Prof. John Gibbs: Re-evaluating The Phantom Carriage

Component parts of this output:

An audiovisual essay in two parts Gibbs, J. and Pye, D. (2017) ‘The Phantom Carriage: a revaluation’

A book chapter: Gibbs, J. and Pye, D. (2018) ‘The Phantom Carriage (Körkalen) (1921)’

Research process, insights and dissemination

This project comprises a video essay and a written essay, each co-written equally by Gibbs and Pye, which together argue for the significance and achievement of Körkarlen (The Phantom Carriage, Victor Sjöström, 1921) while also extending the methods and subjects of style-based criticism. The project has two methodological innovations which are, first, bringing a critical and interpretative understanding of the film’s style into conversation with the historical accounts of film form which predominate in the scholarship around silent cinema, and second, the audiovisual essay’s demonstration of new and dynamic ways of conducting close analysis.

Both written and videographic arguments analyse the flexibility and fluidity in the film’s construction of dramatic space, which are remarkable for its period – and unrecognised in existing scholarship – but also argue that the films’ interests extend well beyond the handling of film space. Both pieces examine the construction of a sequence in detail, analysing the dynamic deployment of editing strategies in an interior setting. The essays argue that the film’s creation of a three-dimensional filmic space – with no hint of frontality – becomes the basis of a reciprocal relationship between spatial naturalism and performance style, and of a mise-en-scène that can take on discrete interpretive force. Each argument also places the sequence within the context of the film as a whole in order to show how relationships articulated through the detailed decisions in the sequence take on their full resonance within patterns and motifs that develop across the film.

The synergy between written and videographic essay provides evidence of how digital technologies can provide dynamic replacements for traditional methods of sequence notation, and how style-based videographic criticism presents exciting new possibilities for complex movement between argument and object of study.

Links to the outputs

Gibbs, J. and Pye, D. (2017) ‘The Phantom Carriage: a revaluation’ (audiovisual essay). Movie: a journal of film criticism (7).

Part 1

Part 2

Gibbs, J. and Pye, D. (2018) ‘The Phantom Carriage (Körkalen) (1921)’. In: Stephen Neale (ed.), Silent Features. Exeter: Exeter University Press, pp. 73-90.

Created: 01/03/21

Last revision: 18/03/21