In 2009, the Filmoteka Narodowa in Warsaw announced that they had discovered a tinted nitrate print with German intertitles. The Archival Film Collections of the Swedish Film Institute got temporary access to this element, and in 2011 a duplicate negative was made, from which this colour print was struck. Swedish intertitles were recreated from a re-printed title list, and inserted into the new negative. A second duplicate negative was made as a preservation element.
When the tinted nitrate print of Mauritz Stiller’s Gränsfolken (1913) was discovered in 2009 at the Filmoteka Narodowa in Warsaw, it was nothing less than sensational. The previously earliest preserved Stiller films had been the 1915 Hämnaren and Madame de Thèbes (screened at Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2003 and 2007 respectively), meaning that up until now none of the films from the director’s initial three, very prolific, years 1912-14 – in which he directed no less than 20 films – had survived.
Gränsfolken was arguably the most successful of Stiller’s early films; 41 prints were sold by production company Svenska Biografteatern to 17 countries. The script by Norwegian writer Peter Lykke-Seest deals with fraternal and national rivalry in an undefined Nordic context, but Stiller transposed the action to an Eastern milieu, familiar to him. Not only the names of the characters suggest a more or less Russian context, but clerical ornates, musical instruments, costumes and head-gowns during the wedding ceremony in the first reel indicate an orthodox-slavic setting.
The style of the film is somewhat archaic, with hardly any camera movement, and a lot of the acting is taking place frontally, straight at the camera. But Stiller creates dynamics by having characters move along the depth-axis of the frame, and he also at times has action taking place on multiple depths of eld in the same shot. Stiller also creates interesting visual patterns by using geometrical figures of the settings to create frames within the frame (exteriors were shot on location in Visby with its medieval arched stone walls). The inclusion of Gränsfolken in the surviving Stiller filmography gives us new insights in the director’s thematic and stylistic development.

Jon Wengström