Silent Ibsen

NOTA B E N E

Transnational Film Adaptation in the 1910s and 1920s

Edited by Eirik Frisvold Hanssen and Maria Fosheim Lund

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STU D I ES FRO M TH E NATI O NAL LI B R ARY O F N O RWAY

Silent Ibsen

Silent Ibsen

Silent Ibsen Transnational Film Adaptation in the 1910s and 1920s

Edited by Eirik Frisvold Hanssen and Maria Fosheim Lund

N at i o n a l L i b r a r y o f N o r way, O s l o 2 0 2 2

Contents

Acknowledgements 1. Silent Ibsen: Introduction

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Eirik Frisvold Hanssen 2.

“To Familiarise the Lowly”: The Cultural Politics of Adaptation

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The Pillars of Society (Thanhouser, 1911) Pillars of Society (Raoul Walsh, Triangle, 1916) Rob King 3.

First and Foremost An Ideal American Woman?

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A Doll’s House (Theodore Marston, Thanhouser, 1911) Ali Yalgın 4.

Pantomime, Paratext, and Expressivity

95

Ghosts (George Nicholls, Majestic, 1915) Mark Sandberg 5.

Peer Gynt: The Missing Years

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Peer Gynt (Oscar Apfel, Morosco, 1915) Peer Gynts Jugend and Peer Gynts Wanderjahre und Tod (Victor Barnowsky, Richard Oswald-Film, 1919) Ellen Rees 6.

“The Best Swedish Film Ever Made”

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Terje Vigen (Victor Sjöström, Svenska Biografteatern, 1917) Bo Florin 7.

Fragment and Failure

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Hedda Gabler (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala Film, 1920) Angela Dalle Vacche 8.

Trauma, Aesthetic Treatment, and Intermediality

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Das Haus der Lüge (Lupu Pick, Rex-Film, 1926) Thor Holt 9.

Silent Ibsen: Filmography Edited by Maria Fosheim Lund

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Contributors

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Nota bene

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Acknowledgements

The Silent Ibsen project and this book would not have been possible without the collaboration of several film archives, cultural heritage institutions, and other partners. We want to thank the George Eastman Museum, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Jared Case, and Daniella Currò; the Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc., and Ned Thanhouser; the Library of Congress, Gerald Hatfield and Rosemary Hanes; the Swedish Film Institute and Jon Wengström; the EYE Filmmuseum, Leenke Ripmeester, and Annike Kross; the Cineteca del Friuli, Elena Beltrami and Livio Jacob; the Deutsche Kinemathek, Martin Koerber, Elisa Jochum, Anke Hahn, Daniel Meiller, Franz Frank, Cordula Döhrer and Christin Meyer. Numerous scholars, archivists, and other film professionals have shared their knowledge in various ways over the years. In addition to our colleagues at the National Library of Norway, both in Oslo and Mo i Rana, we especially want to thank Peter Bagrov, Cesare Ballardini, Roberta Basano, Oleg Bochkov, Elena Boux, Judith Buchanan, Anna Dobringer, Victoria Duckett, Pål Gengenbach, Thilo Gottschling, Kristina Höch, Anna Kovalova, Thomas Leitch, Armin Loacker, Susan Potter, Arina Ranneva, Laurence Raw, Anna Sofia Rossholm, Anna Sperone, Peter Stens, Réka Zsuzsanna Szalkai, Fabio Pezzetti Tonion, Yuri Tsivian, Patrick Vonderau, and Tami Williams, as well as the authors and peer reviewers of the individual chapters of this book for their invaluable contributions.

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1. Silent Ibsen: Introduction

Eirik Frisvold Hanssen

In 1918, a short newsreel was produced in Norway, titled Henrik Ibsenminder, “Memories of Henrik Ibsen”. Made twelve years after the death of the famous Norwegian author (1828–1906), the film serves as a memorialisation of Ibsen through a wide range of material and conceptual registers. The newsreel features exteriors and interiors of buildings and apartments where he once lived and worked, places in Kristiania (now Oslo) which he used to pass during his daily walks, and numerous plaques and monuments, as well as direct quotes from his works – one in the form of an intertitle, another inscribed in stone.

We also see photographic portraits of the iconic authorial figure at different ages, and the statue of Ibsen in front of the National Theatre in Kristiania. Ibsen is presented not only as an author but also as a celebrity. Landscapes and places carry with them both biographical and literary associations, and the film presents a touristic gaze directed towards places and material traces that represent memories of Ibsen.

Henrik Ibsen-minder was a regional production, and the print held in the film archive of the National Library of Norway originates from the municipal cinema of Grimstad, the small coastal town in the southernmost part of Norway where Ibsen spent his youth (1843–1850) as a pharmaceutical apprentice and assistant and where he also wrote his first play, Catilina (1850). While the film follows Ibsen’s life chronologically, beginning with the house where he was born and ending at 10

his grave, more than four of the seven minutes in the film’s runtime are dedicated to the region where Ibsen spent his life between the ages of 15 and 22. The few minutes that remain show other Norwegian locations, while the film skips completely the period between 1864 and 1891, when Ibsen lived in Italy and Germany and wrote his most influential plays. The main section of the film shows us not only the places in Grimstad where Ibsen lived and worked as a youth but also landscapes and locations in the region associated with his popular poem, Terje Vigen, written much later, in 1862 (Fig. 1a–f).

Figs. 1a–f. A local perspective on Ibsen in the Norwegian newsreel production Henrik Ibsen-minder, produced in 1918: a) opening title; b) image of the entrance to Grimstad through the Hesnes sound, referenced in Ibsen’s poem Terje Vigen (1862); c) intertitle quoting Terje Vigen, “Imenes-Saddle, blue and wide. / He knew then just where he lay” (Ibsen 1995, 66); d–e) image of the pharmacy in Grimstad, followed by a plaque stating, “Here, Henrik Ibsen was a pharmaceutical apprentice, 1844–47”; f) another quote from Terje Vigen, inscribed on a monument commemorating the Napoleonic wars in the churchyard of Fjære church, the place where the hero of Ibsen’s poem is said to be buried: “When winds stopped blustering quite so wild / Terje Vigen rowed for his wife and child, / crossed the sea in an open boat!” (ibid., 65). From the film collection of the National Library of Norway.

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This newsreel production is the only known example of a Norwegian silent film relating to Henrik Ibsen. No film adaptation of any of the author’s works was produced in Norway until 1963, when Vildanden (The Wild Duck) was directed by the dramatist’s grandson, Tancred Ibsen, a renowned Norwegian filmmaker. Outside Norway, however, the silent era, and in particular the 1910s, represents the height of Ibsen’s popularity as a source for film adaptations and as a reference in discourse on cinema. The filmography at the end of this volume lists twenty-eight known silent film adaptations, made in the United States, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Great Britain, Austria-Hungary, and Russia.

To our knowledge, only nine of these twenty-eight titles are still extant. These films are the subject of this book. They include five films from the United States from the period between 1911 and 1916 and four European films from 1917 to 1926: one Swedish, one Italian, and two German. The National Library of Norway has been collecting digital and analogue screening elements of the nine silent Ibsen films known to still be extant, in collaboration with a number of international film archives and other external partners.1 In several cases, no screening prints or elements were available until this endeavour, neither in digital nor analogue formats. Several of the films are not complete but fragments, with substantial parts missing and the images in conditions that vary from the pristine to the badly deteriorated.2 Although adaptations of specific works, these nine films, and the discourse around them, share with the Norwegian newsreel described above a notion of Ibsen that goes beyond the boundary of the literary text: Ibsen is also a celebrity and a general cultural reference. And like the newsreel’s preoccupation with places, the individual films in the transnational phenomenon of silent Ibsen adaptations are highly local-

1

n important foundation of this project was the Ibsen filmography mapping the breadth A of international film productions, edited by Karin Synnøve Hansen and published by the Norwegian Film Institute in 1978 (Hansen 1978) and revised and updated in 1992 and 2006.

2

I n June 2017, the National Library of Norway organised a two-day workshop, “Silent Ibsen”, the first time eight of these films were screened together, with papers by international film and Ibsen scholars. The majority of the chapters in this book (King, Sandberg, Rees, Florin, and Dalle Vacche) are reworkings of papers presented during that event.

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ised. Localisation takes place in a territorial sense, as in the Swedish adaptation of Terje Vigen from 1917, where the archipelago outside Stockholm stands in for the specific coastal landscapes of southern Norway accentuated in the 1918 newsreel, or in the German adaptation of Peer Gynt released in 1919, where the protagonist’s life in Norway is filmed in Bavaria and his travels in the Egyptian desert in Hamburg’s zoological gardens (Vonderau 2017).3 But localisation is also evident in the employment of stylistic and genre elements and in reference to specific sociopolitical contexts: the German Peer Gynt lamenting the loss of his empire right at the end of World War I, the American Ghosts from 1915 employing montage techniques of the emerging classical Hollywood style, the Italian Hedda Gabler in 1920 struggling to feel at home in the genre conventions and acting styles of the Italian diva film.

The majority of the silent Ibsen films were produced in the 1910s.

In the same decade, only sixteen Norwegian films in total were released in cinemas, and fragments remain of only four of them. In quantitative terms, then, the production of international Ibsen films was far more extensive during the decade than Norwegian film production as a whole, and Ibsen’s impact on international film production and film debate far more wide-reaching.

According to Linda Hutcheon, an adaptation defined as “a formal entity or product […] is an announced and extensive transposition of a particular work or works”, a form of “transcoding” that in the case of the silent Ibsen adaptations typically involves a shift of medium from literary work to film (2013, 7). In addition to being “formal entities”, Hutcheon’s framework also views adaptations in terms of processes of creation and reception (ibid., 8). A guiding principle to all the chapters in this book is the importance of considering the silent Ibsen films as instances of transmedial relations and transfers between cinema, literature, and theatre, as well as emphasising their identity, in

3

Two silent Ibsen adaptations, both considered lost, included scenes shot on location in Norway: the Russian Brand from 1914, directed by Pavel Orlenev, and the British Pillars of Society from 1920, directed by Rex Wilson; the latter was actually filmed in Grimstad. See the filmography in this volume.

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Hutcheon’s terms, as “transcultural adaptations”, made and shown within specific production and reception contexts (ibid., 139–45).

Adaptations are here discussed as historically and culturally specific phenomena, involving different national contexts and conditioned by the vast historical changes taking place during the limited time period of 1911 to 1926 – in the development of film industries and styles and the cultural field overall, the political turbulence of the period (with the First World War as a central event), changing hegemonies in international film markets, and Ibsen’s various and shifting positions within different national and cultural contexts.

Ibsen and Cinema The most frequently repeated observation regarding Ibsen and cinema is the limited number of film adaptations based on his work (Ibsen is often compared to Shakespeare, the only playwright more frequently staged) and that hardly any of these films have made a significant impact on film history, with Victor Sjöström’s Terje Vigen from 1917 (examined by Florin in this volume) referred to as the only exception (see e.g. Ferguson 2006, 18–19; Wærp 2015, 411; Engelstad 2021, 178; Rees 2021, 264–65).

Although cinema’s conversion to sound at the end of the 1920s would seem to have provided more suitable technical conditions for adapting Ibsen’s dialogue-heavy plays, the Ibsen film adaptation is in many ways a phenomenon of the silent era. The interest in Ibsen as a source for film adaptation that began in 1911, five years after the author’s death, and lasted for a little over a decade can perhaps be explained by Ibsen’s popularity and celebrity at the time (see Ferguson 2006, 18), which coincided with a general quest to elevate the status of cinema by adapting established literary works. The 1910s and 1920s were also decades when notions of Ibsen changed in several national contexts. Over the course of the 1910s, Ibsen’s status as a topical and modern author was gradually supplanted by his emerging position as a canonised classic, which coincided with a decrease in performances of his plays, while the uplift strategy for cinema was also gradually supplanted by other approaches. Ibsen film adaptations became less frequent after the early 1920s (see e.g. Krouk 2021, 233, and Yalgın in this volume).

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The number of Ibsen films produced and distributed during the silent era equates to only about a tenth of the Shakespeare adaptations in the same period (see Buchanan 2009, 260–78). Shakespeare was a popular source for film already in the late 1890s, long before the first Ibsen adaptations, and, more significantly, Shakespeare films continued to be made in large numbers after the conversion to sound and until the present day. Apart from a continued interest in Ibsen in German cinema until the 1940s (see Holt 2019), his legacy for the most part disappeared from the cinema screen following the advent of sound, re-emerging from the 1950s and onwards as a staple in television theatre productions, a televisual form that often, but not always, stays close to its theatrical origins. Egil Törnqvist’s (1999) examination of the “intimate theatre” of television presentations of Ibsen is probably the most extensive and systematic formal analysis available of the transposition of Ibsen’s work into audiovisual media (see also Rees 2021, 266–67).

There have been recurring discussions about the difficulty or even, as formulated in a thoughtful article by Melvin Chen (2015), the “impossibility of filming Ibsen”. In this volume, Rob King argues that there is a need to establish a “discursive archaeology” of how the idea of this incompatibility was established, with an emphasis on cultural politics instead of explanations based on medium-specificity models.

For what are the specific purposes of an adaptation that allegedly are impossible to achieve? What does “filming” entail? And for that matter, what do we mean when we refer to Ibsen?

The relationship between Ibsen and cinema have often been associated with two intertwined, and usually normative, notions of essence. The first notion includes discourses on fidelity to Ibsen, the capability of the individual adaptation to adhere to the plot of the source text, or other qualities associated with it – moods, themes, intentions.

An even more fundamental normative discourse concerns whether Ibsen’s dramatic form is compatible with an ideal form of the cinematic.

As the chapters in this volume demonstrate, however, the motivation for using Ibsen as a source relates not necessarily so much to preserving specific qualities of the original text or the experience of the theatre performance as to more wide-ranging strategies beyond a sim15

ple two-part relation between source text and adaptation. The films examined in this volume also represent an unstable notion of what cinematic form can be, in part due to the varying national production contexts, in part because of the time span reflected in the corpus of extant films. This is particularly pertinent in the context of the United States, and in relation to the classical Hollywood style, which was not a fixed form during the period in question but a style undergoing intense and uneven development. Aside from the lack of spoken dialogue, few if any of the many infidelities to Ibsen’s original texts found in these films can be explained solely by referring to medium specificity in a general sense but must also be connected to historically situated ideas and practices. Rather than viewing film adaptations as instances of translating content from one set of medium specificities to another, we are instead interested in the various dynamic and dialogic, intertextual and extratextual, multilevel and multimedia processes that take place, which require historical contextualisation to be adequately understood.

Ibsen was an unavoidable cultural reference in the 1910s and 1920s, but there was also a striking ambivalence to his usefulness in cinema. Ibsen’s dramatic form served as a recurring model and reference point in manuals on dramatic writing and screenwriting in the first decades of the twentieth century (Engelstad 2021, 179). But Ibsen’s realist drama, heavy on dialogue and spatially and temporally confined, was also frequently identified as an antithesis to action-based cinematic storytelling, in the 1910s by key early film theorists such as Hugo Münsterberg and Vachel Lindsay (see King and Sandberg in this volume) and in the late 1940s in Nicholas Vardac’s influential treatise on the relationship between theatre and cinema (1949, 216–33), ushering in a debate that is still ongoing on whether the origins of narrative in classical cinema can be found in realist drama or in melodrama and the “well-made play”.

The scarcity of well-known Ibsen adaptations has led to attempts to identify the author’s film historical influence in more indirect ways. Recently, Ellen Rees and Thor Holt have argued that Ibsen’s influence on film history is found not primarily in adaptations but in the “polysemous allegorical structures that underlie his plays”, 16

referring to the oft-mentioned connection between Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (2022, 11). Using “rewriting” and “reimagining” as keywords, Audun Engelstad also claims that the most successful attempts to appropriate Ibsen in film have not been through adaptation but through more subtle uses of themes and narrative strategies, finding examples in both New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s and contemporary world cinema (2021, 178–90). Stanley Cavell found precedent for the Hollywood “comedy of remarriage” of the 1930s and 1940s in Shakespeare’s romantic plays and in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which was also a central reference in Cavell’s examination of the Hollywood “melodrama of the unknown woman” (see Cavell 1981, 20–22 and Cavell 1996). Helge Rønning (2000) has argued that Ibsen has influenced a wide range of popular genres, including the Hollywood action film and melodrama and the television soap opera and crime series.

Reception Contexts and Adaptation Strategies Ibsen’s international breakthrough occurred several years after he became an established author in Scandinavia and varied significantly from one country to the next, with regard to both timing and the specifics of book publications, translations, stage performances, and Ibsen’s position in cultural debates. Thus, not only do the nine films examined in this book belong to the specific national and regional film industries of the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Italy, but these countries also represent very different reception contexts for Ibsen.

In the introduction to a recent collection, Ibsen in Context, the editors, Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem, argue that scholarly and critical discourse on Ibsen was initially dominated by ahistorical approaches to the author, emphasising the distinction between the author and his works, perhaps prompted by Ibsen’s own tendency to “decontextualise” himself from his writings. They also claim that such narratives of autonomy have been increasingly challenged by historical evidence that shows Ibsen and his plays as embedded in “extra-literary” industrial and financial contexts and their contemporary reception (2021, xvi). The editors list a wide range of approaches to Ibsen that have 17

contributed to the field since the 1990s, such as “feminist, postcolonial, world literary, queer, book historical, theatre historical, performance studies, reception and adaptation studies, or translation studies” (Fulsås and Rem 2021, xvii). In addition to a “contextual turn”, Ibsen studies have also undergone a “global turn”, with a large number of studies of the dissemination of Ibsen’s plays in countries beyond Europe and North America, especially Asia (see e.g. Helland 2015; Helland and Holledge 2016; Holledge et al. 2016; Isaksen 2021). Simultaneously, online resources, such as the digital version of the critical edition of Ibsen’s works, Henrik Ibsens skrifter (2005–10; www.ibsen. uio.no) and the database IbsenStage, listing thousands of Ibsen-related performances or “events” (www.ibsenstage.hf.uio), have facilitated computational analysis of and quantitative historical research on networks between plays, institutions, and performers (see e.g. Hanssen 2018), similar to approaches found in recent quantitative historical research on film distribution, exhibition, and reception.

Approaching Ibsen film adaptations thus requires balancing the complexity of silent film historiography on the one hand and the immensity of Ibsen reception and research on the other. In addition to a long line of analyses of individual works in a number of established interpretative traditions and approaches and detailed knowledge of Ibsen’s biography, research on Ibsen also includes in-depth, highly specialised studies on reception contexts, financial and industrial aspects of the literary market, individual theatre performances and translations, and more. In several of the chapters in this volume, methods and concepts from adaptation studies and intermediality studies serve as intermediaries between the fields of silent film historiography and Ibsen scholarship.

Two book-length studies that successfully perform balancing acts similar to the one found in this book in terms of their methodological approach and reflection on historically situated film adaptations of individual authors are Judith Buchanan’s Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (2009) and Thor Holt’s dissertation, Far From Home: Ibsen Through the Camera Lens in the Third Reich (2019). Both studies combine film analysis with historical contextualisation drawn 18

from a wide range of non-filmic primary materials. Buchanan’s book examines the same approximate period as this volume (the silent era) and adaptations from several different countries, albeit of a different author’s works; Holt’s study of Ibsen adaptations looks at a slightly different time period and is limited to a single cultural context.

The history of the silent Shakespeare film provides an illuminating parallel history to that of the Ibsen film during the same period.4 Buchanan argues that these films can be read simultaneously as film industry products, demonstrating technical and institutional developments in the individual film industries, and as “performance readings of Shakespeare” that reveal ways in which Shakespeare was understood and represented in the period (2009, xix).

The five German Ibsen adaptations produced under Nazi rule are probably the most notable Ibsen phenomenon in cinema after the silent era. In order to identify historically situated meaning in Ibsen adaptations made in this specific and highly charged sociopolitical environment, Holt argues that it is necessary to construct “discursive frameworks” around the films and a method that combines close reading with research on both production and reception contexts (2019, 1–2).

