A Film Canon

 

 

The first great cinematic paean to landscape, The Outlaw And His Wife centres on a fable of Icelandic love, shot on location in far northern Sweden. This produces a quintessentially Romantic concatenation of elements, in which the play of fire, water, ice, rock and air silhouettes and dwarfs any human presence, most spectacularly in those episodes that take place around hot springs, waterfalls and escarpments. As a result, the two protagonists gradually find themselves explicated as mere extrapolations of this landscape, explaining the extent to which their flirtation occurs in topographical terms, most beautifully in the outlaw's comparison of his wife's face to "a blue mountain rising out the mist", as well as their rugged, stern regality, which would fall short of beauty against any other backdrop. This is all enhanced by Sjöström's poetic tinting, which embodies the transformative potential of glacial light, as well as the wife's desire to "sleep with my eyes open", producing a dream-like, hallucinatory quality that culminates with her vision of her husband as a projection of the elements, as fleeting as the waterfall onto which he is superimposed.