, his betrothed, who is dressed in the regional costume (folkdrdk) of Dalarna (Fig. 4), a region some 250 kilometres north-west of Stockholm. A similar cultural ambivalence between the outward signs of traditional rural life and those of early twentieth-century urban culture may be observed in a short non-fiction film, shot in Dalarna in 1910, Marriage in Leksand (Leksandsbr6llop). In showing us views of the people of Leksand as they stroll along the broad avenue from Leksand church (Fig. 5) or walk towards the town's guest-house (gdstgifvaregard, Fig. 6), the film not only inscribes picture postcard views which circulated at the turn of the century (Fig. 7 and Fig. 8), but also draws attention, by way of a signpost, to a folk museum (folkmuseum, Fig. 9), an institution which, in the wake of Artur Hazelius' founding of Stockholm's open-air folk museum, Skansen, in 1891, had become a popular attraction by the late 1890s.1 The folk museum in Leksand, founded in 1898,2 also demonstrates that traditional rural life had not only become the subject of regional ethnographic enquiry but, as a popular commodity, of interest to the seasonal tourist. By the 1910s, when tourism began to play an increasingly important role in the economy of the region, tourists arriving in Leksand by rail or by steam ferry could reside at what was now known as Hotell Leksand (the former gastgifvaregr this is the social transition which The Girl from the Marsh