As both Buchanan and Holt point out, and as also demonstrated in several of the chapters in this volume, many of the issues that might appear to be the most obvious to discuss from a current perspective – e.g. lack of spoken language or fidelity to the source text – did not necessarily dominate contemporary reviews or discourse (Buchanan 2009, xviii; Holt 2019, 2).

In the nineteenth century, Ibsen benefitted from an expanding European literary market and a growing middle class that could join

4

I n the US context, several specific production companies and individuals were involved in adapting Shakespeare and Ibsen simultaneously; Buchanan examines A Winter’s Tale from 1910, one of the seven Shakespeare productions from the period 1910–1916 by the Thanhouser Film Company, which produced three Ibsen films in 1911, including The Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House, examined in this volume by King and Yalgın respectively (Buchanan 2009, 126, 127n38). She also examines Macbeth from 1916, which was produced by the Triangle company the same year as their adaptation of Pillars of Society, discussed

by King in this volume (see Buchanan 2009, 198–200).

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the higher classes as book buyers, a social group that could also see itself in Ibsen’s contemporary plays (Aslaksen 2021, 110). The middle class, which had facilitated an expansion of Ibsen’s market in the late nineteenth century, also became the target audience of the movement to provide cultural uplift for the film medium, now as an addition to the working class and mass audience frequenting film screenings.

Cinema’s interaction with other media is a matter both of formal and aesthetic issues and of cultural and social positioning. In the period from around 1908 to the mid-1910s, several film production companies, including the French companies Film d’Art and PathéFrères, the Italian Film d’Arte Italiana, and American companies such as Vitagraph and, as discussed in this volume by King and Yalgın, Thanhouser and Triangle, used adaptation as a prominent strategy in their explicit quest to gentrify mass culture (see Uricchio and Pearson 1993; see also King 2012). The uplift strategy concerned not only aesthetic cultural hierarchies but also a reformist social and moral agenda, which also included the establishment of censorship practices. While Ibsen provided cinema with the cultural prestige of theatre and literature, he was also associated with unwelcome controversial topics (and a depressing Scandinavian mood). The controversial nature of several of Ibsen’s plays, while not initially standing in the way of their commercial success, was nonetheless a complicating factor in the attempts to use the author for uplift purposes in cinema.

Commercially, the strategy of uplift through adaptation was largely unsuccessful: cinema did not achieve elevated status within existing taste hierarchies; instead, it contributed to fundamental changes in these hierarchies. These changes to the cultural landscape, including new groups of consumers, the destabilisation of cultural hierarchies, and the separation of high and popular culture, had already begun when Ibsen was active as a writer. In particular, the tension in taste hierarchies between the edifying qualities of art versus the ethically ambiguous is echoed in the movement from the moral clarity of Ibsen’s early Romantic historical dramas to the psychological complexity and ambiguity found in his realist plays (Miller 2021, 38).

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The Silent Ibsen Films The first and the last of the surviving American films are adaptations of Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society (Samfundets støtter, 1877), both examined

by King in this volume. The Thanhouser Company production The Pillars of Society (1911) is considered the earliest film adaptation of a work by Henrik Ibsen.5 The Triangle production Pillars of Society (1916) was directed by Raoul Walsh.6 Though made only five years apart, a comparison of the two films reveals some of the immense changes the US film industry underwent during this short period. The 1911 film is a late example of a one-reel adaptation, with an elliptical narrative, the use of frontal acting, and each scene comprising a single static shot, while the four-reel production from 1916, which King positions within the Triangle company’s broader aspirations to produce films articulating highbrow cultural values for middle-class audiences, is an early example of classical Hollywood storytelling and continuity editing.

A Doll’s House (1911), based on Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (1879), was also a Thanhouser production. The company produced three one-reel film adaptations of Ibsen in 1911, the third of which, The Lady from the Sea (based on Fruen fra havet, 1888), is considered lost. The Thanhouser film was the first of four American silent film adaptations of A Doll’s House and was long considered a lost film.7 In his detailed close

5

T he National Library of Norway acquired a 35mm print of the film from the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, from a black-and-white preservation component in 2015. The extant print is about 700 feet long, while the original release print was said to be around 1,000 feet long. See www.thanhouser.org/tcocd/Filmography_files/ajgs8f_.htm, accessed 18 June 2022.

6

n analogue restoration was carried out by the Library of Congress at L’Immagine RitroA vata in Bologna in 2012 from a tinted nitrate positive print. The National Library of Norway acquired an HD scan of the restored print (of 3,691 feet) in 2016. See lccn.loc.gov/91725745, accessed 18 June 2022.

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A 35mm nitrate print of the film was in fact purchased by the Tokyo-based film scholar and collector Hiroshi Komatsu in a Paris flea market as early as 1995. A digital copy in standard definition from a 16mm reduction print was produced in 2017 on the initiative of Ned Thanhouser and the Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc., and the first modern screening of the film took place during the Silent Ibsen conference at the National Library of Norway in Oslo the same year. The film has since been published online and on DVD, along with The Pillars of Society. See Thanhouser 2020, 149. See also www.thanhouser.org/ tcocd/Filmography_files/idh13bruy.htm, accessed 18 June 2022.

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reading, Ali Yalgın examines how the regulation of gender, and specific female ideals, were also central to the strategy of uplift, examined

by King in the previous chapter, and how this is reflected in the Thanhouser film, where the action is explicitly placed in the contemporary context of the early 1910s.

Ghosts (1915), directed by George Nicholls and produced by Majestic, is another American adaptation of a realist play, Ibsen’s Gengangere (1881).8 Whereas actors in the Thanhouser productions released in 1911 were generally uncredited, the emergence of the star system as an attraction for audiences gradually superseded the brand of famous authors.

The anonymity of the actors at the beginning of the decade stands in stark contrast with the emphasis on Henry B. Walthall as a star actor in both Ghosts (1915) and Pillars of Society (1916). The expressive acting style of Walthall functions as an attraction in its own right, and as demonstrated

by Sandberg in his analysis of Ghosts, incorporates a complexity that can be analysed in detail on its own historically specific terms.

A narrative strategy found in all four of the extant American adaptations from the 1910s of Ibsen’s realist plays is the abandonment of the unity of space and time in Ibsen’s drama in favour of linear and more temporally and spatially expansive narratives, in which the past events gradually revealed through Ibsen’s dialogue and retrospective technique are, in the films, dramatised and placed in chronological order. In Ibsen’s works, the spatial dynamics of the “narrow room” (see Aarseth 2000) and the gradual revelation of past events are techniques that not only adhere to the technical conditions of theatre performance but also have narrative implications, functioning as significant sources of tension and meaning: in Pillars of Society, which was adapted in the United States in both 1911 and 1916, time and space have ramifications for Ibsen’s plot in terms of power structures and secrets and the interaction between public and private spaces (see King in this

8

T he National Library of Norway acquired an HD scan of a 16mm print (1,415 feet) from the Library of Congress in 2016. The print is incomplete, according to the records of the Library of Congress. See lccn.loc.gov/91789743, accessed 18 June 2022.

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volume); in Ghosts, from 1915, the gradual revelation of “ghosts” from the past that is central to the play is lost with the normalisation of chronology (see Sandberg in this volume); Yalgın (in this volume) points out that in the 1911 American adaptation of A Doll’s House, a sense of simultaneity in the audience’s engagement with Nora’s secret actions liberates Nora from the criticised melodramatic trope of the protagonist as a woman with a past.

The extant Ibsen silent films also include two adaptations of Ibsen’s “dramatic poem”, Peer Gynt (1867), although substantial portions of both films have been lost. The American film Peer Gynt (1915) was directed by Oscar Apfel and produced by the Morosco Company.9 A German adaptation of the play in two parts was produced in 1918, towards the end of World War I and the Wilhelmine Empire, and released in 1919, after the end of the war and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Peer Gynts Jugend and Peer Gynts Wanderjahre und Tod (1919) were produced by Richard Oswald and directed by Victor Barnowsky, the latter of whom also directed a highly popular stage production of the play at the Lessing Theatre in Berlin in 1913 that featured many of the actors who appear in the film.10 In her comparative analysis of the American and German adaptations, Ellen Rees

9

35mm safety print (3,852 feet) is held at the Library of Congress; two of the original A five reels are missing from the extant print. The preservation print frequently displays badly deteriorated material, with many scenes out of order and even some repetition. The National Library acquired an HD scan from the safety print from the Library of Congress in 2016; in order to make a digital screening copy, certain edits were made to the material, including rearranging some sequences and cutting repeated scenes.

See lccn.loc.gov/91725514, accessed 18 June 2022.

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tinted 35mm nitrate print of an edited, shortened version with Dutch intertitles is held at A the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. About one third of the material screened for German audiences at the premiere of the film, which was shown with an intermission, is preserved.

The original length of the two parts combined was 3,290 metres over ten reels, with a running time of approximately two and a half hours at a projection speed of 18 frames per second. The four reels preserved at the EYE Film Institute have a combined length of 1,215 metres. The intertitles are numbered, which gives an indication of which parts of the film are missing. A 2K digital restoration from the nitrate print took place at ARRI in Munich in 2016; in addition, the National Library of Norway acquired a black-and-white 35mm duplicate negative produced by EYE. See www.filmportal.de/node/34199/ and www.filmportal.de/node/37111/, accessed 18 June 2022.

identifies a strategy in both films that has certain similarities with the unfolding of the backstory in the aforementioned adaptations from the same decade of Ibsen’s realist dramas. Peer’s adventures occurring between Act 3 and Act 4 in Ibsen’s text, mentioned only briefly and in passing, are amplified and extensively dramatised in both of the films.

Rees shows how Ibsen’s play was domesticated for two different national audiences and how popular genre elements and racial stereotypes were applied, with reference to different national histories of race, slavery, and empire, producing films that embrace nationalist ideologies that were originally satirised in Ibsen’s play.

The Swedish adaptation of Terje Vigen (1917), directed by Victor Sjöström and produced by Svenska Biografteatern, is undoubtedly the most famous of the silent Ibsen films and probably the only title that can be considered a well-known film.11 This adaptation of a poem by Ibsen from 1862, which uses direct quotations from the literary work as the basis of its intertitles, is often considered as marking the beginning of the “Golden Age” in Swedish silent cinema of the late 1910s and early 1920s. In his detailed reading of the film, Bo Florin demonstrates how the allegedly “national” cinematic style of the Golden Age draws on, adapts, and imitates a variety of media and that the sources used are fundamentally transnational by nature.

In her analysis of the fragment preserved from the Italian Hedda Gabler (1920), which is based on Ibsen’s 1890 play, directed by Giovanni Pastrone, and produced by the Turin-based film company Itala Film,12

11

T he film has been restored several times over the years, been published on VHS and DVD, and been widely available. The Swedish Film Institute carried out a digital restoration of the film in 2017 from a tinted and toned 35mm nitrate print, and the frame enlargements used as illustrations in this book originate from this restoration.

See www.svenskfilmdatabas.se/sv/item/?type=film&itemid=3428, accessed 18 June 2022.

12

16mm print (199 metres, about a quarter of the film’s original length) with Spanish-lanA guage flash titles (i.e. one frame for each title card) was acquired by the Cineteca del Friuli in Gemona in the 1980s. The National Library of Norway acquired a 2K scan of the 16mm material and produced a digital screening copy with the flash titles stretched out.

In addition to the film materials, the Archivio Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin houses intertitle lists in several languages, plot descriptions, correspondence, and photographs related to the film. (See Cherchi Usai 1986. See also Alovisio 2007).

24

Angela Dalle Vacche establishes an “imaginary dialogue” between Ibsen and the Italian diva film genre within the changing industrial context of Italian cinema in the 1920s. Dalle Vacche examines what she argues are incompatibilities with regard to cultural sensibilities and the gendered personas associated with the genre in relation to the characters in Ibsen’s play. She also performs a close analysis of the stylistic choices of the film, which include acting styles, cinematography, and a highly ornamental set design typical of Italian cinema of the 1910s but on the verge of disappearing when the film was being made.

The latest of the surviving silent Ibsen films – and also the last film that we have become aware of as extant – is Das Haus der Lüge (1926), a German adaptation of Ibsen’s 1884 play Vildanden (The Wild Duck), directed by Lupu Pick and produced by Rex-Film.13 In his close reading, Thor Holt argues that the film should be considered a forgotten piece in the history of the German Kammerspielfilm of the 1920s.

By retaining a narrative structure similar to that of Ibsen’s text – in contrast with the American adaptations in the 1910s of the author’s realist plays – the past again becomes a dominant force in the story; Holt argues that the film can be read as an interwar trauma narrative, where the painful past of the First World War, though never made explicit, is indicated throughout.

Ibsen and Intermediality Another aspect that varies between different national contexts and audience groups is the latter’s familiarity with Ibsen’s works (see Törnqvist 1999, 15). While Ibsen was performed in commercial theatres in Scandinavia, he was associated more exclusively with avant-garde traditions in

13

35mm nitrate print (2,227 metres) with flash titles is held at the Deutsche Kinemathek A in Berlin. The print has probably been merged together from different sources intended for distribution for different national audiences and seems to have been produced long after the 1920s, as indicated by the diverging aspect ratios between the moving images and the intertitles and the insert of Hedwig’s ring appearing twice in the film but with the inscription in two different languages (see Holt in this volume). A 4K digital restoration based on the nitrate print was carried out by the National Library in 2019.

See www.filmportal.de/node/9417/, accessed 18 June 2022.

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other parts of Europe. In many cases, the films were likely to have played for an audience largely unfamiliar with the source text, again complicating the notion of fidelity as a central question in a historical sense. Yalgın claims that Ibsen was largely considered a “niche” dramatist for the mass audience that went to see the American films. King argues that accessibility to Ibsen by an audience unfamiliar with the author was perceived as a much more important factor for the success of a film adaptation than fidelity.14 The poem Terje Vigen, on the other hand, was widely read in the Scandinavian context, and Holt (in this volume) points out that the German bourgeois audience at the premiere of Das Haus der Lüge was probably also familiar with the Ibsen play the film was based on.

Ibsen’s dramas were initially presented in two coexisting media forms – published books and stage performances (see Fulsås and Rem 2021, xvii; Aarseth 2000, 38–39; Törnqvist 1999, 186). Film adaptations refer to the literary text, to performance traditions in the theatre, and sometimes even to specific productions (see King, Yalgın, Sandberg, Rees, and Holt in this volume). As shown by Florin in his examination of the 1917 Swedish adaptation of Terje Vigen, they can also refer to specific book illustrations and books as visual objects, which thus serve as an additional intermedial layer (see also Wærp 2018, 14). And, as shown in the newsreel on “Ibsen memories”, the films often also trade on Ibsen’s status as a celebrity and brand established by media representations of the author, such as photographic portraits and press articles (see Larsen 2013, 120–69). Ibsen as an authorial figure is reflected in the opening title card of Pillars of Society from 1916, which describes the cultural significance of the playwright’s works (see King in this volume), and at the beginning of Ghosts from 1915, where a “live” portrait of

14

In the United States, Ibsen was well-known in Scandinavian and German immigrant communities (in fact, the majority of the earliest US stage productions of Ibsen were performed in German and Norwegian rather than English), showing that familiarity with Ibsen related not only to class distinctions but also to cultural identity (see Krouk 2021, 231–32). The reviewer of the American Peer Gynt of 1915 in the New York-based Norwegian-language newspaper Nordisk Tidende describes the film as a “parody” of Ibsen and demonstrates his knowledge of the play by pointing out the many liberties taken with Ibsen’s plot (Nordisk Tidende 1915, 13).

26

Ibsen “posed” by an actor is shown before the action begins (see Sandberg in this volume), echoing the use of portraits of the author in the frontispieces of certain book publications (Figs. 2a-b and 3a–b).

Although discarded in the finished film, the prologue found in the original screenplay of Terje Vigen, as described by Florin in this volume, similarly showed Ibsen at his desk and established him as the storyteller.

Figs. 2a–b. Ghosts (1915). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Figs. 3a–b. Frontispiece (featuring photographic portrait of “Henrik Ibsen about 1879”) and title page of a book containing A Doll’s House and Ghosts, translated and with an introduction by William Archer, published in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1911. From the collection of the National Library of Norway.

27

But if we approach Ibsen solely as a literary source for the specific films examined in this book, complexities also arise. Engelstad’s assertion in his discussion on the relationship between Ibsen and cinema that Ibsen is regarded as a “champion of realist theatre” (2021, 177) is confirmed by the dominant discourse on the author and by the majority of the extant silent films, but not all of them. Terje Vigen is, of course, a poem with idealist and nationalist connotations. Peer Gynt was labelled a “dramatic poem” by Ibsen and written as a play for reading and for the book market rather than for performance (although it became a highly popular stage play after the turn of the century). In many ways, the play represents an opposite to the template associated with Ibsen’s realist drama, in terms of not only its expansive use of space and time, a form that Raymond Williams, referring to the play, later claimed “became technically possible only in film” (1993, 76), but also its high literary style of dialogue and monologue in verse. The contemporary dramas from the 1870s onwards represented a reinvention of Ibsen as a writer quite late in his career and certainly secured his international renown. While Pillars of Society, adapted in the US in 1911 and 1916, is viewed as the beginning of Ibsen’s realist phase, The Wild Duck, adapted in Germany in 1926, signals the move into symbolist and self-reflexive plays at the end of Ibsen’s career.15 The visual imagination of Ibsen, who early on had aspired to be a painter, most famously found in his detailed stage directions, set design, and props, has also been associated with a “cinematic” or “photographic” sensibility (see Dahl and Bastiansen 2003, 134; see also King and Dalle Vacche in this volume). Connections between detailed sensory and visual description and character psychology are, of course, also a feature associated with nineteenth-century literary realism and naturalism across genres, which in Ibsen is supplemented with rich symbolic imagery.

Joan Driscoll Lynch has argued that Ibsen had an indirect influence on

15

I f we consider another intermedial transposition in the form of the many composers using Ibsen’s works as settings during the nineteenth century (Heise, Delius, Wolf, Rung, Elling, Sjögren, Lange-Müller, and of course, Edvard Grieg), their songs leave the impression of Ibsen as an author of historical dramas and melancholy love poems (see Grinde 2017).

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silent cinema in the employment of “dramatic techniques” in the form of visual metaphors connected to character psychology and the use of landscape, examining Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands from 1919 as a particularly pertinent example of thematic and stylistic association (Lynch 1986). An additional factor is the intermediality integrated into Ibsen’s works, i.e. the other art forms and media described on the page, mentioned or shown on stage, and in some cases subsequently displayed on the film screen: painting, sculpture, music, dance, books, architecture, tableaux vivants (Moi 2006, 105–43; Chen 2015, 367; Helland 1997).

Situating film adaptations historically includes acknowledging the centrality of intermedial concepts in early discourse on film. An intermedial approach to these films, as demonstrated especially by King, Yalgın, Sandberg, Holt, and Florin in this volume, encompasses their relationship to Ibsen’s source text and the presence of other media, such as theatre, photography, painting, or books, within the diegesis of both film and play, but also a wider media environment consisting of intertexts and other medialities, including reviews and trade press discourse, promotional materials, book illustrations, and more.16 Attempts to situate Ibsen in the discourse on cinema and other media involve two recurring associations: placing Ibsen in relation to the subsequent development of the narrative and stylistic conventions of cinema, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, connecting him with the explosive nineteenth-century visual culture that was developing alongside his writings, with cinema as one of its late products. In the introduction to an edited collection on Ibsen and contemporary visual culture, Erik Østerud argues that new ways of seeing associated with emerging media

16

T hough the lack of spoken dialogue is a fundamental issue in the silent Ibsen adaptations, silent cinema had an acoustic dimension in its exhibition contexts, most significantly through musical accompaniment. In the US, Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite was among the works most frequently used as film accompaniment (Altman 2004, 293), and the Morosco production of Peer Gynt, examined by Rees in this volume, which premiered on Broadway with an orchestra of fifty instruments, was one of the first instances of an orchestral setting created for a particular film release. The musical score, by Canadian composer George W. Beynon, combined Grieg’s music with a number of other songs and compositions and was debated and criticised in the contemporary trade press (ibid., 294, 346–48; Luz 1915, 143).

