FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

108 Transition and Transformation
dead husband escorts her off to the right in the same manner. Once Ursula has
finally made her way through the fire, she looks up and sees her husband still
hanging there, apparently alive. But he lowers his head to the posture of the
dead Christ and then becomes Jesus himself in a final transformation. Thus, the
scene employs five successive dissolves. There are several thematic factors that
account for and condense the sequence: Ursula’s husband was a sculptor, Ursula
had modelled for a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, her husband dies of a heart
attack and assumes the posture of Christ on the cross. The dissolves serve both
as metaphor and as a means of alternating among different timeframes. While
Ursula doesn’t poison her husband, her intention of doing so is the cause of his
heart attack. Thus, the use of metaphor allows for the expression of a twofold
forgiveness, both by Christ on the cross and by Ursula’s husband.
In this case, just like in The Tower of Lies, another type of construction en abîme
is created, in Iampolski’s phrasing emphasizing “the play of codes, the palpability
of representation, structural isomorphism, and, behind all of this, the flickering
gleam of shifting meanings”. 31 Because, as he underlines, “no reflection is
fully accurate, always involving a variation, a transformation that is stressed by
the repetition itself”–which leads to the spectator’s witnessing of “the very birth
of meaning”, which s/he shares with the father in The Tower of Lies. 32
But The Tower of Lies also seems to have contained another kind of dissolve
(which occurred in Name the Man and He Who Gets Slapped, and which
would later appear in The Divine Woman). This was mentioned by a Swedish
critic who attributed its use to American “modernities”:
If one is supposed to find some directional modernities, it would be possible to point
to the many “trick transitions”, which is the professional term, for example, his trick
to let one image fade into another by dissolving a spinning power-loom wheel with a
car tire. Sjöström seems to have fallen in love with this particular kind of transition,
which in his latest film appear almost too frequently. 33
This Swedish critic was obviously not aware of the frequency of the device in
Sjöström’s previous work, as The Tower of Lies contains fewer dissolves than
his other films – seventeen in all, of which six may be said to function as analogy,
in the way that has been revealed as Sjöström’s particular style.
According to the Swedish trade press, a particular national version of the film
was made preceding distribution in Sweden. Filmjournalen claims that this version
lets the action take place in a Swedish home in America through an intertitle,
“in order to avoid all anachronisms”, but above all, the happy ending already
mentioned, where Glory returns home to marry her love from childhood,
has been cut out:
The Emperor of Portugallia is in its Swedish version a tragedy without any redeeming
features. The film ends with the poor farmer in his fantastic costume and with death