Sir Arne's Treasure

Mauritz Stiller's haunting historical drama, based on a Selma Lagerlöf novel, set in a frozen sixteenth-century Sweden. Three Scottish mercenaries murder the wealthy Sir Arne and his household for his treasure, but their escape is blocked by the ice-locked harbor. One of the killers, Sir Archie, falls in love with Elsalill, who doesn't realize he murdered her family — but the ghosts of the dead will not rest. Stiller's extraordinary use of the snow-covered Swedish landscape gives the film an atmosphere of crystalline, almost unbearable beauty, and the climactic funeral procession across the ice is one of the most visually stunning sequences in all of silent cinema. A gothic tragedy of guilt, love, and inescapable fate, told with a visual poetry that still takes the breath away.