29

technologies can serve as relevant frameworks for Ibsen’s realist theatre, as well as for the themes and notions of human psychology found in his plays (1997, 9–10). Although some chapters in Østerud’s book analyse Ibsen’s work directly (see e.g. Risum 1997), the majority of the contributions are concerned with establishing the broader context or continuities that Ibsen was taking part in or preceding (see e.g. Tybjerg 1997).

Hans Fredrik Dahl and Henrik G. Bastiansen argue that Ibsen’s contemporary dramas reveal extensive insights into contemporary media and present an exposé of several of Ibsen’s plays that thematise contemporary media and communications phenomena (2003, 119–21): Peer Gynt, referencing modern steamships, the emerging tourism industry, and newspapers (ibid., 122–23); Pillars of Society, providing a “sociological analysis” of a variety of communication forms and media in a small local community, including the local press, intercontinental telegrams, and the competition between steamship and railroad traffic (ibid., 123–24); in Ghosts, the growing proliferation of printed publications providing access to new ways of thinking (ibid., 126; see also Sandberg 2000, 327–28). Anders Skare Malvik has argued that a media perspective on Ibsen can help illuminate neglected political aspects of his plays, examining how An Enemy of the People, as well as Pillars of Society and Ghosts, respond to the rise of the newspaper industry in the late nineteenth century and the new power relations and forms of social memory produced by a new media culture (2015, 4–11).

Ibsen’s plays are thus preoccupied with many of the modern media and technologies of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Likewise, the plays are full of ekphrastic reference to other established art forms.

Ibsen’s dramatic universe remains, however, a world without cinema.

Although Ibsen’s last two plays were written in the latter half of the 1890s, there is no evidence that he ever visited a film screening, and as Mark Sandberg has pointed out, there are few similarities between Ibsen’s plays from this decade and the aesthetics of the early cinema of attractions (2006, 327–328). Ibsen’s penultimate play, John Gabriel Borkman from 1896, employs a form of “montage” technique, where the acts of the play are structured as one continuous action in which 30

each act demonstratively begins at the moment where the previous ended but in a different room, similar to the spatial strategies of continuity editing in cinema (Sandberg 2006, 333–336; Dahl and Bastiansen 2003, 135), of which early variants can be found in films like Ghosts from 1915 and the 1916 production of Pillars of Society.

Ibsen’s interest in photography is most fully explored in The Wild Duck from 1884 (see e.g. Lien 2005), and Holt in this volume demonstrates how the German film adaptation of the play displaces and reframes photography, its processes of staging and retouching, and themes relating to truth and illusion, in the explosive visual culture, intellectual context, and sociopolitical atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. In addition to being frequently photographed himself, Ibsen used photography as a metaphor in his writings of the 1850s as a theatre and literary critic. The first instance of Ibsen using photographic metaphor in his literary work occurs in Peer Gynt in 1867, when the Thin Person, soon revealed to be the devil, refers to the process of turning a negative photographic image into a positive one as a form of purgatory. A soul whose life can be compared to an inverted or negative image can, through a painful process, be turned into a positive one and ultimately be saved.

Peer’s problem, according to the Thin Person, is that he has “half-erased himself” (“visket halvt sig ud”) (Ibsen 1995, 165–66; Ibsen 2007, 251). It is not necessarily Peer’s moral transgressions but his self-erasure which makes it impossible to save him (see also Larsen 2013, 205).

Marginality and Archive The question of erasure is also pertinent to the material history of the silent Ibsen films. The filmography of silent Ibsen adaptations found at the end of the book is, for the most part, a list of lost and incomplete films. A recent estimate suggests that more than two thirds of the films from the silent era have been lost due to neglect, natural decay, or the intentional destruction of negatives and prints (Cherchi Usai 2019, 206–8). What we know of the films considered to be lost is mainly found in non-filmic sources, usually on paper, a far more stable carrier than nitrate film. Occasionally, descriptions of scenes missing from the extant prints can be found in reviews or other written sources (see 31

Sandberg in this volume). While the analysis of historical stage performances relies on such sources almost exclusively, specific challenges are posed by the partially available documents of silent film fragments, their incompleteness creating obstacles for comparative readings.

Angela Dalle Vacche (in this volume) makes a point about how the film fragment provides barriers to accessing, enjoying, and evaluating a film, both as a historical document and as an artwork.

The two silent adaptations of Peer Gynt, one from the United States in 1915, the other released in Germany in 1919, not only represent different approaches to Ibsen’s play informed by specific national and cultural contexts. They are also two “half-erased” films, illustrating the different conditions in which films disappear and how fragments are made. The jumbled fragments of the American film from 1915 seems to be a product of the arbitrariness of physical deterioration.

Two of the reels are missing completely, and some of the scenes that are extant are barely visible. The African-American musicians providing entertainment in a lengthy sequence at Peer’s southern plantation, not found in the original play but added to the film, are now about to disappear from the story again and are only partly discernible within the visible decay of the image (Fig. 4). The erasure of almost two thirds of the German film, on the other hand, seems to be the product of deliberate shortening by a distributor or exhibitor.

While Ibsen’s works are positioned at the forefront of the history of literature, most of the silent Ibsen films have been neglected and forgotten in the various national film historical contexts in which they were originally produced (see e.g. Holt 2019, xix). Buchanan contends that the silent film adaptations of Shakespeare are positioned at the peripheries of two intersecting histories – Shakespearean performance and film history – and that this dual fringe position, which certainly also applies to silent Ibsen films, is interesting in the way it can illuminate cultural hierarchies (2009, 7–8). The project of acquiring these films and attempting to provide a scholarly context for them is caught in the dynamics between canonisation and neglect, driven by the logic of the great national author but pointing towards forgotten international cinema.

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Fig. 4. Peer Gynt (1915). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

This book, then, is a collection of historically situated close readings of the nine silent Ibsen film adaptations that to our knowledge are extant in varying degrees of integrity. Both the films themselves and the selection of films are fragmentary, incomplete manifestations of broader histories. The value of the case study in article or chapter form, which often dominates the field of adaptation studies, has been debated (see e.g. Leitch 2017, 8) as in itself often providing fragmentary and insular insights. A more comprehensive history of silent Ibsen adaptations that includes the twenty films considered lost would probably construct its historical narrative from non-filmic, extra-textual sources to a greater extent rather than close readings. Nevertheless, an important aim of this book is to benefit from the newfound availability of these particular films and study all the remaining moving images from silent Ibsen adaptations, placing them in relation to each other and in broader histories of cinema and Ibsen reception.

This book is also initiated and published within a specific institutional context, that of the National Library of Norway as a cultural 33

heritage institution, and more specifically, the site of Norway’s national film archive. Film archives usually have mandates based on national and regional delineations but also contain collections that reflect how cinema was circulated across national borders. Most national film archives have a large international film collection, which typically, but not exclusively, includes films that have been screened and distributed domestically, and which as such are also reflective of a kind of national film culture. Most of the silent Ibsen films were never shown in Norway. They belong to a category of acquisition called Norvegica extranea, which refers to works published outside of Norway and relating to Norway and Norwegians. (These cultural categories are, of course, not sharply defined, nor entirely unproblematic; see Takle 2009, 144–45).

The term was coined for books but can be used to reflect on the institution’s collection and its mission, and remind us of the transnational, collaborative, and multimodal nature of film production and the many forms of cultural exchange that are involved, whether we are referring to cast and crew members, filming locations, or literary sources.17 One as yet unexplored issue relating to the broader history of silent Ibsen film adaptations is copyright. While the criteria for what constitutes an adaptation, particularly with regard to broader notions of intertextuality and textual dialogism, has been the subject of extensive academic debate (see Leitch 2017, 7), from an industrial viewpoint, the question of whether a work is an adaptation or not is arguably first and foremost a legal issue.

The concepts of copyright, and even authorship, were largely unresolved during the early years of cinema. Legislation differed from one country to the next, and many countries had no copyright laws for cinema at all. It is likely that most, or even all, of the films examined in

17

T he silent Ibsen adaptations have been included in the National Library’s film archive but they are also part of the library’s extensive Ibsen collection, which, along with Ibsen’s original manuscripts and personal papers, includes book editions in numerous languages, theatre programmes, posters, and other printed materials, together with a large audiovisual collection of recorded stage performances, films, broadcasting, music, and photographs. See www.nb.no/forskning/ibsen.

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this book, with the exception of Terje Vigen, were produced without the approval of the Ibsen estate. In a 1913 interview, Ibsen’s son, Sigurd Ibsen, stated that he was aware that several of his father’s works had “already been filmed in foreign countries without asking [his] permission”; he also referred to having “no legal means in [his] power to prohibit this” (Exhibitor’s Times 1913, 13). Interestingly, Ibsen did not seem to view this as a serious problem and instead, in line with other contemporary discourses on film adaptation, emphasised the democratising potential of film across national, cultural, and social divisions, and the opportunity to provide new audiences access to Henrik Ibsen’s works: If my father’s plays can be given […] to the masses, so much the better. A good film drama can give them a conception of a literary work they otherwise would have no idea of, as the prices of the regular theatre do not permit them to attend. The masses should not be denied this privilege.

(Exhibitors’ Times 1913, 13)

Ibsen nevertheless negotiated film rights with several major international film production companies, such as Pathé-Frères and Nordisk Film, and reached an agreement in 1913 with Svenska Biografteatern (the company that eventually produced Terje Vigen in 1917) to make film adaptations of a series of historical and “national” dramas (Fru Inger til Østraat / Lady Inger of Oestraat, 1854, Gildet på Solhaug / The Feast at Solhaug, 1855, Hærmendene på Helgeland / The Vikings of Helgeland, 1858, and Kongs-Emnerne / The Pretenders, 1863), projects which never were realised (see Aftenposten 1913, 1; see also Florin in this volume).18 In 1914, Ibsen claimed that he had no legal right to hinder the production of adaptations outside Scandinavia, but that he could obstruct both production and distribution within Scandinavian territories (Aftenposten 1914, 3). Apart from Terje Vigen and Das Haus

18

T here were also other unrealised silent Ibsen films. An intriguing example is French impressionist filmmaker Germaine Dulac’s script for a film adaptation of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, written in the mid-1920s and providing an additional context for Ibsen adaptations: the French association between Ibsen and avant-garde symbolist theatre, both of which served as major sources of inspiration for Dulac’s modernist cinema (Williams 2014, 35, 41, 238n112).

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der Lüge, the films presented in this book were, according to censorship records, not screened in Norway. Whether this was a consequence of the efforts by the Ibsen estate is thus far unknown. By 1925, Sigurd Ibsen seemed to have a different impression of his legal rights; after learning about the Italian Hedda Gabler made five years earlier (examined by Dalle Vacche in this volume), he turned to the production company, asked for 20,000 lire in compensation, and demanded that the film not be shown again (Alovisio 2007, 195). According to the preserved file cards of the Norwegian censorship board, the silent Ibsen film adaptations that were screened in Norway in addition to Terje Vigen and Das Haus der Lüge include the following: A Doll’s House (Maurice Tourneur, Famous Players-Lasky, USA, 1918); The Pillars of Society (Rex Wilson, Great Britain, 1920), Nora (Berthold Viertel, UFA, Germany, 1922), and A Doll’s House (Charles Bryant, Nazimova Productions, USA, 1922, the latter shown in Norway in 1925) (Figs. 5a–c).

During Henrik Ibsen’s career, in the decades preceding the production of silent Ibsen films, the lack of international copyright protection had led to a number of unauthorised translations, book publications, and theatre performances, as well as heavily adapted and censored versions of his plays. While entailing substantial financial losses and a lack of control for Ibsen, recent research also demonstrates that these many unauthorised iterations contributed to the wide dissemination of his work and developing the author’s success and influence (see D’Amico 2014, 22–25; D’Amico 2021, 154–56). Thus, the lack of copyright permission and the many liberties taken with the source texts Figs. 5a–c. File cards from the Norwegian film censorship board, Statens Filmkontroll for a) the U.S. production A Doll’s House (1918), dated 15 November 1919, and released in Norway as Nora, now considered lost; b) the British production Pillars of Society (1920), dated 8 September 1922, and released in Norway as Samfundets støtter (also considered lost), and c) the German Das Haus der Lüge (1926), dated 29 October 1926, released in Norway as Vildanden, and examined by Holt in this volume. The file card for the 1918 production of A Doll’s House lists three short cuts of 12 metres altogether. The card is signed by Fernanda Nissen, who was one of Norway’s first film censors, as well as an active feminist, socialist, theatre critic, and an admirer of Ibsen’s play. The scenes listed on the card as having been removed are: 1) “The masked ball at Stenborg’s (“Maskeraden hos Stenborgs”), 2) “The children in bed” (“Barna i sengen”), and 3) “Nora with her children” (“Nora hos barna sine”). While party scenes were regularly cut by Norwegian film censors, it is less obvious why the two scenes featuring Nora’s children were omitted. From the collection of the National Library of Norway.

36

37

that are typical of the silent Ibsen films also can be seen as continuing the long history of dissemination of Ibsen’s work beyond the author’s control in the preceding decades. * In her autobiography, Asta Nielsen, one of the leading and most influential international stars of silent cinema, gives an account of preparing for her first stage audition at the age of fourteen, in Copenhagen in 1895 (Nielsen 1945, 79–80). When given the opportunity to choose a scene to perform, the young girl suggested a section from Ibsen’s Brand, one of her favourite plays. Her tutor was surprised upon realising that she had not learned any of the lines of the scene because, as Nielsen asserts, she wanted to play the emotions of the scene, silently, words being unnecessary. Her tutor rejected this proposition and gave her other scenes to prepare instead. Fifty years later, Nielsen reflected that her “first stumbling steps in the silent art” that she eventually would master would have occurred during this audition in 1895, as the cinema was emerging as a medium, had she been allowed to follow her instincts. If so, it would perhaps also represent the first fumbling steps of a silent representation of Ibsen – where the lack of spoken dialogue should not be considered a technical deficiency but a deliberate choice, signalling its own range of possibilities of expression, emotion, and meaning, soon to be explored in the films examined in this book. In 1925, Nielsen had the opportunity to perform Ibsen silently in the leading role of a German film adaptation of Hedda Gabler, one of the many films that are considered lost.

There is still much to discover about the films in this collection and the broader phenomenon of the Ibsen silent film. Hopefully, the chapters in this book will provide a starting point for including these fascinating films in their respective national and transnational film histories and in the complex histories of Ibsen reception, which should not be regarded as separate fields but in terms of interaction and exchange within broader comparative frameworks (see D’Amico 2014, 5–6). It is also hoped that prints of other silent Ibsen films are still waiting to be discovered and identified.

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Oslo: Norwegian Film Institute.

Hanssen, Jens-Morten. 2018. Ibsen on the German Stage 1876–1918: A Quantitative Study. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.

Helland, Frode. 1997. “Når vi døde vågner og kunstverket ‘Opstandelsens dag’.”

In Den optiske fordring: Pejlinger i den visuelle kultur omkring Henrik Ibsens forfatterskab, edited by Erik Østerud, 56–71. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

———. 2015. Ibsen in Practice: Relational Readings of Performance, Cultural Encounters and Power. Methuen Drama Engage. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.

Helland, Frode, and Julie Holledge. 2016. Ibsen between Cultures.

Acta Ibseniana 12. Oslo: Novus Publishing (Novus forlag).

Holledge, Julie, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, and Joanne Tompkins. 2016.

A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions. Uxbridge/London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Holt, Thor. 2019. “Far from Home: Ibsen through the Camera Lens in the Third Reich.” PhD diss., University of Oslo.

Hutcheon, Linda. 2013. A Theory of Adaptation. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Ibsen, Henrik. 1995. Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, translated by John Northam.

Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

———. 2007. Henrik Ibsens skrifter 5: Episk Brand; Brand; Peer Gynt, edited by Vigdis Ystad. Oslo: Aschehoug & University of Oslo.

Isaksen, Azadeh Mazloumsaki. 2021. “Ibsen in Iran: Dariush Mehrjui’s Transposition of Et dukkehjem (A Doll’s House) and Gengangere (Ghosts) to the Screen.” PhD diss. UiT the Arctic University of Norway.

King, Rob. 2012. “The Discourse of Art in Early Film, or, Why Not Rancière?” In A Companion to Early Cinema, edited by André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo, 141–62. Malden/Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.

Krouk, Dean. 2021. “American Ibsens.” In Ibsen in Context, edited by Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem, 231–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bibliography

Larsen, Peter. 2013. Ibsen og fotografene: 1800-tallets visuelle kultur.

Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.

Leitch, Thomas. 2017. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, 1–20. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lien, Sigrid. 2005. “The Wild Duck and Other Stories. The Discourse of ­ hotography in Nineteenth Century Norway.” In Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal P of Art History 74(2):82–95.

Luz, Ernst. 1915. “Unsatisfactory Music for ‘Peer Gynt’.” Motion Picture News, 2 October:143.

Malvik, Anders Skare. 2015. “The Advent of Noo-politics in Ibsen’s Problem Plays.” Ibsen Studies 15(1):3–39.

Miller, Derek. 2021. “Realism.” In Ibsen in Context, edited by Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem, 37–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Moi, Toril. 2006. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art,Theater, Philosophy.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nielsen, Asta. 1945. Den tiende muse. I: Vejen til filmen.

Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel.

Nordisk Tidende. 1915. “Ibsen paa film.” 23 September:13. Østerud, Erik. 1997. “Introduktion.” In Den optiske fordring: Pejlinger i den visuelle kultur omkring Henrik Ibsens forfatterskab, edited by Erik Østerud, 9–13.

Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

Rees, Ellen. 2021. “Mass Media and Cultural Reception.” In Ibsen in Context, edited by Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem, 264–71.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Rees, Ellen, and Thor Holt. 2022. “Entanglements of Adaptation, Allegory, and Reception: Jaws and An‌ Enemy‌ of‌ the‌ People.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 14(1):1–14.

Risum, Janne. 1997. “Om blomster og stier hos Ibsen og i Kabuki.” In Den optiske fordring: Pejlinger i den visuelle kultur omkring Henrik Ibsens forfatterskab, edited by Erik Østerud, 72–88. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

Rønning, Helge. 2000. “From Snorre to Dante’s Peak.” In Ibsen on Screen, edited

by Jan Erik Holst and Astrid Sæther, 73–87. Oslo: Norwegian Film Institute.

Sandberg, Mark B. 2006. “John Gabriel Borkman’s Avant-Garde Continuity.”

Modern Drama 49(3):327–47.

Takle, Marianne. 2009. Det nasjonale i Nasjonalbiblioteket. Oslo: Novus forlag.

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Bibliography

Thanhouser, Ned. 2020. “The Thanhouser Studio Filmography: Analysis and Extant Prints.” In Provenance and Early Cinema, edited by Joanne Bernardini, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, 143–54.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Törnqvist, Egil. 1999. Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre: Studies in TV Presentation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Tybjerg, Casper. 1997. “Illusionens besjæling.” In Den optiske fordring: Pejlinger i den visuelle kultur omkring Henrik Ibsens forfatterskab, edited by Erik Østerud, 89–101. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

Uricchio, William, and Roberta Pearson. 1993. Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Vardac, Nicholas. 1949. Stage to Screen:Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Vonderau, Patrick. 2017. “Re-Inventing the Nation: Peer Gynt (1919).”

Unpublished paper held at the “Silent Ibsen” conference at the National Library of Norway in Oslo, June 2017.

Wærp, Lisbeth P. 2015. “The Play-Within-the-Film: Peer Gynt in Skjoldbjærg’s En folkefiende (A Public Enemy, 2004).” Nordlit 34:411–25.

———. 2018. “Nature, Pathos, Heroism: Victor Sjöström’s Silent Film Adaptation (1917) of Ibsen’s ‘Terje Vigen’ (1862).” Ibsen Studies 18(1):1–32.

Willams, Raymond. 1993. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. London: Hogarth.

Williams, Tami. 2014. Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations.

Urbana/Springfield: University of Illinois Press.

