A Rare Silent Classic On Presidents' Day

Thursday, February 15----While most Americans will spend Presidents' Day Monday either shopping, sleeping late or lounging at a pool, intrepid New Yorkers can bathe in the glorious spectacle of a silent film classic, with musical accompaniment, at the Jacob Burns Film Center.....Swedish director Victor Sjostrom's 1921 classic THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE.

Sjostrom (later dubbed Victor Seastrom in Hollywood), who directed some early silent classics in both his native Sweden and eventually in Hollywood, was also the director/mentor who brought the world Greta Garbo. His collaborations with Garbo retain their sensuality and exquisite beauty after more than 75 years. Sjostrom's career in Hollywood did not outlast the coming of sound films, but he continued to make significant films in Sweden and Europe. In his latter years, he founded a renewed fame playing the lead character of an older man facing his mortality in the 1957 Ingmar Bergman classic WILD STRAWBERRIES.

In THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE, Sjöstrom not only directs, but plays the lead in this eerie, unsettling, visually stunning film about three drunkards, who evoke a legend....the last person to die in a year, if he is a great sinner, will have to drive the Phantom Carriage that picks up the souls of the dead. One of the men dies suddenly, right at the stroke of midnight.....thus begins his journey and our own.

The film will be accompanied by musician Ben Model, who has served as resident silent film accompanist for the Museum of Modern Art for more than two decades. He composes all his own scores and performs in a style that is simultaneously contemporary and evocative of the silent era.

For more information, to buy tickets and to check the other Burns Center offerings, log on to their website: http://www.burnsfilmcenter.org

Sandy Mandelberger, Film New York Editor