This is an extended version of the catalogue essay I wrote for Pirmoji Banga 2022, currently taking place in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The famous phrase attributed to Charlie Chaplin offers a devastating summary of He Who Gets Slapped (1924): “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” Victor Sjöström’s film examines what happens when one man’s bitterest humiliation is replayed for laughs, again and again, like a one-reel comedy playing in a nickelodeon.

The setting is French, but the source play is Russian, an enduringly popular stage hit by Leonid Andreyev, first performed in 1915. He Who Gets Slapped is an example of Andreyev’s “pansyche” theatre, in which the inner emotional state of the characters is more important that the plot. It’s an apt choice for director Victor Sjöström, credited in his American films such as this one, as Victor Seastrom. He had previously made dark psychological dramas such as Ingeborg Holm (1913) and The Phantom Carriage (1921) back home in Sweden. He Who Gets Slapped was one of his first films in his Hollywood career, which would include such similarly anguished fare as The Scarlet Letter (1926) and The Wind (1928), both starring Lillian Gish and Swedish actor Lars Hanson.