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2. “To Familiarise the Lowly”: The Cultural Politics of Adaptation The Pillars of Society (Thanhouser, 1911) Pillars of Society (Raoul Walsh, Triangle, 1916) Rob King

The impossibility of filming Ibsen is a commonplace in Ibsen studies (Chen 2015). One of the important things about this collection, then, is that it permits a discursive archaeology of that commonplace. The Raoul Walsh-directed Pillars of Society, released by the Triangle Film Corporation in September 1916, occupies a key place in that archaeology. It was not quite the American cinema’s first feature-length adaptation of Ibsen – that honour belongs to the 1915 five-reeler Ghosts, about which more below – but it was released at a moment when the difficulties of filming Ibsen were very much in the air, with the Triangle film provoking different opinions on this issue (see also Sandberg in this volume). For some, the film was proof of cinema’s capacities for cultural democratisation (“familiariz[ing] the lowly with great examples of leading dramatists”, as one reviewer put it), while for others it was a fuddy-duddy gesture to an outdated model of culture (“full of old-fashioned frocks and old-fashioned methods”, as another opined) (Harrison 1916b; Johnson 1916a). This chapter, accordingly, uses the film to unearth the terms within which Ibsen’s supposed “impossibility” came to be cast in the critical discourse of the era, and it argues that that impossibility, in America at least, cannot really be understood outside of debates about the cultural politics of cinema as a mass medium – that is, debates about how cinema might function in society and, thus, what cinematic mass culture could or should be.

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By and large this is not the way the Ibsen “problem” has been discussed. As Eirik Frisvold Hanssen has argued, Ibsen adaptations have tended to “generate essentialist arguments on the differences between cinema and theater”, a tendency dating to the earliest film theorists such as Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg, both of whom, writing at the time of Pillars’ release, identified Ibsen as a cinematic no-no (2017, 158; see also Sandberg in this volume). It was Münsterberg’s contention, for instance, that film’s specific “dramatic qualities” as a medium of action made it unsuited to the “subtler shades of motives” of Ibsen’s work (1916, 219), while Lindsay declared Ibsen an artist of “the spoken word” and thus an impossibility for the silent screen: “At the close of every act of the dramas of this Norwegian one might inscribe on the curtain ‘This the magnificent motion picture cannot achieve’” (1915, 152). More recent scholarship on Ibsen adaptations has tended to draw similar conclusions, albeit for different reasons – as, for instance, in the case of Ibsen historian Asbjørn Aarseth, who pitches his argument on the “irreducible distinction” between theatrical and cinematic constructions of narrative space (2000, 43). Yet behind these surface variations, what unites these essentialist comparisons is a common tendency to bracket off any consideration of the actual motives driving Ibsen adaptations and to beg the question of whether a formal comparison is the only valid framework of evaluation in the first place. What risks getting occluded is an entirely separate dimension of Ibsen’s impossibility that this chapter seeks to recover – an impossibility located not primarily in the aesthetics of Ibsen’s stagecraft, which cinema supposedly could not approximate, but rather within then-current endeavours to put cinematic mass culture in the service of “high” art, which Ibsen’s work risked derailing. The better to see this, though, it will be important to begin by clarifying the motivations and investments that led to the Triangle release in the first place.

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“Made for the masses with an appeal to the classes”: The Triangle Film Corporation and Arnoldian Cultural Politics The Triangle Film Corporation had been formed by Harry Aitken in the summer of 1915 from a merger between the production companies and personnel that sided with Aitken when he was ousted as president of the Mutual Film Corporation that June: Aitken’s own Majestic Motion Picture Company, where D. W. Griffith had been employed as director and supervisor since 1913, and Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann’s New York Motion Picture organisation, a holding firm for both Thomas Ince’s Kay-Bee studios and Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company. Hence, Triangle: Griffith, Ince, and Sennett, a roster of producing talent through which Aitken sought to produce motion pictures that would articulate exclusive “highbrow” cultural values for genteel middle-class patrons without sacrificing the industry’s established working- and lower-middle-class audience base. As Adam Kessel, appointed Triangle’s vice president, put it: “The pictures will be high class enough to play in two-dollar houses … [but] will also be suitable to play in houses catering to the masses.” In sum, “They will be made for the masses with an appeal to the classes” (Motion Picture News, 1915a). Following a precedent already established by W. W. Hodkinson’s Famous Players company, the Triangle venture drew in particular on the cultural authority of the legitimate stage and literary fiction as entertainment for respectable middle-class audiences. As another of Kessel’s early announcements explained: “The Ince and Griffith[-supervised] pictures will be picturizations of the better plays and novels … [for which] we have already engaged some of the most famous theatrical stars, and are signing up more,” including such stage worthies as Frank Keenan and Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree (Motion Picture News, 1915b). The corporate mandate here was an Arnoldian one, in keeping with the broader influence of Matthew Arnold’s 1869 Culture and Anarchy on genteel cultural politics during this era. It had been Arnold’s celebrated recommendation that culture “seeks … to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere”; and it was this injunction that Triangle sought to accommodate to the commercial dynamics of cinematic mass culture, with 45

the medium’s top director-producers recruited as tastemakers in this project of high cultural dissemination (1971, 56).

The decision to adapt Ibsen’s Pillars of Society, first published in 1877, did not, however, originate with the Triangle idea. The film was initially produced in the summer of 1915 as part of an earlier scheme of Aitken’s along similar lines, the Mutual Masterpictures series of four- and five-reel prestige features launched that March. Prepared as a follow-up to a Masterpicture version of Ghosts – the film that claims the title of American cinema’s first feature-length Ibsen adaptation (see Sandberg in this volume) – Pillars of Society was eventually shelved for over a year as a result of the corporate reorganisation from which Triangle emerged. Yet the delay in the film’s release might, on first blush, be seen as propitious, so well suited was Ibsen’s work to the cultural project Triangle claimed for itself. The decade or so following Ibsen’s death in 1906 had marked a significant re-evaluation of the playwright’s work in America: the charges of moral repulsiveness with which his prose dramas were first greeted in the late 1880s and 1890s – when his work was disparaged for its appeal to “wild-eyed, long-haired” intellectuals – were giving way to regret that the extraordinary social purposiveness of his work, in consequence, remained too little understood (Schanke 1988, 21). “Ibsen can no longer be denied,” thundered critic J. G. Huneker, writing on the occasion of the playwright’s death. “He is too big a man to be locked up in a library as if he were full of vague forbidden wickedness” (as cited in Schanke 1988, 44). Many of Ibsen’s most prolific interpreters in America – actors Mary Shaw, Mrs Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Alla Nazimova – routinely echoed that sentiment, defending the Norwegian’s work as an articulation of a reformist social agenda that cried out for a mass audience. By the mid-1910s, a number of film critics began to take up a complementary refrain, seeing in Ibsen a corollary possibility for transforming the mass medium of cinema into a medium of artistic “purpose” – none more so than Moving Picture World critic Louis Reeves Harrison, who, in a series of articles begun the year before Pillars’ production, repeatedly cited Ibsen as a model for what he variously called “plays of purpose”, “problem plays”, and a cinema of 46

Fig. 1. The opening title card to Triangle’s Pillars of Society (1916). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“social criticism” (1914a; 1914b; 1916a). Nor was Aitken alone in answering that call, which presaged a short-lived spate of US Ibsen adaptations in the mid-to-late 1910s that included a Morosco version of Peer Gynt (1915) (see Rees in this volume), a Bluebird adaptation of A Doll’s House (1917), and Hedda Gabler (1917) produced by Frank Powell Producing Corp. and distributed by Mutual (see the filmography in this volume for a complete overview).

Triangle’s release of Pillars of Society nonetheless stands out in this context as a seemingly ideal confluence of a company whose explicit corporate mandate was the mass dissemination of high culture and the work of a playwright whose recent, albeit still contested, admission to those portals had been accompanied by calls for greater public awareness. “He is considered by many the greatest modern playwright,” the film’s opening title card affirmed, appropriating Ibsen’s hard-won cultural pedigree for Triangle’s mission of highbrow cultural dissemination (Fig. 1). Ten years after the playwright’s death, the time, it would seem, was ripe for Ibsen on film. What light, though, might Triangle’s Pillars of Society shed on how this endeavour went wrong?

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“Then the curtains shall be drawn back”: Ibsen’s Dramaturgy and the Narrative Feature Film As an opening sally, I want first to frame this issue within the essentialising terms by which Ibsen adaptations have usually been assessed, examining Triangle’s film in view of Ibsen’s supposed intractability for cinematic translation. Here, I return to Aarseth (2000), who, in an aforementioned essay in which Pillars of Society – the play, not the film – figures prominently, argues for a “constitutional difference” separating the dramaturgical innovations of Ibsen’s prose cycle, a twelve-play series of which Pillars was the first, from the storytelling conventions of cinema. Again, some context: Pillars of Society, we know, was the play on which Ibsen worked the longest (over two years, between 1875 and 1877) in his endeavour to achieve a scenography suited to his investigation of the ethical conflicts of bourgeois life.

That scenography, moreover, came to be centred on the confines of a single room (what Aarseth calls the scenography of the “narrow room”). Ibsen’s drafts and revisions for Pillars of Society reveal his eventual decision to use the Bernicks’ living-room set for all four acts, and his two subsequent prose plays, A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881), show Ibsen winding the scope of the action tighter still, as the dramatis personae shrinks from nineteen (in Pillars) to seven to five, and the length of the action from five days to two to a single night (Cardullo 2011, 369).

What makes Pillars’ scenography unique in this trajectory, however, is the importance retained for exterior space, courtesy of a plateglass wall at the back of the Bernicks’ drawing room. The overall scenic design is painstakingly described in the play’s opening pages: SCENE. – A spacious garden-room in the BERNICKS’ house. In the foreground on the left is a door leading to BERNICK’S business room; farther back in the same wall, a similar door. In the middle of the opposite wall is a large entrance-door, which leads to the street. The wall in the background is almost wholly composed of plate-glass; a door in it opens upon a broad flight of steps which lead down to the garden; a sun-awning is stretched over the steps. Below the steps a part of the garden is visible, bordered by a fence with a small gate in it. On the other side of the fence 48

runs a street, the opposite side of which is occupied by small wooden houses painted in bright colours. It is summer, and the sun is shining warmly. People are seen, every now and then, passing along the street and stopping to talk to one another; others going in and out of a shop at the corner, etc.1 (Ibsen 1913, 127)

Ibsen’s new scenography thus initially involved what Aarseth nicely calls a “Janus-headed stage”, in which the drawing room functions as spectacle in a double sense, both for the theatre audience looking on through a virtual fourth wall and, potentially, for characters on the other side of the diegetic glass wall – a potential actualised in the play’s finale when Merchant Rummel organises a gathering of townspeople in the garden to pay tribute to Consul Bernick (2000, 42). “When the garden is filled with a surging crowd,” Rummel earlier explains, “then the curtains shall be drawn back, and they will be able to look in upon a surprised and happy family. Citizens’ lives should be such that they can live in glass houses!” (Ibsen 1913, 205).2 (By way of a somewhat imperfect illustration of the effect, Figure 2 shows two set photos from Mrs Fiske’s 1910 staging of the play, the first with curtains closed, the second with them opened.)

This, as has been noted, is a dramaturgy well suited to Ibsen’s exposure of the contradictions of bourgeois class formation. One way to read Ibsen’s prose cycle, it has been suggested, is as a series of allegories of a class that, in its very commitment to ideals of order and consensus, is ultimately forced to “draw back the curtains” on the lawlessness and violence on which that order is founded – here, in Bernick’s culminating confession of past misdeeds (Eagleton 2008).

1

I n Norwegian: “En rummelig havesal i konsul Bernicks hus. I forgrunden tilvenstre fører en dør ind til konsulens værelse; længere tilbage, på samme væg, er en lignende dør. Midt på den modsatte væg er en større indgangsdør. Væggen i baggrunden er næsten helt af spejlglas med en åben dør ud til en bred havetrappe, hvorover er spændt et solsejl. Nedenfor trappen ses en del af haven, der indhegnes af et gitter med en liden indgangsport. Udenfor og langsmed gitteret løber en gade, der på den modsatte side er bebygget med små lysmalte træhuse. Det er sommer og varmt solskin. Enkelte mennesker går nu og da forbi henne i gaden; man standser og samtaler; der handles i en på hjørnet liggende krambod o. s. v.” (Ibsen 2008, 11)

2

“ Når haven er fyldt af den bølgende mængde, går forhængene op, og man skuer indenfor en overrasket og glad familje; – en borgers hjem bør være som et glasskab.” (Ibsen 2008, 167)

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Figs. 2a–b. Two set photos from Mrs. Fiske’s 1910 production of Pillars of Society at the New York Lyceum Theatre.

Mrs. Fiske (as Lona Hessel) is second from right in (a), third from left in (b). Published in Theatre Magazine May and June 1910. Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

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But, in its revocation of an older logic of theatrical action, Ibsen’s scenography could hardly be countenanced within the formal terms of transitional-era feature filmmaking. Pillars of Society may well represent Ibsen’s first step towards what Jacques Rancière has called “immobile drama”, in which the Aristotelian logic of a causal, character-driven chain of actions is displaced by the “sensible reality” of the setting itself (2013, 117). (For Rancière, The Master Builder is the culmination of that curve.) But, as countless film historians have shown, it was in the image of those same classical principles that Ibsen’s drama worked to revoke that cinematic storytelling in America took shape. The “immobile drama” of a bourgeoisie whose guilt-ridden history closes around it in wave upon wave of revelation is, in consequence, rejected in Triangle’s adaptation (“re-mobilised”, we might say) in favour of a more direct telling that folds out the backstory into the linearity of a Bildungsroman: we first track the Consul’s youthful misdeeds – his trip to France and affair with an actress for which he convinces his fiancée’s brother, Johan, to take the blame, his financially motivated betrayal of his fiancée, Lona, to marry her sister – and only then, more than halfway in, do we pick up where the play begins, fifteen years later. The dramaturgical primacy of the drawing room as a fishbowl-like space for the exposure of past wrongdoing is meanwhile dissolved into the haptic patterning of early continuity editing, which subordinates space to character interaction (Fig. 3). (Walsh, one should recall, was a former assistant to D. W. Griffith, one of the major architects of the continuity style.) Aarseth, it would seem, is exactly right: the chronotope of the “narrow room” as the framework of Ibsen’s prose cycle simply does not carry through into the framework of transitional-era cinematic narrative.

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(a)

(b)

(e)

(f)

(i)

52

(c)

(d)

(g)

(h)

Figs. 3a–i. The opening scene of Triangle’s Pillars of Society (1916) exemplifies continuity style by orchestrating the space of the Bernicks’ drawing room in terms of protagonist action and sightlines. The sequence is bookended by point-of-view structures in which Bernick first leafs through a titillating volume on Parisian nightlife (a–e), then reads the spine of the Bible that his mother gives him instead (g–i). The full space of the drawing room set is only visible briefly in (f) – lasting all of two seconds – which functions as a delayed establishing shot. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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“Extremely hard to understand”: Thanhouser’s 1911 Adaptation of Pillars of Society We can get a better handle on that incompatibility if we take an extended parenthesis at this point to compare Triangle’s Pillars of Society with the earliest film adaptation of the play, a one-reel version produced by the Thanhouser Company in 1911. Anticipating Aitken’s organisation by a few years, Thanhouser had been launched in 1909 with similarly gentrifying intent and had likewise turned to Ibsen to that end. “We are after uplift,” founder Edwin Thanhouser had explained in a 1911 interview shortly before the film’s release, describing his goal as to “place the moving picture on a higher plane and gain for our particular brand a world-wide respect” (Moving Picture News, 1911a). Just as Majestic/Triangle would oversee the production of two feature-length Ibsen adaptations in 1915–1916 – Ghosts and Pillars – so had Thanhouser similarly invested in a brief run of three Ibsen one-reelers back in 1911, of which Pillars was the first, followed by A Doll’s House and The Lady from the Sea (see also Yalgın in this volume).

(The primacy accorded to Pillars of Society seems to have been personally motivated: Edwin Thanhouser had been one of the few people to stage Pillars in America, at the tail end of his previous career as a theatrical producer, at Chicago’s Bush Temple Theatre in January 1909.) Yet in belonging to a slightly earlier phase in the development of film style, Thanhouser’s version of Pillars paradoxically has the effect of more nearly replicating Ibsen’s modernising innovations in stagecraft.

Formally, the Thanhouser film follows the paradigm of other one- or two-reel “quality” literary adaptations of this period: a digest of narrative highlights, each presented in a single-shot scene – here, just twelve3 – with each scene preceded by an explanatory intertitle.

Hearkening back to the tableau construction of early film adaptations like Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903), this storytelling

3

T wo of these scenes have brief inserts: the fifth, punctuated by a newspaper insert, and the last, by a letter. If we then count these two scenes as consisting of three shots – the master shot, the insert, and the return to the master – the total number of shots in the film is sixteen.

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approach survived in the post-attractions era primarily in films tied to theatre – as here – even through the resulting narrative compression often came at the risk of incomprehensibility. Ibsen’s relative unfamiliarity on American soil seems, in consequence, to have made the Thanhouser film a frustrating viewing experience – at least to judge from the Moving Picture World critic who described the film as “extremely hard to understand” (1911a).

Yet for viewers who may have been flummoxed by the story, the Thanhouser version nonetheless offered a kind of ersatz fidelity to Ibsen’s double stage: fully half of the film’s scenes are set in the Bernicks’ drawing room, whose windows and doors permit a staging of action that – as per the play and unlike Triangle’s version – extends into the depth of exterior space (Fig. 4). What makes this set of some interest is the way it thereby bridges two principles of staging derived from early film. As David Bordwell has noted, one of the most striking features of early cinema is the divide between flat interior spaces – for which action would typically be framed in straight-on views and actors arranged on a kind of “clothesline” principle – and deep exteriors, with action staged recessively into the background of the shot (1997, 169). In emulating Ibsen’s dramaturgy, the Bernicks’ drawing room set enables an alternation between both principles: when open, the doorway and window allow for an interplay in depth between foreground and background planes of action (e.g. Fig. 4a, showing the return of Johan to the home of the unsuspecting Bernick, seated foreground left), while doorway closed produces a more planimetric staging (e.g. Fig. 4b, showing Bernick’s discovery of his son Olaf’s disappearance).

Still, there remains a paradox. If, in the Ibsen original, the space of the double stage gives material form to the public exposure that ends the play, there is no such conclusion in the Thanhouser adaptation. In place of Bernick’s confession before a mass gathering of citizens outside his drawing room windows, the Thanhouser version has Bernick acknowledge his misdeeds before a small group of just five or six people within the room, whose windows furthermore remain dark.

The film evokes the pictorial effect of the double stage but does not ultimately link it to the final situation of mass public exposure. The 55

Figs. 4a–b. The drawing room set of Thanhouser’s Pillars of Society (1911), with window and doorway open (a) and closed (b). Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum and Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

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Triangle version meanwhile reverses this. The film retains the culminating scene of exposure but separates it from the space of the drawing room: instead, in Walsh’s version, Bernick addresses the crowds from an exterior balcony that is accessed through – but cannot be seen from – the drawing room set. A comparison of the Thanhouser and Triangle adaptations of Ibsen’s play thus yields a curious chiasmus of missed connections vis-à-vis the original play’s dramaturgy: on the one hand, a 1911 version that retains the fishbowl set but does not really activate it in relation to Ibsen’s drama of public exposure; on the other, a 1915/1916 version that keeps that drama but doesn’t bother to replicate the material setting of the double stage. It is as though, in each case, the spatial terms of Ibsen’s dramaturgy have been filtered solely in terms of their capacity to accommodate available norms of film style: to the extent – but only to the extent – to which Ibsen’s double stage aligned with the tableau-like storytelling of the “quality” film, as in the Thanhouser version, then a kind of fidelity was possible; but when tendencies in film style pointed away from Ibsen’s dramaturgy, as was decisively so by the time of the Triangle film, then formal fidelity simply ceased to register.

“A medium which should not be sneered at”: Film Adaptation as Cultural Democratisation But here’s the rub: nobody at the time seems to have cared about any of this, at least not those writing in the trade press. Actually, nobody there really noticed – or rather, only one did, Moving Picture World’s Louis Reeves Harrison, who observed obliquely of the Triangle version that “no attempt has been made to profit from the methods [Ibsen] used” and that the conventions of screen storytelling would require “radical modification” to accommodate those methods (1916c, 1804).

