I feel confident that Iris och löjtnanshjärta, unknown to most of us, will be revealed to many as an authentic masterpiece of the 1940s, and cause general cinephilic shame for not being better known. It’s a drama of the rich, with an attentive eye to those who are fragile in the midst of hearts of stone: wounded children, those of “lower” classes. Miss Julie (1951) was evidently not Sjöberg’s first class-conscious study about master and servant: in the center, there is the proud choice of a woman who returns to being a servant, and has the child of the wealthy youth, without the acceptance of the family that can only offer cynical solutions and cold financial compensation. There is a sentence we hear once, that is later repeated: “… if God would cease to exist, our culture would fall down like a house of cards”.
Alf Sjöberg’s (1903-1980) modernist expression has been described as a shock combination of disparate elements that explode against each other. Precise enough, as there is a sense of experimentation everywhere (strange angles, diagonals, images that are nearly abstract or sometimes at the border of being pretentious, yet are not); and at the same time the fantastic expressive scale of the director never abandons the carnality of the persons, even if so many of them lead a non-life dominated by money by the self-imposed prison of ownership, with claustrophobia and nightmare tightly combined in almost everything. But the film also projects something in total contrast, a fabulous glimpse of a romantic image, always impossible to reach. If the film could be seen in its day as a glimpse of cinema’s future, now it does so more than ever.

Peter von Bagh