As part of Ballroom Marfa’s fourth annual New Year’s film program, Sarah Lipstate (AKA Noveller) played an original score for Victor Sjöström’s 1921 Swedish film, The Phantom Carriage, a masterpiece of silent cinema often cited as an aesthetic touchstone for Ingmar Bergman and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

The film opens on New Year’s Eve as three drunks recount the legend of how the last person to die before the end of each year must serve as Death’s soul collector in the year to come, driving the titular phantom carriage. One of these men dies just before midnight, shortly after spurning the wishes of a dying woman. His sins are then recounted in ethereal flashbacks by Georges, the driver of the carriage from the preceding year.

Lipsates’s melodic guitar soundtracked this iconic silent film masterpiece with new compositions.