This is not to say that there was no acknowledgment of the formal challenges that Ibsen represented; we have seen that there was, in the writings of Lindsay and Münsterberg, both of whom presumed that cinema’s silence mitigated against the “subtler shades of motives” of Ibsenian drama. There was also a critical commonplace differentiating cinema as a medium of action from Ibsen’s “plays of thought” (Eng-

57

lund 1913, 14; see also Sandberg in this volume).4 What remains odd, however, is how little these medium-specific concerns – silence vs speech, action vs thought, even cinematic vs theatrical space – were addressed in the industry’s trade discourse on individual Ibsen adaptations, which mobilised very different standards of evaluation. If we want to ascertain the full measure of the Ibsen “problem” for transitional-era American cinema, we will need to attend to the investments shaping those discussions, too.

To return to the film at hand: Triangle’s investment, in this respect, was clear. Aitken’s company sought to appropriate cinematic mass culture to an Arnoldian agenda that would transmit genteel aesthetic standards across class divisions. But this, it should be noted, entailed complications whenever adaptation was concerned, generating an ambiguity over the exact criteria by which any adaptation was to be evaluated. Granted the Arnoldian formula (“to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere”), should, then, an adaptation be assessed with respect to its fidelity to the aesthetic virtues that made the original “the best” in the first place? Or with a view to cultural accessibility and democratisation (to the goal of making it “current everywhere”)? In the case of Ibsen, the general perception that the playwright’s dramaturgy lay outside cinema’s reach – that formal fidelity was, in a strict sense, not really possible – seems to have provoked the industry’s defenders to favour adaptation techniques that instead stressed the latter goal of familiarisation of a straightforwardly authorial and narrative kind (that is, acquainting audiences with the name of Ibsen and the stories of his plays).

4

T he earliest instance of this commonplace that I am aware of is Clayton Hamilton’s 1911 Motography essay “The Art of the Moving-Picture Play” (50). As Hamilton claims therein, “The only type of drama which is absolutely unavailable for the kinetoscope is that in which the element of action is entirely subordinated to the element of character”, citing “some of the social dramas of Ibsen” as examples. Other essays in the trade press posit the same distinction – the representation of action vs that of thought or character – but are more optimistic about cinema’s capacities to encompass the latter. See, for example, Englund 1913, as well as critic Louis Reeves Harrison’s numerous references to Ibsen discussed earlier.

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We see this move occurring in real time in a fascinating 1915 essay “Don’t Sneer at the Screen” by critic W. Stephen Bush. Taking Morosco’s earlier adaptation of Peer Gynt as his point of departure (see Rees in this volume), Bush begins the essay by chastising a “highbrow wiseacre” whom he recently overheard “pour[ing] the vials of his sarcasms” upon the film (“‘Very little left of Ibsen,’ he says”). What the “haughty eye” of the highbrow custodian fails to see, however, is the value of such films in bringing culture to “the great masses who never had … an academic training”. As Bush explains: “Peer Gynt,” before it was filmed, reposed on the shelves of the libraries.

All of its profound wisdom and philosophy, all its witchery, all its poetic beauty, all its passionate preaching of love and truth was shut up between two covers of pasteboard. […] The treasures of the world’s literature are not merely for the chosen few. Time was when a manuscript was the precious possession of one man or one family or one little group of men. Then came printing and the book was read by thousands where the manuscript never passed out of one narrow circle. The screen makes the feast of knowledge even more general. Everybody is invited, everybody is amused and everybody learns something. A medium which reveals and visualizes for the masses that which otherwise would be merely the scholar’s delight should not be sneered at – least of all by a real scholar. (1915, 231)

Adaptation, in the context of cinematic uplift, thus came to be defended as adaptation in the service of accessibility, with fidelity as an ancillary issue.

The same held for critical responses to Walsh’s Pillars of Society the following year. The Triangle film may not have been what cinema’s advocates had hoped for – most acknowledged that the film lost the play’s “biting satire” – but this deficit was secondary to near unanimous approbation of the film as a vehicle of high cultural diffusion (Motion Picture Magazine, 1916). “[A] highly artistic addition to a class of production intended to familiarize the lowly with great examples of leading dramatists” was Louis Reeves Harrison’s previously quoted opinion (1916b). In fact, the very qualities of Triangle’s adaptation that, from a formalist perspective, did most to violate Ibsen’s artistry – e.g. the folding out of the backstory – were exactly those that, from the 59

viewpoint of accessibility, received plaudits. One critic observed that the film’s success as mass entertainment was “due to its excellent [plot] construction”, praising the film’s narrative clarity for ensuring a “cosmopolitan” – that is, cross-class – appeal (Milne 1916, 944). One needs, in other words, to reckon with a situation in which the specificity problem identified by Münsterberg and others, so far from being a last word, was only one term in a dialectic that negotiated formal fidelity against accessibility as duelling frameworks for the evaluation of cinematic adaptation.

But at this point, the Ibsen “problem” creeps in once more, only now on the other side of the dialectic, too, for it is difficult to think of a playwright who was less suited to the kind of democratising agenda that Triangle claimed for itself. As historian Joan Rubin has noted, Matthew Arnold’s prescription of the “best” tended to translate “into a stress on the classics”, familiarity with which, he believed, would extend an atmosphere of “sweetness and light” across the classes (1985, 785). But none of this obviously applied to Ibsen, whose recent admission to the portals of high culture in no way secured consensus on his moral appropriateness for the masses. Thus, alongside those who perceived in Ibsen a prestige from which cinema might prosper, there were those who continued to view him as a “sensational pessimist” whose work was, at best, “problematic to the masses” and, at worst, a “sin against decency” that should “forever be banished from the studio of the filmmaker” (Moving Picture World, 1911b; Moving Picture News, 1911b; Moving Picture World, 1911c). True, some Ibsen opponents found that their antipathy abated as their familiarity grew, the most prominent in film circles being W. Stephen Bush himself, whose aforementioned 1915 defence of filmed Ibsen reversed an earlier essay in which he had registered “emphatic dissent from the philosophy of Ibsen” and vowed to “recoil with the proverbial horror from the thought of trying to film such plays as ‘The Pillars of Society’ and ‘The Ghosts’ [sic]” (1911, 705). But for others, exposure to Ibsen adaptations only intensified their opposition, such as the Illinois Congress of Mothers, who, a few months after the Triangle film’s release, wrote the Chicago Examiner to argue for Ibsen’s exclusion from projects of cinematic uplift, 60

complaining that the various Ibsen films of the period had exposed America’s children to “almost every unconventionality known to society” (as cited in Moving Picture World, 1917). In facilitating Ibsen’s mass accessibility, Triangle’s film evidently did little to assuage ongoing reservations regarding his mass acceptability.

As Eirik Frisvold Hanssen has observed, “Ibsen may have been considered high art, but he was also a highly controversial author” (2017, 170). All that remains to be added is that Ibsen thus symptomatised a tension in the very conception of aesthetic value during this period. Writing decades later, in his pathbreaking sociological study, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu would reflect on the split dividing “bourgeois” fractions of the dominant taste culture (“who expect their artists … to provide emblems of distinction”) from “intellectual” fractions (who “expect rather from the artist a symbolic challenging of social reality”) (1984, 293). But that fault line was already there in the context of Ibsen’s turn-of-the-century American reception, which had begun to fracture between an older, genteel conception of art as morally edifying cultural tradition (“the best that has been thought and known”) versus an incipiently modernist conception, of which Ibsen was a vanguard figure, that played havoc with the ethical standards enshrined in that tradition. It was as though Triangle’s filmmakers were trying to claim Ibsen as part of an Arnoldian “best” of which his work was, in a certain sense, the negation. * Our conclusion, then, will be a simple one: the Ibsen paradox originated at the crossroads of two competing definitions of adaptation informed by then-current debates about cinema as both art and mass culture. Ibsen’s “adaptability” was compromised by a two-fold exclusion, both the aesthetic “could not” raised by the earliest medium specificity theorists and also, supervening upon this, an ethical “should not” emerging from debates surrounding the cultural politics of cinema as a mass medium. There was, in the end, precisely nothing fortuitous about the timing of Pillars of Society’s release. But the final 61

untimeliness for my argument is this: Triangle was, by this point, already tottering on the brink of financial ruin, having attracted neither the “classes” nor the “masses” to its genteel mission (King 2005, 15–19). Indeed, within a few months of Pillars of Society’s release, all three points of the Triangle – Griffith, Ince, Sennett – would jump ship and sign with Paramount, a potent index of the failure of Aitken’s mission. Pillars of Society was thus one of the very last of Triangle’s films to be released under cover of Aitken’s founding agenda, and the brief spurt of Ibsen features of the mid-1910s of which it was part coincides with the very last time that a project of highbrow cultural diffusion like Triangle’s enjoyed any plausibility as a model for cinematic mass culture. As numerous historians have had cause to note, the agenda of American mass culture would be set not by Arnoldian imperatives but by the dynamics of a cross-class leisure economy that outmatched the ethical and aesthetic standards of the genteel classes.

Aitken’s vision of film as cultural uplift was soon to give way to a celebrity culture whose standard bearers were fan magazines like Photoplay that promoted film as part of a modern consumer lifestyle.

And so, in addition to the critical responses already mentioned, the film would also come to be remembered by some as a fusty monument to an outdated gentility that had set the parameters of Triangle’s failure. Appropriately enough, it was in the pages of Photoplay itself that the film received its most negative assessment, for it was Photoplay’s lead critic, Julian Johnson, who gave the withering dismissal, earlier quoted, of the film’s “old-fashioned frocks and old-fashioned methods”, even going so far as to belittle the film’s production as “an occasion to regret” (1916a; 1916b). By “old-fashioned methods”, we can now plausibly hypothesise, Johnson meant to refer not to the film’s style – which was of a piece with emerging norms of continuity – but to its cultural politics. At least he knew that the future of cinematic mass culture lay elsewhere.

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Bibliography

Aarseth, Asbjørn. 2000. “Drama in the Narrow Room: Teichoscopy as a Constitutional Difficulty in the Ibsen Film.” In Ibsen on Screen, edited by Jan Erik Holst and Astrid Sæther, 38–51. Oslo: Norwegian Film Institute.

Arnold, Matthew. 1971 [1869]. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. New York: Bobb’s Merrill.

Bordwell, David. 1997. On the History of Film Style.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bush, W. Stephen. 1911. “The Lady from the Sea.” Moving Picture World, 2 December:705.

———. 1915. “Don’t Sneer at the Screen.” Moving Picture World, 9 October:231.

Cardullo, Robert J. 2011. “The Pillar of Ibsenian Drama: Henrik Ibsen and Pillars of Society, Reconsidered.” Neophilologus 95:359–71.

Chen, Michael. 2015. “The (Im)Possibility of Filming Ibsen.” Nordlit 34:363–69.

Eagleton, Terry. 2008. “Ibsen and the Nightmare of History.” Ibsen Studies 8(1):4–12.

Englund, Hilda. 1913. “Ibsen Dramas On The Screen.” Exhibitors’Times, 31 May:14.

Hamilton, Clayton. 1911. “The Art of the Moving-Picture Play.” Motography, 14 January.

Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold. 2017. “Silent Ghosts on the Screen: Adapting Ibsen in the 1910s.” In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, 154–78. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harrison, Louis Reeves. 1914a. “Plays of Purpose.” Moving Picture World, 2 July:229.

———. 1914b. “Problem Plays.” Moving Picture World, 7 November:760.

———. 1916a. “Social Criticism.” Moving Picture World, 1 July:62.

———. 1916b. “Pillars of Society.” Moving Picture World, 12 August:1099.

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Bibliography

———. 1916c. “Creative Method – Ibsen.” Moving Picture World, 16 September:1804.

Ibsen, Henrik. 1913. Pillars of Society. Translated by R. Farquharson Sharp.

London: E. P. Dutton.

———. 2008. Henrik Ibsens skrifter 7: Samfundets støtter; Et dukkehjem; Gengangere; En folkefiende, edited by Vigdis Ystad. Oslo: Aschehoug & University of Oslo.

Johnson, Julian. 1916a. “The Shadow Stage.” Photoplay. October:80.

———. 1916b. “The Shadow Stage.” Photoplay. November:86.

King, Rob. 2005. “‘Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes’: The Triangle Film Corporation and the Failure of Highbrow Culture.” Cinema Journal 44(2):3–33.

Lindsay, Vachel. 1915. The Art of the Motion Picture. New York: Macmillan.

Milne, Peter. 1916. “Pillars of Society.” Motion Picture News, 12 August:944.

Motion Picture Magazine. 1916. “Photoplay Reviews.” November.

Motion Picture News. 1915a. “Sig,”“$4,000,000 Production Company, Is Launched.” 17 July:87.

———. 1915b. “Two-Dollar Admission Price Is Triangle’s Aim.” 14 August:43.

Moving Picture News. 1911a. “Thanhouser Co.” 15 April:17.

———. 1911b. “Impressions of ‘The Lady from the Sea’.” 25 November:8.

Moving Picture World. 1911a. “Comments on the Films.” 20 May:1142.

———. 1911b. “The Film Maker’s Responsibilities.” 5 August:270.

———. 1911c. “Facts and Comments.” 30 December:1052.

———. 1917. “Chicago News Letter.” 19 May:1130.

Münsterberg, Hugo. 1916. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study.

New York: D. Appleton and Co. Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. London: Verso.

Rubin, Joan. 1985. “Self, Culture, and Self-Culture in Modern America: The Early History of the Book-of-the-Month Club.” Journal of American History 71(4):782–806.

Schanke, Robert A. 1988. Ibsen in America: A Century of Change.

Lanham: Scarecrow Press.

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3. First and Foremost An Ideal American Woman?

A Doll’s House (Theodore Marston, Thanhouser, 1911) Ali Yalgın

The gender politics of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) have been subject to recent reconsideration, which has led to thought-provoking discoveries regarding the iconic play’s role in the women’s rights movement. This includes enquiries as to whether Ibsen was a feminist or not and how the play raises feminist questions regardless of that conundrum (Moi 2021), and the implications of the globalisation of those questions thanks to the actresses who have played Nora over the course of more than a century (Holledge et al. 2016). The Thanhouser Company’s adaptation of A Doll’s House (Theodore Marston, 1911) gives us important clues as to how the play’s gender politics were perceived and reformulated in the framework of its early globalisation within a Western culture, more specifically the American Progressive Era. Recently re-discovered, this one-reel film is known to be the first stage-to-screen adaptation of the play, with Julia M. Taylor as Nora, Edward Genung as Torvald, and William Russell as Krogstad.

On the one hand, the Thanhouser film was not advertised as an adaptation of a “problem play” on the women’s cause, unlike the 1918 adaptation featuring Elsie Ferguson or the 1922 adaptation featuring

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Alla Nazimova.1 The 1911 reviews were positive, yet they did not emphasise the work’s relationship with women’s emancipation. The trade press affirmed that the film did a good job in terms of generating “an adequate staging” (Morning Telegraph, 1911), that it was “adapted very cleverly, dealing only with the essence of the plot” (New York Dramatic Mirror, 1911), and that it “convey[ed] the central idea of the drama to the average mind, which latter would never know the play either through the book or through the stage” (Moving Picture World, 1911). The company and the press, as I show below, were interested in framing the adaptation as a part of the film industry’s “uplift” movement rather than focusing on gender. The rhetoric of uplift sought to distinguish cinema from other forms of “cheap amusement” by way of positioning it as a potential instrument for the moral and cultural education of the masses (Grieveson 2004, 24–25). Edwin Thanhouser, the company’s founder, employed this rhetoric when he claimed Ibsen to be “good material” because it facilitated the company’s goals of putting “the moving picture on a higher plane and gain[ing] for our particular brand a world-wide respect” (Moving Picture News, 1911a). What is not immediately visible from this narrative, however, is how the uplift movement was entwined with gender politics. In this chapter, I will first put the Thanhouser adaptation of A Doll’s House within the context of cultural uplift as a system of gender regulation during the American Progressive Era, then closely read the film through this lens.

In particular, in order to understand the feminist potential (and limitations) of A Doll’s House in American silent cinema, we need to be aware of the complicated relationship between the uplift movement, the women’s rights movement, and the image of the ideal woman in early twentieth-century America. In general, we need to remember that the

1

or example, a press book made for the 1918 film suggests that one of the publicity texts F to be published in the press begins with the title “Can a woman reared as doll child have ideas of her own? This problem is solved by Elsie Ferguson in her newest photoplay, ‘A Doll’s House’ soon to be displayed here” (Ulrich 1918, 11). A review of the Nazimova film in 1922 explicitly claims that Ibsen’s play “marked the first step in the emancipation of woman, in a manner of speaking, and was used as a premise in the feminist movement” (Moving Picture World, 1922).

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play’s potential for stimulating feminist questions is dependent on the constructions of gender that surround its recreation and reception in different cultures and media.

Although the uplift discourse has been a part of the discussion on silent Ibsen films (see also King in this volume), the movement has not been explicitly framed as a gender regulation act. The focus has been mostly on the puritanical impositions of the movement, without an emphasis on its imagery of the ideal white middle-class American woman. Writing on the Ibsen adaptations in early American cinema, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen points out the discrepancy between the scandalous themes of Ibsen’s plays and the uplift movement’s desire to associate cinema with respectability (2017, 172–73). He astutely claims that the Ibsen films struggled to find a place in this landscape due to “a lack of familiarity with general audiences, difficulties in negotiating with the aesthetics of the theater, and texts brimming with unwelcome moral transgressions and ambiguities” (ibid., 175). What we are missing here, however, is a clearer picture of the agents that actively defined and categorised those “unwelcome moral transgressions”.2 Although Hanssen has written elsewhere on gender within the context of the four American silent adaptations of A Doll’s House, he has omitted the issue of uplift from this discussion. His argument is that rather than being foregrounded for its importance to the women’s rights movement, the play was seen predominantly as a vehicle for individual actresses to shine in the industry. Therefore, the Noras embodied in these films did not represent “a collective transition from subjugation to power, modernity, and equality” (ibid., 8). Furthermore, the male reviewers of the trade press and some key feminists, such as Elizabeth Robbins, had issues with Ibsen; the former claimed his by then more than thirty-year-old play to be “outdated, antiquated, and primarily of

2

anssen even cites an acerbic review on the 1915 adaptation of Ghosts, titled “EmasculatH ing Ibsen”, that criticised the film for bastardising the play by superimposing “a Prohibitionist agenda” and accused “[t]he wet nurses who minister to the mob” for “put[ting]our old friend Ibsen into diapers”. However, he does not zero in on the gendered associations that this review was making.

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historical interest”, whereas the latter were disappointed with his non-transformative politics (ibid., 7).3 Early twentieth-century white middle-class Americans did find the tableau of gender inequality of A Doll’s House to be outdated; however, by taking this irrelevance at face value, we are missing a link in how the play’s potential for a more radical feminist interpretation was neutralised, at least in the realm of cinema. This chapter will try to find that link by looking at the highly coded gender politics of the uplift movement’s cultural project as an active agent affecting the play’s reproduction and reception in early cinema. I will begin this analysis by investigating the conditions under which the Thanhouser company came to release the film.

The Uplift Movement and the Ideal American Woman The Thanhouser Company’s Ibsen films were a part of the organisation’s greater project of bridging theatre and film in order to increase the latter’s respectability as a form of high art. This strategy was used by many film companies, such as the Vitagraph Studios, which made “quality films” comprising of adaptations of classics, including works

by Shakespeare and Dante (examined by William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson in their 1993 study). However, the Thanhouser company had, through its founder, connections with the art of theatre long before its first stage-to-screen adaptation of St. Elmo (1910), which had in turn been adapted for the stage from Augusta Jane Evans Wilson’s 1866 novel and toured in 1909 (Bowers, 1995a). Indeed, Edwin Thanhouser had a theatrical past, which he often liked to highlight in interviews. After managing a theatre company in Milwaukee for years, Thanhouser started a film company in New Rochelle in 1909 (Thanhouser 2011, 90). His grandson Ned, who has rigorously reconstructed

3

hile other researchers have also affirmed that Ibsen’s relevance to gender equality in W the early twentieth century was challenged (see Farfan 2004; Schanke 1988, 62; Krouk 2021, 233), the presence of women who simultaneously continued to refer to Ibsen for their cause, such as Emma Goldman and Mary Shaw, whose “use of Ibsen bears comparison to the radical English appropriations of the late nineteenth century, which associated the playwright with the figure of the New Woman” (Krouk 2021, 231), complicates this reading.

