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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
The first thing that strikes you is the cold—an almost tactile chill that seeps through the hundred-and-ten-year-old emulsion and settles on your knuckles as you lean toward the monitor. AB Stockholms Filmkompanis veckorevy nr. 19 was never meant to be art; it was weekly merchandise, a nickelodeon appetizer shoveled out between boxing shorts and Pathé serials. Yet here it is, resurrected by a fluke: a mislabeled canister in a Helsinki bunker, a spliced hunk of footage the size of a postcard, and a spectral violinist who insisted the crate smelled of March snow. When the 2K scan flickered alive in the lab, the temperature in the room dropped three degrees—either the HVAC faltered or the ghost of winter 1912 walked through the walls.
Unlike the stagy tableaux of Home, Sweet Home or the Expressionist fever of Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, this newsreel edits Stockholm the way a jazz drummer treats rhythm—syncopated, impatient, alive. Observe the cut from a suffragette’s raised gloved hand to the sudden smack of a policeman’s cape; the splice is missing four frames, creating a jump so violent it feels like a punchline. The missing frames are gone forever, yet their absence tells a better political joke than any intertitle could.
Jacob Bergqvist—listed only as “gentleman” in the incomplete ledger—has the kind of face that belongs on a 19th-century daguerreotype: cheekbones like glaciated ridges, eyes that refuse the camera’s thirst for intimacy. When he tips his bowler, the gesture lasts exactly eight frames, yet the micro-movement of his pupils suggests he has already seen the century that follows. Compare that to Nathan Söderblom’s ecclesiastical visage: the archbishop’s beard is a weather system, snow-heavy and prophetic, each follicle a sermon on theodicy. In extreme close-up (unusual for 1912) the grain clusters around his nostrils like frost on stained glass.
There is no soundtrack, yet the mind furnishes one: the iron shriek of Kungsbron drawbridge, the huff of a North Germanic horse, the ammonia sting of pickled herring. I played the reel on loop while sipping aquavit; by the fourth pass the room reeked of tar and brine, as though the celluloid itself exuded the Baltic. This is the phantom synesthesia that only the best archival fragments provoke—compare the olfactory hallucinations reported during the MoMA screening of The Cinema Murder.
Uppsala’s frozen river becomes a makeshift cathedral when Söderblom steps onto the ice. The camera, perched on a wooden sled, tracks him in a slow dolly that predates Citizen Kane’s famous floor-level shot by three decades. Students skate circles around him, their blades carving cuneiform prayers into the surface; each scratch refracts sunlight like runic inscriptions. The scene is a one-take miracle: no safety net, no CGI, just theology in motion. When a boy falls through a thin patch, the camera hesitates—should it intervene?—then tilts skyward, abdicating moral responsibility in favor of cosmic vertigo.
The suffragette sequence arrives without warning, a riot of violet sashes against slate uniforms. One woman, her hatpin as long as a stiletto, fastens a rosette to a policeman’s lapel while staring straight down the barrel. The gesture lasts perhaps two seconds, yet it detonates across history: a proto-Pussy Riot moment, raw and unfiltered. Compare the sanitized activism in The Cinderella Man where suffrage is reduced to a quaint subplot; here it is flesh, fabric, and defiance.
At minute four, a cinematograph booth at Skansen bursts into flame. The camera doesn’t cut away; instead it records the firemen’s futile ballet while nitrate curls like black orange peel. The conflagration becomes a metaphor for the medium itself—images devouring themselves in a bright, brief orgy. The heat was so intense that the lens warped, leaving a permanent fisheye halo around the edges, a wound that doubles as inadvertent Expressionism.
The polar-bear balloon, stitched from canvas once used to wrap locomotives, ascends above Gamla stan trailing ropes that slap chimney pots like imperial cat-o’-nine-tails. Children chase its shadow, their mouths forming perfect Os. From the gondola, a hand—possibly Bergqvist’s—drops leaflets that flutter downward like wounded gulls. One lands on the lens, obscuring the frame for eighteen seconds; when it peels away, the city below has shifted, as though Sweden itself hiccupped.
The final shot is a slow dusk tableau: sanitation workers hoist barrels stamped with the company’s initials onto a barge whose hull is painted the same shade as dried blood. The men sing a hymn in minor key, their breath forming contrails that vanish faster than memory. The camera holds until the barge slips under the bridge, then iris-shutters to black—not the usual circular fade but an asymmetrical ellipse that resembles a closing eye. In that instant the entire newsreel flips from document to dirge, from information to incantation.
Place this reel beside the wartime panic of The Zeppelin’s Last Raid and you’ll notice a shared obsession with airborne threat—one real, one absurd. Pair it with the claustrophobic morality of The Unpardonable Sin and you’ll see how public space becomes confessional. Only here, absolution is not offered; it simply sinks into the fjord.
The 4K restoration by the Swedish Film Institute used a wet-gate printer filled with a bespoke brew of ethanol and lavender oil to mask scratches. The lavender, chosen after a blind sniff test with Stockholm pensioners, evokes 1912 barbershops. Color grading leaned into the mercury-green of early March snow, pushing shadows toward sea-blue and highlights toward gas-lamp yellow. The result is a hallucination so crisp you can count the stitches on Söderblom’s cassock.
Projected at the correct 16 fps instead of the standard 24, motion acquires the elastic grace of a dream. Watch Bergqvist’s stride elongate until he seems to glide rather than walk—an urban wraith negotiating cobblestones that no longer exist. Speed corrected, the suffragette rally feels less like agitprop and more like pagan carnival, a flicker-book bacchanalia that predates The Spirit of Cabin Mine’s outdoor rituals by seven years.
Who owns the faces of the dead? The balloonist who leaned over the basket and became a smudge on the emulsion—did he vote? Did he die in the trenches of 1915? The nitrate refuses biography; it offers only silhouette. Yet the eye seeks narrative, sewing shadows into fate. This ethical itch is sharper here than in Alias Jimmy Valentine where character arcs are pre-chewed. Here, history is a buffet of ghosts; you pick whom to haunt you.
I screen the reel every March equinox, lights off, aquavit chilled, windows open to coax the city’s diesel breath inside. By the sixth viewing the room fills with strangers: archivists, insomniacs, a theology dropout who swears the hymn is sung in Phrygian mode. We don’t speak; we simply let the images re-inscribe themselves on our corneas like afterimages of a solar eclipse. When the iris closes, we exhale in unison, a congregation whose creed is impermanence.
By the time the barge disappears, winter is already hemorrhaging into spring. The ice on the Fyrisån cracks like a vertebra, and the polar-bear balloon deflates behind the treeline, a white carcass of empire. The newsreel, once a commodity, has become a season—one week in March that refuses to end. You walk outside, collar high, and every tram clang feels like a splice, every breath a fade-out. Stockholm is no longer the city you entered; it is a loop, a perforation, a promise that the next frame might, impossibly, show tomorrow.
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