The Picture Makers
The Picture Makers describes an imaginary meeting between four great figures in Swedish cultural history: Selma Lagerlöf, world-famous story-teller and Nobel Prize laureate, Viktor Sjöström, one of Sweden’s greatest film directors and actors of all time, Julius Jaenzon, legendary and brilliant film photographer, and Tora Teje, one of the leading Swedish actresses of the 1890s. One autumn day in 1920, they gather together to look at a provisional version of Sjöström’s silent film Körkarlen based upon one of Selma Lagerlöf’s most famous novels.
With The Picture Makers, where Per Olov Enquist develops the thesis of hidden driving forces behind Selma Lagerlöf’s writing such as her father’s alcoholism, Enquist continues the line from two of his earlier plays Tribadernas natt, a drama about Strindberg and his first wife, and Från regnormarnas liv about H C Andersen, and brings together these actors from the world of literature for a discussion about life and death, about art and ethics.
Per Olov Enquist was born in 1934 in a small village in Norrland, the northern part of Sweden. After studies at the university of Uppsala he received his MA in 1960. Since the early sixties Enquist has worked as literary and theatre critic for several newspapers and magazines. He is one of Sweden’s leading contemporary…
Read more
About the book
The Picture Makers describes an imaginary meeting between four great figures in Swedish cultural history: Selma Lagerlöf, world-famous story-teller and Nobel Prize laureate, Viktor Sjöström, one of Sweden’s greatest film directors and actors of all time, Julius Jaenzon, legendary and brilliant film photographer, and Tora Teje, one of the leading Swedish actresses of the 1890s. One autumn day in 1920, they gather together to look at a provisional version of Sjöström’s silent film Körkarlen based upon one of Selma Lagerlöf’s most famous novels.
With The Picture Makers, where Per Olov Enquist develops the thesis of hidden driving forces behind Selma Lagerlöf’s writing such as her father’s alcoholism, Enquist continues the line from two of his earlier plays Tribadernas natt, a drama about Strindberg and his first wife, and Från regnormarnas liv about H C Andersen, and brings together these actors from the world of literature for a discussion about life and death, about art and ethics.