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many of the previously lost Thanhouser films, claims that “[t]he decision to enter the film industry was a business venture for Edwin Thanhouser, not an idealistic dream of changing the world with better entertainment” (ibid.). Charlie Keil, however, has shown that the company, following other film companies at the time, advertised high artistic quality as one of their founding principles, exemplified by “generic selectiveness”, “a theatrical pedigree”, and “moral purity”; their approach ensured that “even those Shakespearian plots that featured unpleasantness would be avoided” (2011, 113). Edwin Thanhouser’s primary concern might have been to maintain a profitable business; after all, as a part of the Motion Picture Distribution and Sales Company (MPDSC), the company needed to follow certain rules of production and distribution and fight for its place in an increasingly standardised industry. This necessity often meant, as Eileen Bowser claims, the sacrifice of “experiment and change” for the benefit of financial “stability” (2009, 49). However, the promise of intellectually and morally superior entertainment was definitely a part of the company’s marketing strategy to make financial profit, and that claim to superiority was evidenced by the company’s connection to theatre.

In addition to Shakespeare, Ibsen seems to have been an important indicator of that theatrical connection, as the company produced three adaptations of his plays in 1911 (The Pillars of Society came first, and The Lady from the Sea was released last). The advertisements for all three films explicitly framed the company’s engagement with the playwright as a step taken to make high-quality films. As a press announcement for A Doll’s House stated: The picture carries all the great dramatic qualities that made Ibsen’s writings so powerful in play form, and you cannot go wrong if you rig up some special advertising display for this very fine feature. Simply the words ‘A Doll’s House, by Ibsen’ will do, outside the show, but paint’em in big letters with the name ‘Thanhouser’ underneath as a guarantee of merit. (Moving Picture News, 1911c)

The announcement promised exhibitors that besides high-quality content, the title of the source text and name of the playwright would 69

attract customers to the nickelodeon. While the source text is said to have “great dramatic qualities”, equally important are the film being defined as a “very fine feature” and the producer being a guarantor of “merit”. All of these descriptions are indicators of status, communicating a yearning for an upper-class clientele.

Ibsen would have been a good choice to fulfil this aspiration, as he was quite niche even in the relatively high-status world of legitimate theatre. A Doll’s House was not an entirely welcome play, especially in the early years of its run. Looking at the reception history, we see that it was a controversial play that did not do particularly well at the box office. Adapting this play for the ulterior motive of financial gain would therefore have been odd. For instance, speaking of the early reception of A Doll’s House, Ståle Dingstad (2016) claims that the staging of the play in Germany for the first time in 1880 was quite a flop, even though Ibsen had written the famous “German ending”, wherein Nora does not leave house and home due to her inability to abandon her children.

Establishing the reception of the play on the basis of Georg Brandes’ review of the Berlin Residenz-Theater production in 1880, Dingstad shows how Brandes puts the blame for this failure on the “Berlin audiences”, whom he characterises as “artistically depraved”, unsophisticated people who “wanted value for money and distasted any kind of seriousness” (as quoted in Dingstad 2016, 113).4 Unsurprisingly, Germany was not the only country where A Doll’s House was considered to be too much for the regular theatregoer. The United States, where the play was first performed by an amateur group as The Child Wife, was not exactly teeming with Nora fans. Although during the 1890s and early 1900s, a variety of nationally and internationally known stars, such as Minnie Maddern Fiske and Alla Nazimova,

4

hile Dingstad admits that the real reason behind the anticlimactic reception of the play W is “hard to find” and might have been caused by a range of factors, from bad performances to the play’s daring challenge to idealism, we see here that even an intellectual as supportive of Ibsen as Brandes affirmed that A Doll’s House would not do well in the theatre; there was a view that Ibsen was an acquired taste and, therefore, that staging his plays did not promise high sales.

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played Nora in versions where Nora slams the door at the end of the play and leaves, these productions did not make Ibsen popular in the USA. Orm Øverland, for instance, claims that the Norwegian playwright was criticised for being inscrutable, didactic, too serious, “obscene”, and “irrelevant” by American reviewers (2006, 96). He did not fare well in the 1910s either; according to Dean Krouk, although Ibsen was beginning to be canonised in the 1910s as a pillar of modern drama, he had lost his shine in the theatre, “a development that has been attributed to familiarity and popular acceptance but was also connected to the First World War and the more intense profit orientation of professional theatres” (2021, 233). Although Ibsen plays generated a lot of discussion, they were never quite box office hits. Therefore, for Edwin Thanhouser, the brief affair with Ibsen must have been connected more with the cultural capital generated through adapting his dramas and less with short-term monetary goals. He has, in fact, formulated this affair as an artistic sacrifice in an interview on the filming of The Pillars of Society: “We are sacrificing money to art, a little here and a good deal there, but we actually think we are attaining our ideals” (Moving Picture News, 1911a).

This financial sacrifice for the sake of ideals is an example of what Rob King identifies as an eagerness for cultural uplift, which “implied escaping the stigma of the film industry’s largely lower-class audience, and […] involved exploiting high or ‘highbrow’ culture as a model for filmmaking practice” (2009, 118). In line with this elitist trend, in the aforementioned interview Edwin Thanhouser said: We are after uplift. […] We are essaying the big things that we feel filmdom needs. Subjects that heretofore many film producers have not approached, we are staging with full success. I believe we are making a lasting impression on the public mind, both from an artistic and an educational standpoint. Our start in this direction has stood us in good stead, and today observers place us among the best in our particular line. (Moving Picture News, 1911a)

The interview shows not only that Thanhouser was quite adept at using the keywords that would appease the industry’s anxieties over dignifying film as a respectable form of art, but also that he connected 71

Ibsen closely with the task of “education” and the underlying desire to become a social force that improves society. We see not only the functionalisation of Ibsen as a mark of distinction but also the objective of using Ibsen for instruction. By bringing Ibsen from stage to screen, then, Thanhouser seems to have wanted both to be part of the strategy to engage with higher-class patrons, so that the industry could attract upper-class customers and investors, and to educate the lower classes by way of this popular entertainment format that they loved and consumed with pleasure.

The educational aspect of the uplift project immediately recalls the highly coded gender politics of this endeavour, as it was tightly connected with the ideal of what made a respectable middle-class woman. Writing on the regulation of early cinema, Lee Grieveson says: Cinema’s shift from ‘unworthy past’ to ‘higher future’ and move into the realm of moral discourse was aligned with the complex configuration of classed and gendered conceptions of respectability so central to the self-definition of the middle class. (2004, 11)

As popular theatre had tried and succeeded at becoming respectable in the nineteenth century, it was now cinema’s turn to play the game of respectability by making the nickelodeon both family- and woman-­ friendly. This task called for both a physical transformation (a cleaner and more comfortable environment, brighter theatres, properly dressed personnel, and, shamefully, racial segregation) and more carefully curated programming that avoided taboo subjects, such as sex, drunkenness, and crime. However, women were not merely the target consumers of respectable art; they actively worked to better the industry, making use of their perceived essential moral superiority (Grieveson 2004, 101). For instance, white middle-class women reformers became deeply involved in the National Board of Censorship, where they represented a large majority.5 Apart from the connection between

5

rieveson claims that “by 1912, 57 of 75 censors were women, and by 1915 the figure had G risen to 100 out of 115” (2004, 101).

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women’s work and respectability, Grieveson points out yet another bond between the uplift movement and gender. He says that “the promotion of the educational potential of cinema was linked closely also to the efforts to attract women audiences, for women’s traditional role was closely linked to the education of children” (2004, 104). A cinema that inculcated moral purity could therefore be associated with the quality of motherliness. The uplift movement seems to have wanted to kill two birds with one stone here: associating cinema with women would make the nickelodeon respectable, but it would also reinforce the image of a certain type of ideal woman (the morally pure mother) and rebuke those departing from it.

Unsurprisingly, this idealisation of women was full of internal tensions, as it tried to conceal the heterogeneity of what it meant to be a woman. On the one hand, women were essentially good and moral; on the other, they themselves needed to be educated. How could A Doll’s House serve this purpose? Playwright and critic Clayton Hamilton, a supporter of Ibsen during this era, suggests that “Shakespeare wrote for an audience made up mainly of men and boys, and gave them Rosalind and Falstaff: Ibsen and Pinero have written for an audience made up mainly of women, and have given them Nora Helmer and Zoe Blundell” (1914, 266). Later in the same article, Hamilton asserts that “any movement to improve the theatre-going public, any movement to uplift the audience, must […] be directed toward the women of America”. He proposes that Nora be exploited as a figure for the cultural uplift agenda, because women loved to watch Nora and would benefit from the instruction of this classical piece that specifically targeted them (ibid.). But who exactly did critics like Hamilton have in mind when they said “women”? Were they, for instance, talking about producer-directors such as Alice Guy Blaché, or Lois Weber, who, according to Karen Ward Mahar, embodied “the ideal director at the height of the uplift movement, between 1909 and 1916” (2006, 99)? Or were they talking about women in multiple lower-level posts within the fluid film industry, whose work we risk obliterating, as Jane Gaines has persuasively warned, by limiting our research to “entrepreneurial women” (2018, 157)? Were they including the slapstick comediennes 73

whose bodies, as Margaret Hennefeld’s research reminds us, resisted “the bourgeois upward mobility and institutional standardization of the American film industry” by shifting from shape to shape (2017, 148)?6 Were they even thinking about women of colour? The discourse of uplift flattened the differences between women by imposing the ideal of “a middle-class, middle-aged matron”, whereas women from “working-class and immigrant communities” who went to see films and were not necessarily interested in sacrificing their existence to this ideation (Mahar 2006, 81).

And yet, it was not only men insisting on an ideal image of femininity. Margaret Finnegan’s research (1999) has shown that the mainstream suffragists banked on this image too, as they were influenced by consumer culture’s commodification of personality. Within this atmosphere of buying and selling in mass, the mainstream suffragists began to market themselves as the embodied versions of the ideal, self-­realised citizen and were extremely careful about building the right image of themselves in order to gain the right to vote. Therefore, Finnegan claims, “suffragists from a variety of perspectives could represent the standards of womanly personality most valued by early twentieth-­ century Americans: moral purity and heterosexual (or at the very least motherly) love combined with passion, charisma, and a zeal for life” (1999, 87). Those women who were fighting for their right to vote could be the same ones making essentialist claims about female moral purity, which they could operationalise in service of cultural uplift. Placed within this context, the Thanhouser film can show us that the Ibsen play would have had a hard time fulfilling the purpose of razing the

6

s Hennefeld shows, “[W]omen assumed a fantastic range of shapes and textures, places A and positions, sexual and racial identities in early filmmaking: transmogrifying themselves into micrographic nicotine fairies (Princess Nicotine, 1908), cutting off their own limbs to finish their housework on time (The Kitchen Maid’s Dream, 1907), razing the public sphere in protest to win voting rights (Kansas City Saloon Smasher, 1901), or having spontaneous, female to male sexual reassignment by ingesting magical African seeds (A Florida Enchantment, 1914)” (2017, 146–47).

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“façades”7 of gender roles at this time in America, because the mainstream imagination of what was meant by a “woman” was quite strictly engineered to conform to a certain ideal. The silent Noras were in a dialogue with this ideal. In the next section, I will perform a close reading of Thanhouser’s silent film in order to analyse that dialogue.

An Idealised Nora When we look at A Doll’s House (1911), what we immediately see is a typical example of the transitional-era American film (1907/8–1917), quite like the other surviving US-produced Ibsen films. Hanssen has shown how all the silent Ibsen films are the products of a change in the “industrial and economic structures of film production, distribution, and exhibition” (2017, 157). Accordingly, the films reflect the stylistic shift from the aesthetics of the cinema of attractions towards classical filmic storytelling, wherein realistic and pictorialistic acting styles blended together and their length in terms of reel numbers increased from one to many (ibid.). Produced around the middle of this era, A Doll’s House is no different. Comprising twenty-six (mostly medium-­ long) shots, thirteen intertitles summarising the plot at the beginning of each scene, and four inserts, A Doll’s House strives in its one-reel journey to follow Nora from the moment her father gives her hand to Torvald until the very end, when she leaves her husband and his house.

Gone is the reasonable, recently widowed Kristine Linde, who is looking for a job, as well as Torvald’s best friend, Doctor Rank, who, while suffering acutely from hereditary syphilis, is secretly in love with Nora.

The scenes are mostly shot in a studio, save for a scene in the gardens, which is supposed to represent the couple’s visit to the south in order to cure Torvald’s illness. The camera movement is limited to occasional

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I borrow the analogy of the façade from Mark Sandberg’s study on the architectural metaphors in Ibsen’s plays. For instance, Sandberg claims that in his early prose plays, such as Pillars of Society and A Doll’s House, “Ibsen removes a given home’s false façade to invoke a truer home elsewhere, a home based in fantasies of absolute structural integrity” (2015, 60). Arguably, the pessimistic ending of A Doll’s House denies the existence of such a “truer home”.

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pans, and the narration depends heavily on the use of mise-en-scène and mixed acting styles. As Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs have argued, the late nineteenth-century theatre’s style of pictorialism found its way well into the silent film era, seeping into everything from the actors’ performances to mise-en-scène (1997, 7). Quite like its contemporaries, the film showcases an acting style that has traces of both realistic subtlety and pictorial elements, including tableau-like shots and grand gestures (see also Sandberg in this volume for a discussion of acting styles). We can therefore affirm, as Hanssen argues, that the film is made in the aesthetics of the transitional era.

Seen from this perspective, the erasure of women from the advertisements and reviews connected with the film can also be blamed on the transitional era’s yet-to-be-established conventions. While in the theatrical tradition, the actresses who played Nora were closely identified with the role (Minnie Maddern Fiske, Alla Nazimova, Janet Achurch, Eleanore Duse all embodied different Noras, as we see in Holledge et al.’s aforementioned research), in 1911 the star system was not yet quite established, and actors were just beginning to get credit for their work in film. Accordingly, the advertisement released by Thanhouser does not reveal that Nora is played by Julia M. Taylor, a theatre actress who became a temporary member of the Thanhouser Company in 1910–11 (Bowers, 1995b). Similarly, we do not know the name of the actress who briefly appears as Marie Helene, the nurse. As Hanssen shows, the later silent adaptations of the play did advertise the name of the lead actresses, including Dorothy Phillips, Elsie Ferguson, and Alla Nazimova (2015, 4–5); therefore, the exclusion of the actresses’ names in the 1911 film is rather standard given the context.

Apart from the actresses, another woman who suffers exclusion from the production is Gertrude Homan Thanhouser, Edwin Thanhouser’s wife. Thanks to the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), we now know that Gertrude “was a major contributor to the success of the Thanhouser film enterprise, where she worked as actress, scenario writer, film editor, and studio executive” (Thanhouser 2016). Gertrude was credited with co-writing the scenario for the company’s earlier stage-to-screen adaptations, including Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale 76

(1910). While she was not given screenwriting credits for the Ibsen adaptations, it is quite possible that she was involved in them. In any case, Ned Thanhouser’s profile on WFPP positions her as the executive producer of all three of the films. Despite their erasure from A Doll’s House, both Julia M. Taylor’s and Gertrude Homan Thanhouser’s names appeared in the trade press on later occasions.8 Interestingly, while the identity of the actress who portrayed Nora is obscured, the character that she plays is reborn as a woman of the 1910s. An obvious piece of evidence is the insert of a promissory note showing Nora’s name as “Nora Helmer” and indicating that Nora has agreed to borrow “twelve hundred dollars” on “Jan. 17, 1911”. The date and the currency on the note signal to the public that they should recognise this woman as their contemporary and as a compatriot. Positioning Nora as a woman of the 1910s almost creates the effect of watching her actions in real time. This stands in marked contrast with Ibsen’s retrospective dramaturgy – a realistic unfolding of the secrets and repressed emotions of the characters, created with painstaking verisimilitude and generating the effect of a slow burn in the spectator.

No secrets are kept from the spectator here; instead, during the first two thirds of the reel, we follow a hyper-dramatic version of Nora’s backstory in the original plot; the moments of marriage, illness, death, forgery, threat, argument, and marital separation are all connected in a linear fashion. Thanks to Hanssen, we know that this kind of linearisation was typical of the silent Ibsen films (2017, 162). As mentioned early on in this chapter, the reviewers appreciated that the gist of the play was made understandable for the “average mind”, i.e. those lowbrow audiences who supposedly had nothing to do with Ibsen. In addition to its function of exposition, though, the linearisation also strangely liberates Nora from the melodramatic “woman with a past” trope, which, as Elin Diamond points out in her famous 1990s criticism of

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ee, for instance, an article presenting the actors of the Thanhouser Company, which has S the pictures and names of the actors who usually appeared in the films (Moving Picture News, 1911b).

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“Ibsenite realism”, grants the spectator the pleasure of finding out Nora’s dirty secrets piecemeal and diagnosing her as a hysteric.9 Rather than learning about Nora’s shocking past, the film’s spectators become complicit in Nora’s actions as they unfold in real time; they witness the circumstances that push her to commit forgery and then slam the door shut and leave Torvald.

The gendered logic of uplift starts to become visible as we notice the nature of the relationship that the adaptation strives to shape between the spectator and Nora. To repeat Hanssen’s argument, the controversial behaviour of Ibsen’s characters (forgery, adultery, incest, and alcoholism to name a few) proved to be problematic due to the moral values of the uplift project (2017, 171). The Thanhouser company seems to have evaded this problem by modelling Nora as an essentially virtuous and productive woman. The film signals this moral superiority through Nora’s body, the mise-en-scène, and finally Nora’s actions, each of which I analyse below. Consequently, we realise that this film’s Nora is highly reminiscent of the ideal of the good white middle-class American woman, a key image of the uplift movement and non-radical suffragists.

Nora’s body, from the film’s earliest shot right through to the end, represents the main source of technology giving us information about her character and making us bond with her. In the very first shot, spectators can read Nora’s curiosity and nervousness at the same time: she secretly glances at Torvald, lowers her gaze when addressed by her father, and constantly fiddles with the back of a chair, with three quarters of her body turned to the camera. As Nora communicates messages to viewers through the work of her eyes, hands, and posture – all within the same medium-long shot taken from a fixed angle – the

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lin Diamond argues that “Ibsenite realism guarantees its legitimacy by endowing the E fallen woman of popular melodrama with the symptoms and etiology of the hysteric” (1990, 60). Realism is more interested in giving the onlookers the pleasure of diagnosing and dissecting the hysterical “fallen woman” than in seeing the fallen woman thrive.

However, Nora is also one of Ibsen’s rare protagonists who actually finds a way out of the maze. If Nora is an exception to the rule, then it becomes all the more interesting to see how the gender politics of the uplift movement tried to re-purpose her.

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Fig. 1. Julia M. Taylor as Nora in A Doll’s House (1911). Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

film establishes her gendered status as lower in relation to the more comfortable men. Her movement is quite restrained, she does not speak, and she acts the way a shy child behaves near adults. However, right after this shot, we see a relatively untethered Nora who uses her hands, arms, and torso more liberally as Torvald grabs her bag of macaroons, a famous symbol of Torvald’s superficial yet oppressive love.

She feigns innocence; then, before he leaves the frame, she tries to give Torvald an exaggerated kiss of assurance that she will behave. Once Torvald has left, Nora takes out a piece of macaroon that she had hidden and eats it facing the camera directly, thereby making the spectator an accomplice to her illicit action (Fig. 1). We understand that she is a woman who is capable of taking charge despite her childish mannerisms and who even manipulates her husband by playing innocent. As the film progresses, we see Nora’s movement grow further. She not only assumes a central position in all the scenes, which start in medias res, but also directs the limited camera movement (mostly consisting of 79

rather stuttering pans), thereby claiming ownership of the story by directing our attention. However, the film is equally adept at communicating Nora’s helplessness and eliciting pity for her through the use of her body. In a later scene, when the doctor announces that she must take her husband to the south to improve his health, Nora faces the camera in despair, sitting in a chair in the foreground of the frame, resting her head on her hand (Fig. 2). The repeated shots of Nora looking at the camera let her actively engage with the public, which is invited to partake in both her mischief and her dilemma through the physical and emotional signs emitted by her body. As such, the film positions Nora as a complicated character with ambiguous motives.

However, Nora’s complexity starts to dissolve as the story unfolds. Using the mise-en-scène, the adaptation emphasises that she is a virtuous fighter despite the criminal act she is about to undertake.

Specifically, the film uses the contrast between the foreground and the

Fig. 2. Julia M. Taylor as Nora in A Doll’s House (1911). Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

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background of the frame in order to establish this perception. According to Brewster and Jacobs, there is a parallel between the silent film actor in the foreground of a frame and the theatre actor in the footlights in terms of signalling importance to the spectator, which means that the closer a subject is to the camera, the more important they are interpreted to be (1997, 92). The Thanhouser film, however, reverses this dynamic by positioning Nora behind Torvald on multiple occasions in order to establish a bond of complicity between her and the viewer. Torvald, meanwhile, stays in the foreground, unaware of what Nora is up to behind his back. This configuration is repeated twice in the film. The first time is right before Nora forges her father’s signature. The camera shows a desperate Nora, who has just applied for a loan in secret and lost her father (who was supposed to endorse her for the loan), as she checks on a sickly, coughing Torvald. While the latter sits in his armchair in the foreground, Nora watches him from the background of the frame, by the door. After a while, Nora’s facial expression changes into one of determination as she unfolds the loan agreement she had been clutching in her right fist (Fig. 3). The spectators see then and there, in Torvald’s unwitting presence, that Nora is breathing in and taking the decision to do something with the note.

The following scene shows Nora in the next room, the antechamber of their apartment. She reads the note again, stares at the room she just came out of, then sits down, resolved to forge her father’s signature.

Connecting like this with an anxious Nora, who is physically behind Torvald, the spectator realises that Nora is the behind-the-scenes force keeping this marriage (and her husband) alive and finds further proof of when another, similar layout occurs, in the sequence after Nora and Torvald return from their trip. While Torvald, cured and happy, sits in his room, Nora sneaks in from the background, looks at him enchantingly and blows him kisses, before returning to the dark antechamber where she secretly takes in sewing to pay off her debt (Fig. 4). The foreground-background logic in the frames therefore shows the silent film spectator an important dramaturgical vein in Ibsen’s play, which relates to hiding and revealing secrets, as one might grasp from the

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Figs. 3–4. Edward Genung and Julia M. Taylor as Torvald and Nora Helmer in A Doll’s House (1911).

Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

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very first line spoken by Nora: “Hide the Christmas tree well, Helen”10 (Ibsen 2016, 109). More importantly, however, the mise-en-scène reveals that Nora’s act of hiding things and keeping secrets is a form of labour.

Consequently, the public gets no opportunity to associate her with criminality, which would have posed a problem for uplift purposes.

Whatever Nora does, she does out of love, and she excels as a woman whose labour is completely dedicated to her family.

The film’s treatment of Nora’s labour is not only ideational; her labour is also materialised in the scene where she sews by candlelight, in secret, in order to pay her loan. As with many of the scenes in the film, this one is shown as part of Nora’s backstory in order to deliver the plot comprehensibly in the silent medium. However, within the gender dynamics of 1910s America, the scene gains another significance. On the one hand, the frame shows a Nora who is claiming more space in the doll house, as the scene begins with her locking the door, then approaching her sewing box with extreme care so as not to make any noise and finally sitting down at the table to work. In his audio commentary on the film, Hanssen (2020) interprets Nora at this moment as “locking the door to be alone; the secret work here represents newfound independence, rather than emotions and cravings needing to be concealed”. However, it is also remarkable that Nora’s independence comes under conditions of duress. The synopsis of the film, published in the trade press, emphasises the cumbersome nature of Nora’s sewing work: She worked late at night sewing to pay off the load of debt under which she labored. And the years passed on, and children came, and Torvald grew in wealth and knowledge, but he never once realized that Nora had troubles and anxiety, simply because she bore her cross with a smiling face. (Moving Picture News, 1911d)

While her work does help Nora realise that her marriage had a weak foundation and ultimately leads to her independence, the description

10

“Gem juletræet godt, Helene” (Ibsen 2008, 213).

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above draws the picture of a Christ-like Nora, which does not exactly evoke a joyful liberation. The film therefore seems to argue that Nora deserves liberation because she has worked very hard for it.

Although never once referred to as a “New Woman” in the synopsis, the portrayal of Nora’s sewing reminds us of the ideal, self-­ realised, and industrious figure of the New Woman. In contrast with Torvald’s male fantasy of locking Nora within a doll’s house for display, the reformers in America desired to functionalise the New Woman as a useful element of the workforce. Although their work was still mostly compartmentalised in this era, women were encouraged to contribute to the moral and economic progress of America. Indeed, rather than deeming a working woman unusual, middle-class society singled out the woman who did not work and was spending too much money. Drawing on Thorstein Veblen’s criticism of the leisure class, Janet Staiger identifies one of the many types of “bad women” types on screen as “the butterfly”, shorthand for “the social butterfly”. As Staiger posits: [A woman] was bad when she assumed that the marriage contract was a mere monetary one in which she was to flit about as the social butterfly, going from flower to flower. She was bad when her meaning was limited to being an ornament. Worse yet was when she could not adjust her consumption to her income, her desire to her position. Overconsumption was as threatening to the home as inadequate consumption in this modern era. (1995, 165)

While the original Torvald frequently chastises Nora for her spending, calling her a “spendthrift”, he has no problem with positioning her as a shining jewel to be displayed, then put back into the cabinet, and with no other purpose in life. The ideal wife for Torvald in 1879 Norway, however, is not at all the ideal woman of the white middle-class America of the 1910s. When Nora is sewing on screen, we see that she is not Torvald’s idealised doll-wife; rather, she is the antithesis of the butterfly. She sews with dedication, while throwing quick glances at the door to see if Torvald is coming. To that end, Nora becomes the exemplary white middle-class woman holding the family, and by extension, all of society, together. The very next shot in the film affirms this interpreta84

tion. It takes place “some years later” and shows Nora happily dancing and chasing her children, with Torvald then joining their game, and the happy family stays together for a bit longer before the mother and the children send the father off to work. While we may not be certain whether the sewing scene and the happy family scene were sequenced to achieve a narrative connection (after all, we are still in the transitional era), we can see that Nora, unlike the butterfly, is useful.11 But useful to whom, and for what? To herself, as “first and foremost a human being”,12 as Nora famously says in the play (Ibsen 2016, 184), or to society, as a good, productive wife and mother?

The fact that the adaptation eliminated some of the elements of the source text that would potentially have made Nora morally dubious might give us a clue that, at least in terms of liberated sexuality, the film strives to fashion Nora as the morally pure American woman. The most obvious example of such an elimination is the disappearance of Dr Rank from the adaptation, which leaves the viewer no room at all to question Nora’s innocence. In the original play, there is a scene in which

11

Although I have not been able to find Thanhouser-related material to emphasise the issue of Nora’s usefulness, the materials related to the Ferguson and Nazimova films do show that the subject of a woman’s functionality in the family and society was used to attract the potential viewer’s attention. One example is the text from an advertisement in the 1918 Artcraft adaptation pressbook, starring Elsie Ferguson, with the headline: “Doll Wives Sometimes Prove Useful Women”, followed by the sub-heading “Theory of Helplessness Is Disproved in Artcraft Picture, ‘A Doll’s House’” (Ulrich 1918, 15). The uselessness of the doll wife, according to the text that follows the headline, is based on her inability to “aspire to higher altitudes of thought and action” (ibid.). Another page of the press pack, with the title “Advertising Campaign Suggested for the Exploitation of ‘A Doll’s House’”, advises exhibitors to get a “car card” printed “with a photograph of Ferguson at one end, a doll’s house at the other” and to print the following text in the middle: “Are doll wives good mothers? Are they practical and have they ideas of their own? Elsie Ferguson will answer you in her portrayal of the doll wife in ‘A Doll’s House’ at the … Theatre next” (ibid., 20).

In a review by Motion Picture News on the 1922 Nazimova film, a New York Sun reviewer is quoted as saying, “Nazimova is quite sincere and appealing, and her face has taken on real charm. […] She set forth the story of the butterfly wife who won her emancipation with a simplicity and directness that make ‘A Doll’s House’ one of the unusual pictures of the year—one which every woman will demand to see as her natural right” (1922). Note that the “natural right” granted to women is the viewing experience of a transformation narrative from the “butterfly wife”, i.e. of the archetypal over-consuming bad woman to the virtuous New Woman.

12

“først og fremst et menneske” (Ibsen 2008, 370).

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Nora is suggested to sexually tease Dr Rank (by showing him her newly bought stockings), who later confesses his feelings for her. With the disappearance of Dr Rank, this scene also disappears. In this way, the adaptation resembles an earlier production of A Doll’s House by Minnie Maddern Fiske, which retained the role of Dr Rank but got rid of the suggested eroticism. A report on the 1894 production indicates that the actress “had properly removed from the role of Rank some of its hideousness. Nora’s stockings were not on view, and nothing was said about them” (New York Times, 1894). Dingstad writes of this production that it was organised as “a fundraiser for a hospital in the city”, this being why Fiske wanted to “make the play more respectable in order to counter Ibsen critics” (2016, 121). The Thanhouser adaptation, on the other hand, bars Dr Rank from the story altogether, although he is replaced by a middle-aged doctor who diagnoses Torvald’s illness. The reviews of the film do not seem to have noticed Rank’s absence, and the synopsis published by the company never once mentions him. Without any reference to Rank, the adaptation is less complicated, in terms not only of the narrative structure but also with regard to its moral content. The Thanhouser Nora is a morally appropriate woman who does not show a trace of the notorious Ibsen’s obscenity. The Thanhouser film ensures that Nora ends up surviving the cruel world that surrounds her with her decency unscratched, save for her act of forgery, which she commits, in any case, out of wifely duty.

Ibsen’s Nora, however, is not so much the ideal woman who has been set up to survive all external moral threats and more a human being who makes mistakes and transforms herself. As Toril Moi observes, Ibsen uses the metaphor of theatricality in order to criticise idealism, performed by Nora and Torvald in flesh and bone until the scripted roles of “ideal wife” and “ideal husband” explode: Both Nora and Helmer spend most of the play theatricalizing themselves by acting out their own clichéd idealist scripts. Nora’s fantasies are variations on the idealist figure of the noble and pure woman who sacrifices all for love. (2006, 232)

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According to Moi, what makes Ibsen’s play so sophisticated and modern is the way it consciously intertwines theatricality and authenticity, thereby questioning the acts of spectating and acting not only in the theatre but also in daily life (ibid., 240–41). Nora’s transformation comes with her rejection of the burden of idealism. The tarantella scene is one of the peak moments in which the play’s critique of idealism is in perfect harmony with the playwright’s use of metatheatricality, whereby Nora is doubly subjected to a commodifying gaze while also given an opportunity to express herself and gaze at the world (Moi 2006, 236–38). For instance, when Alla Nazimova danced the tarantella sensually in her 1907 production, one reviewer said, “[T]he interviews with Dr. Rank were graphically expressed in many illuminating details of light and shade, and the Tarantella was executed with much natural and sensuous charm” (Theatre, 1907). Interestingly, when Nazimova also adapted the play into a film, which is now lost, Adele Whitely Fletcher interpreted the dance without eroticising it: “[Nazimova’s] Nora who dances frantically to keep her husband from the letter-box wherein lies an incriminating letter; her Nora dancing at the masquerade with a worried heart; […] they are, all of them, human characterizations” (1922, 73). Either Nazimova toned down the erotic aspects of the dance, or perhaps Fletcher, as a woman, was able to avert the male critic’s commodifying gaze.

In the Thanhouser film, however, which admittedly was produced more than ten years before the Nazimova film, the dance does not fulfil the double function of eroticisation and self-expression.

When the evening of the masked ball comes, the costumed Nora enters the frame hopping and dancing rather childishly on her own, soon to be joined by her children, who give her a hug. The scene turns into an episode of peaceful domesticity. Whereas in Ibsen’s play, Nora is already threatened by Krogstad and dances the tarantella both in order to distract Torvald and expel her anguish, in the film the dance represents a mother’s moment of joy with her children. Indeed, the dancing is kept to a minimum and is only preparatory to Krogstad’s entrance, which creates a dramatic effect on the spectators, who iden-

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tify with a happy Nora who is caught unawares by the villain.13 As such, it is doubtful whether the adaptation sees Nora as “first and foremost a human being”, or, rather, as a morally pure mother who is trying to save her selfish husband. In any case, a reviewer has remarked that “[t]he dancing incident at the ball is not quite plain to one who has not read the play” (Moving Picture World, 1911). By obscuring this scene of theatricalised sexuality, the film also seems to make the plot less clear.

On the whole, the Nora of the Thanhouser film cannot quite achieve her transformation from a self-theatricalising, self-sacrificing ideal wife into a woman who rejects the predetermined roles defined by the ruling ideology. The film comes across instead as showing the story of a childish yet goodwilled and industrious wife who releases herself from the clutches of a shallow husband who wants a trophy wife. While the first silent Nora victoriously overcomes the repression of Torvald and leaves to lead an independent life, it is not clear whether she rejects the role of “self-sacrificing woman” imposed on her by the patriarchal order. Consequently, Thanhouser’s A Doll’s House imposes the standards of moral appropriateness on Nora, who, due to the producer’s concern for uplift, seems unable to eschew the role of idealised white middle-class woman, even if she does leave her husband and children.

Indeed, a reviewer from The New York Dramatic Mirror commented, “The actress might perhaps have better realized Nora’s awakening, and thus made the last scene more vital” (1911). Thinking about the changed gender dynamics in the adaptation, and the consequent idealisation of Nora, I wonder whether Julia M. Taylor could have played Nora’s transformation better.

13

T hen again, the Thanhouser version was not the only one to rush through the scene. The previously mentioned account of Fiske’s 1894 production indicates that the Tarantella sequence “was distinctly disappointing”, for she did not “take advantage of the Tarantella to produce theatrical effect”; however, this choice was justified by a gloriously strong scene between Nora and Mrs Linde immediately afterwards (New York Times, 1894).

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Looking at the Thanhouser Film Today As a coda, it is worth remembering Jane Gaines’ question about feminist film history – “What kind of an answer do we now want” (2018, 24) – based on viewing the first silent adaptation of A Doll’s House.

Perhaps, despite the evidence that the play’s gender politics were re-­ appropriated by the uplift movement, we desire some ambiguity in the adaptation that leaves us with the sense that a feminist utopia where all kinds of women are included somehow manages to resist the imposition of gendered ideals. For this reason, I would like to finish the chapter by interpreting an exceptional scene in the Thanhouser film that makes the last sequence quite pleasingly puzzling in terms of its stance towards Nora’s emancipation from idealism, even if this interpretation comes from today’s perspective. After reading Krogstad’s letter, which threatens to expose Nora’s forgery, Torvald leaves Nora in the antechamber and locks himself in the inner room. All alone, Torvald snarls, lifts up a photographic portrait of Nora, and turns his back on the camera (Fig. 5).14 Three representations of women in three different media form a triangular configuration in this shot. At the very back, hung on the wall, is a painting of a woman with her head turned slightly to the right. Closer to the camera but behind Torvald is the bust of a woman facing in the same direction as the head in the painting on the wall. The third is the photographic portrait of Nora which Torvald is holding, which is also looking in the same direction as the other two heads. These three representations of women produce a constellation for a brief moment, allowing us (if not the viewers in 1911, then the viewers of today) to criticise Torvald’s idealisation and iconisation of Nora. Torvald raises a finger and tells off Nora’s photographic portrait, ripping up the image and then throwing the pieces into the fireplace. As he puts a cigar in his mouth, the scene cuts to an anxious yet determined Nora waiting in the antechamber, all dressed up to go

14

T his photograph of Nora is the same as the one of Julia Taylor that was printed in the article introducing the players of the Thanhouser Company, which was published four days before the film was released (Moving Picture News, 1911b). Thus, unexpectedly and indirectly, Julia Taylor’s actress persona does make an appearance in the film.

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outside. The ripping up of the picture could be shorthand for Torvald and Nora’s intense argument, or indeed, a replacement for physical violence. However, this violence also takes on symbolic meaning. In this Torvaldian, idealist realm, furnished with heavy works of art and neoclassical busts, Nora’s photographic portrait, which symbolises the modern woman, can no longer exist. The photo, which frames Nora’s face as previously posed, is ripped apart by the patriarch, who throws the remaining bits into the fireplace. Once the image has been destroyed, we find a Nora who has transformed herself. More than a century later, then, we might interpret the scene as a (perhaps accidental) critique of the aesthetics of idealism, after which Nora sets herself free. At least, we know that the reviewer who disapproved of the inscrutable tarantella scene seems to have liked this scene, as he said, “The last act is well done and the last act is the most important” (Moving Picture World, 1911).

The Thanhouser production of A Doll’s House, the first film adaptation of the iconic Ibsen play, follows the industrial endeavour of 1910s American filmmaking to redeem cinema as a tool for social uplift.

In this chapter, I have tried to remind the reader of the close connection between that endeavour and the politics of gender regulation, which sought to forge an image of ideal femininity, fashioned after the white middle-class American woman. By situating the Thanhouser film within this context, we can see that the tableau of oppression painted by the source text would have been perceived as outdated in the 1910s in America. After all, the ideal middle-class woman was not the butterfly – she was expected to be productive. However, we also see that women were still burdened by scripted idealised roles and that the idealised image had slipped into the construction of Nora on screen, at least in the case of the Thanhouser film. We certainly cannot assert that all Ibsen films constructed Nora this way; however, the analysis of the Thanhouser film does help us understand more clearly why, leaving aside Ibsen’s association with highbrow culture, the films of A Doll’s House did not have more of a positive impact on the women’s cause. In this specific case, we can say that the film’s subsumption under a project of uplift caused the source text to lose its firm stance 90

against idealism, as it placed Nora within the confines of a new ideal, one that excluded women who were not white and middle class. Ultimately, we have to remind ourselves that the dynamic, yet culture-­ and-medium-specific, conventions of gender greatly shape the reproduction and reception of the perceived politics of a work that has been adapted to a new setting. This proves to us one more time that the silent Ibsen films deserve our attention, for they come back to us with the message that, although the conventions of making and consuming art may reinforce dominant ideologies, these may also be disassembled, not least by way of retrospective scrutiny.

Fig. 5. Torvald (Edward Genung) looking at a photograph of Nora (Julia M. Taylor), A Doll’s House (1911).

Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

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Bowers, David Q. 1995a. “Volume I: Narrative History. Chapter 3 (1910): St. Elmo and Forward.” In Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History. Accessed 31 January 2022. www.thanhouser.org/tcocd/Narrative_files/c3s4.htm.

———. 1995b.“Volume 3: Biographies. Taylor, Julia M.” In Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History. Accessed 31 January 2022. www.thanhouser.org/TCOCD/ Bowser, Eileen. 2009. “Movies and the Stability of the Institution.” In American Cinema of the 1910s:Themes and Variations, edited by Charlie Keil and Ben Singer, 48–69. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. 1997. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Diamond, Elin. 1990. “Realism and Hysteria: Toward a Feminist Mimesis.”

Discourse 13(1):59–62.

Dingstad, Ståle. 2016. “Ibsen and the Modern Breakthrough – The Earliest Productions of The Pillars of Society, A Doll’s House, and Ghosts.” Ibsen Studies 16(2):103–40.

Farfan, Penny. 2004. Women, Modernism, and Performance.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Finnegan, Margaret. 1999. Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture & Votes for Women.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Fletcher, Adele Whitely. 1922. “Across the Silversheet. The New Screen Plays in Review.” Motion Picture Magazine 23:4, May:72–73.

Gaines, Jane M. 2018. Pink-Slipped:What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Grieveson, Lee. 2004. Policing Cinema: Movies and Censorship in Early-Twentieth-­ Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hamilton, Clayton M. 1914. Studies in Stagecraft. New York: H. Holt and Company.

Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold. 2015. “A Doll’s House and the Performance of Gender in American Silent Cinema.” Screening the Past 40. Accessed 1 May 2021. http://www.screeningthepast.com/issue-40-first-release/­a-doll%e2%80%99s-­ house-and-the-performance-of-gender-in-american-silent-cinema/.

———. 2017. “Silent Ghosts on the Screen: Adapting Ibsen in the 1910s.” In The

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Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas M. Leitch, 154–78.

New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2020. “The Pillars of Society (1911).” DVD audio commentary.

The Thanhouser Collection DVD volumes 13,14 & 15.

Hennefeld, Margaret. 2017. “Slapstick Comediennes in Silent Cinema: ­Women’s Laughter and the Feminist Politics of Gender in Motion.” In The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, edited by Kristin Lené Hole, Dijana Jelača, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patrice Petro, 141–55. New York: Routledge.

Holledge, Julie, Jonathan Bollen, Frode Helland, and Joanne Tompkins.

2016. A Global Doll’s House: Ibsen and Distant Visions. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ibsen, Henrik. 2008. Henrik Ibsens skrifter 7: Samfundets støtter; Et dukkehjem; Gengangere; En folkefiende, edited by Vigdis Ystad. Oslo: Aschehoug & University of Oslo.

———. 2016. A Doll’s House and Other Plays, edited by Tore Rem, translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. London: Penguin Books.

Keil, Charlie. 2011. “Narration in the Transitional Cinema: The Historiographical Claims of the Unauthored Text.” Cinémas. Revue d’Etudes Cinématographiques / Journal of Film Studies 21(2/3):107–30.

King, Rob. 2009. “Movies and Cultural Hierarchy.” In American Cinema of the 1910s: Themes and Variations, edited by Charlie Keil and Ben Singer, 115–39.

New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Krouk, Dean. 2021. “American Ibsens.” In Ibsen in Context, edited by Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem, 231–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mahar, Karen Ward. 2006. Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Moi, Toril. 2006. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art,Theater, Philosophy.

New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2021.“Feminism.” In Ibsen in Context, edited by Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem, 91–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morning Telegraph. 1911. Review of A Doll’s House. 30 July: n.p.

Motion Picture News. 1922. “Critics Laud ‘A Doll’s House.’” 4 March:1399.

Moving Picture News. 1911a. “Thanhouser Co.” 15 April:17.

———. 1911b. “Edwin Thanhouser and his Company.” 24 June:10.

———. 1911c. “The Thanhouser Two-A-Week: A Doll’s House.” 15 July:4.

———. 1911d. Review of A Doll’s House. 15 July:20–21.

Moving Picture World. 1911. Review of A Doll’s House. 5 August:295.

———. 1922. “Newest Reviews and Comments: ‘A Doll’s House.’” 25 February:863.

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New York Dramatic Mirror. 1911. Review of A Doll’s House. 2 August:25.

New York Times. 1894. “Minnie Maddern Fiske as Nora.” 16 February:4. Øverland, Orm. 2006. “The Reception of Ibsen in the United States: A Mirror of Cultural and Political Concerns, 1889–1910.” Studia Universitatis Babes-­BolyaiPhilologia 3:93–103.

Sandberg, Mark B. 2015. Ibsen’s Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the Modern Uncanny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schanke, Robert A. 1988. Ibsen in America: A Century of Change.

Lanham: Scarecrow Press.

Staiger, Janet. 1995. Bad Women Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Thanhouser, Ned. 2011. “Reconstructing Thanhouser: The Twenty-Five-Year Journey of a Citizen Archivist.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 11(2):90–99.

———. 2016. “All in the Family: The Thanhouser Studio.” In Women Film Pioneers Project, edited by Jane M. Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta. New York: Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries. Accessed 1 May 2021. wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/essay/all-in-the-family-thethanhouser-studio/.

Theatre. 1907. “Mme. Alla Nazimova as Ibsen’s Nora.” 7:72.

Ulrich, Charles Kenmore, ed. 1918. Press Book and Exhibitor’s Aids. “A Doll’s House”. Paramount Press Book Collection 5.2.

Uricchio, William, and Roberta Pearson. 1993. Reframing Culture: The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Films. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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4. Pantomime, Paratext, and Expressivity Ghosts (George Nicholls, Majestic, 1915) Mark Sandberg

This chapter concerns a “failed” silent-film adaptation of Ibsen that might not have been a failure after all, or at the very least, not in the way that is usually assumed. The version of Ghosts produced by the Majestic Motion Picture Company in 1915 shows, no doubt, the difficulties of transposing a densely verbal naturalist drama to the visual regime of silent film, but the usual conclusion – that Ibsen’s plays are essentially untranslatable to the screen – does not do justice to the more complex contemporary promotion and reception of this film at the time of its release. It is possible to appreciate Ibsen’s dramatic texts, as I do, for his mastery of the analytic dramatic form, his evocation of the unsaid underneath all that is said, and the subtle psychology of his characters without weaponising the excellence of his stage works as an easy criticism of any filmic adaptation. Such aesthetic hierarchies, anchored in ideas of medium specificity, obscure the peculiar characteristics of this 1915 film and the ways that it does something more than fall short of Ibsen’s theatrical standard. By examining the 1915 film of Ghosts within the assumptions and expectations of its own media environment, it is possible to recover historical perspectives that evade the aesthetic hierarchies that have since then become the de facto and somewhat facile explanations for why there are relatively few “Ibsen films”.

This larger historical contextualisation beyond a simple adaptation of drama into film follows the lead of Eirik Frisvold Hanssen’s 95

examination of Ibsen films of the 1910s in terms of both their aesthetic position and their paradoxical role in “uplift cinema” of the transitional era between 1907 and 1917. After admitting that these Ibsen adaptations fall short on both counts (aesthetically and morally), Hanssen states: “[W]hat remains fascinating about the Ibsen adaptations of this crucial period is how they make visible cinema’s negotiation with other more established media and cultural and social norms at a time when the notion of what a film is and should be is constantly contested and redefined” (2017, 176). In what follows, I will examine this “negotiation with other more established media” in terms of two supplementary communicative strategies that were to varying degrees available to the 1915 Ghosts when adaptation difficulties arose. For the sake of brevity, I will call these “pantomime” and “paratext”, though the argument for each will involve more nuance than those terms convey in themselves. On the one hand, an examination of the extended performance context allows for recovery of the legibility strategies and virtuoso expressivity that made the acting in this film an attraction instead of a flaw. At the same time, the incomplete support from these legibility strategies in performance necessitated the creation of a paratextual ensemble surrounding the film.

These adjacent textualisations of the film make clear the way that Ibsen’s name functioned as a positive constellation of composite impressions when the acting could not convey what was needed in the adaptation. The fact that both contexts to a certain degree functioned as communicative supports for a cinematically transposed densely verbal drama can easily lead to familiar conclusions about essential medium-specific deficiencies of “the silent Ibsen film”; this chapter acknowledges those contextual support functions but also suggests that an intermedial approach to this 1915 film opens the way to understanding this Ghosts as a different kind of success.

A Prestige Production The Reliance and Majestic Studios in Hollywood, where this Ibsen film was produced in 1915, was described by an in-house trade-press article by the film’s distributor, the Mutual Film Corporation, as follows: 96

A veritable city by day, at night transforming itself into a monster fairyland, with thousands of electric lights twinkling and flashing in the darkness, is that section of Hollywood, California—to be exact, No. 4,500 Sunset Boulevard—occupied by the Reliance and Majestic studios. (Reel Life, 1915d)

This was D. W. Griffith’s production facility, the one that a few months later, in July 1915, would team up with Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio and Thomas Ince’s Kay-Bee studio to form the Triangle Film Corporation (the 1916 Pillars of Society film was produced by Triangle after the consolidation, and this Ghosts just before; see also King in this volume). The distribution of Ghosts was handled through the Mutual Film Corporation, direction came from George Nicholls under Griffith’s supervision (the degree of his involvement is unclear), and the film was released on 24 May 1915.

Its most famous star was the lead actor, Henry B. Walthall, who played the roles of both Captain Alving and his son Oswald. Mary Alden played the role of Helen Alving. Both of these leads had worked with Griffith the year before during the filming of The Birth of a Nation.

Most famously, Walthall had played the lead role of the Confederate soldier and imagined founder of the Ku Klux Klan (Ben Cameron, the “Little Colonel”) and Mary Alden had performed in blackface as the mixed-race woman Lydia Brown, the housekeeper/mistress of the white Reconstruction Senator Austin Stoneman. Although this racist epic has since become notorious for its role in perpetuating the South’s “lost cause” narrative, at the time it was also considered a major leap forward in narrative ambition and technique (see also Rees in this volume).

Walthall had previously performed in other film adaptations of literary sources, as he had also starred in two films based on works by Edgar Allen Poe from 1914 and 1915 (entitled The Avenging Conscience and The Raven); it would also be Walthall and Alden who would again team up for another round of Ibsen adaptation by playing Karsten Bernick and Lona Tonnesen in Triangle’s Pillars of Society a year later.

All of this detailed production information situates this adaptation of Ghosts firmly within mainstream developments in Hollywood’s transitional era leading up to 1917 – the major studio, well-known 97

actors, and the turn to prestigious literary material to perform a kind of “uplift cinema”. Today, that term seems retrospectively unacceptable for a film like The Birth of a Nation, and as Hanssen also notes, Ibsen’s reputation as an author of highbrow literature could not really mitigate the discrepancies raised by his controversial themes and biting social critique of the very middle-class mores that “uplift cinema” was attempting to appropriate (2017, 175). As one contemporary reviewer put it, “‘Ghosts’ is not a pretty story. But it is a forceful story, and one which will create thought and talk” (Proctor 1915, 67). One might say the same of Edgar Allen Poe’s writing (as that reviewer in fact did), the source for two other Walthall vehicles of the time: a canonical writer, sure, but also morbid in ways ill-suited to an “uplift” project. The apparent ability to overlook the effects of the actual subject matter conveys the intensity of cinema’s overriding embrace of the cultural capital of canonical literature and famous authors in the transitional era, despite the perceived moral valence of the literature itself.

If cinema can “create thought and talk”, the reasoning seemed to go, it has vaulted film into a different cultural category.

So, what kind of Ghosts was this? Despite the film’s opening homage to the great author – a tableau-like pose by the Vitagraph actor Karl Formes in Ibsen costume (see the introduction in this volume) – it would otherwise be a stretch to call this adaptation “respectful” when applying typical fidelity criteria; there are too many significant departures from Ibsen’s text. For example, a doctor figure has been added to the cast. In the play, of course, the knowledge of the hidden half-sibling relationship between Osvald and Regina is carefully guarded by Helene Alving,1 who reveals it to Pastor Manders and thereby makes clear that she understands the risk of incest if the two were allowed to marry. Here in the film, that crucial knowledge is instead doled out to this added figure of the doctor. He seems to be borrowed more or less from Damaged Goods, a film made a few months earlier in October 1914. Based on

1

T hroughout the discussion here, the Norwegian spellings “Osvald” and “Helene” will refer to the characters in Ibsen’s play and “Oswald” and “Helen” to those in the film adaptation.

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Eugene Brieux’s cautionary syphilis drama Les Avariés from 1901, which was also translated into novelised form as Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair in 1913, the film adaptation of Brieux was produced shortly thereafter by the Mutual Film Corporation and thus preceded the 1915 film of Ghosts by Majestic. Ghosts’s doctor figure lectures everyone as pedantically as he does in the Brieux play (typically with wagging finger and a sad shake of the head), a link that did not go unnoticed in a contemporary review of the film that stated, “For those who are not Ibsen students let it be said that ‘Ghosts’ resembles ‘Damaged Goods’ in being a study in inherited taint” (Proctor 1915, 67).

The doctor of this silent film Ghosts is thus saddled with providing a reminder of the public health consequences of the initial alliance between Helene and the Captain. When Regina’s mother, Johanna, dies in the midst of a written confession of the identity of the Captain as Regina’s true father, it is the doctor who intercepts and hides the note from the other characters. When the doctor then hears of the sudden wedding plans of Oswald and Regina, he is also the one to race to the church to stop the wedding in the nick of time. The main effect of giving the doctor such a crucial role of narrative mediation is that the play’s tragic element is eliminated as well: here, Mrs Helen Alving knows no more than the other characters, and her actions after the Captain’s death thus lose their aspect of tragic misdirection because there is no disparity between her knowledge and her actions. Here in this filmed version, she is only a victim, achieves no belated insight, and, unlike Helene Alving of the play, provides no tragic dimension.

There are other differences as well – Regina’s father in the film is not a scoundrel like Engstrand in the play, but a respectable, kindly, pipe-smoking gentleman. Pastor Manders is no longer a sly, calculating hypocrite and the indirect cause of Helene Alving’s tragedy, but a milquetoast pious man of the cloth – a walking cliché, really. Regina has also lost her ruthless vitality here, giving instead her best impression of Ophelia as she runs distraught to her likely suicide after the halted wedding. (In the play, of course, she swiftly recalculates how her chances would improve if she nimbly pivoted to Engstrand’s brothel instead.) Most crucially, in the final scene Oswald takes poison 99

himself while his mother runs for help from the doctor, removing the euthanasia element of the morphine pills in the play and the uncertain, suspended aspect of the drama’s close.

Even more significant is the film’s straightening out of Ibsen’s famously recursive narrative timeline, which in the drama gradually reveals pieces of the past that finally cohere into a terrible realisation and reconstructed storyline by the time the curtain falls. The 1915 Ghosts chooses to represent directly the crucial events of the past instead of leaving them implicit or narrated gradually as fragmentary clues – a linear exposition tactic that the other Ibsen films of the early teens also employed (see King and Yalgın in this volume). The intricate retrospective, analytic structure of the original play – one of Ibsen’s key contributions to Western drama – is in this way entirely lost; in the film there is no detective activity made available to either the characters or the spectators, no crucial secret to piece together from strategically placed euphemistic hints, and no gradually dawning understanding that ambushes the viewer. Thus we also lose the resonance of the play’s title: there are no “revenant” narrative bits from the past that make a ghostly appearance in the present; they come instead as straightforward linear exposition from the earliest point of the dramatic plot until the end of the play. If the ambush of the present by the past is key to Ibsen’s aesthetic form and his social critique, then it seems fair to say that the film abandons the most Ibsenian aspect of the play.

The film’s depiction of the past could have been handled in flashback instead of in the chronologically linear way in which it is actually presented. Flashbacks had developed to that point by 1915 and were known from other films, as Maureen Turim has shown in her history of the technique. She states: “It does appear that flashbacks clearly marked as temporal analepses were quite common in the teens—although relatively few of these films have survived” (1989, 28–29). That is to say, if one were already going to go to the trouble of visually dramatising the past, as this film does, one could just as well have embedded the sequences as shorter recursive, remembered revelations as present them in sequential order as a backstory (in this case, approximately the first twenty-seven minutes of a fifty-nine-minute 100

film – not a trivial proportion). Choosing a flashback strategy might have preserved some of that sense of the relentless pressure of the past on the present that exists in the original play.

Of course, it is hard to argue from absence about roads not taken. David Mayer suggests an explanation can be found in Griffith’s “arm’s-length supervision” of Ghosts, namely that Griffith’s investment in “concurrent—parallel and overlapping—actions” made the flashback less interesting to him: “His narratives unfolded in a forward direction and were set in ‘the present’” (2009, 169), although it is unclear whether Griffith’s tastes as producer were determinant in Nicholls’s film. It is relevant to note, however, that the initial overt, linear depiction of the implicit theatrical backstory was also the strategy used in the 1911 Pillars of Society film (and of course, the same recursive role of the past is crucial to that plot; see also King in this volume). That approach could be seen as consistent with the much shorter one-reel format that conveyed the dramatic action in briefer tableaux, with the backstory portion of the narrative taking the form of brief scenes from the past very much similar in narrative logic to those of the dramatic present. The same approach was taken in the later 1916 version of Pillars of Society, however, so its use in Ghosts was probably not simply a holdover from the narrative logic of shorter films. In fact, the longer feature-length (one-hour) films that had become increasingly common internationally after 1913 might have had reasons to fill out that past action with a fuller exposition: without recourse to extensive dialogue (which would have impossibly weighed down the film with intertitles), the filmmakers needed more action sequences that could play out for a longer time: in Ghosts, a visually exciting dinner/ dance party at Captain Alving’s house, or the dynamic movement of an invented horseback riding date between the Captain and Helen out in the open air on a country road. The past in this film seems intended not to haunt the present as much as to eat up playing time in the first part of the film. Reinforcing this impression is the fact that extended sequences (the chase to stop the wedding, for instance) have also been added to the second half of the story, which is set in the present.

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The Media Essentialists Two of the most frequently cited early film theorists writing around the time of this film in 1915 and 1916, Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg, seem provoked by the attempt to adapt Ibsen’s drama to film.

Both of them use Ibsen’s stage drama somewhat reductively as an explanatory foil for the new cinematic art form, emphasising the comparative externality and visual compression of the silent cinematic image while still defending in equal but separate measure the achievements of serious theatre (see also King in this volume).

Lindsay specifically discusses Majestic’s Ghosts – which in 1915 would have been a film quite contemporary with the publication of his book – in order to insist on this medium specificity. He writes, “It is a principle of criticism, the world over, that the distinctions between the arts must be clearly marked, even by those who afterwards mix those arts” (2000, 109), and in his appraisal of the problem of adapting the Ibsen drama to film, he states, “Wherever in Ghosts we have quiet voices that are like the slow drip of hydrochloric acid, in the photoplay we have no quiet gestures that will do trenchant work. Instead there are endless writhings and rushings about, done with a deal of skill, but destructive of the last remnants of Ibsen” (ibid., 108).

In light of the flashback discussion above, it is interesting that there apparently was a tableau-like scene (not extant in the Library of Congress print of the film) occurring when Oswald goes off to paint the portrait of the King. Lindsay describes the scene at length: He is looking sideways in terror. A hairy arm with clutching demon claws comes thrusting in toward the back of his neck. He writhes in deadly fear.

The audience is appalled for him. This visible clutch of heredity is the nearest equivalent that is offered for the whispered refrain: “Ghosts,” in the original masterpiece. This hand should also be reiterated as a refrain three times at least, before this tableau, each time more dreadful and threatening. It appears but the once, and has no chance to become a part of the accepted hieroglyphics of the piece, as it should be, to realize its full power. (ibid., 107)

Lindsay imagines the hairy arm (which we in the surviving print do not see at all) performing the interspersed function of the flashback 102

imagined earlier in this discussion, returning as a regular visual refrain to substitute for the “acid drip” of dialogic refrains in the original.2 The overriding logic of his analysis, however, is to assert the distinctive qualities of each medium that make the search for equivalence necessary in the first place. Employing a rhetorically contrastive symmetry, Lindsay famously states: At the close of every act of the dramas of this Norwegian one might inscribe on the curtain “This the magnificent moving picture cannot achieve.” Likewise after every successful film described in this book could be inscribed “This the trenchant Ibsen cannot do.” (ibid., 105)

Lindsay’s pithy summary reinforces a media essentialism that has persisted to this day as an explanation for the lack of successful film adaptations of Ibsen.

In Hugo Münsterberg’s book on film perception from the following year, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, he too wrote of Ibsen in media-essentialist ways: The usual make-up of the photoplay must strengthen this effect inasmuch as the wordlessness of the picture drama favors a certain simplification of the social conflicts. The subtler shades of the motives naturally demand speech. The later plays of Ibsen could hardly be transformed into photoplays. Where words are missing the characters tend to become stereotyped and the motives to be deprived of their complexity. (1916, 219)

Like Lindsay, Münsterberg elevates this observation to the status of a general law of separate-but-equal media, an attitude he also conveys when making the following observation: “If ever a Shakespeare arises for the screen, his work would be equally unsatisfactory if it were

2

L indsay’s mention of this now-unavailable scene is plausibly accurate, not only because of the detail of his description but also because, in the current versions, there is a puzzling narrative break around the moment he describes, occurring between the intertitles “A Royal Command to paint the King’s portrait” and “His hope blasted, he returns home”. The visualisation of the “clutching hand of heredity” as a hairy demon arm in this missing tableau scene likely also explains the later intertitle using exactly the same phrase, which does not entirely make sense in its current context without the visual echo back to the missing tableau.

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dragged to the stage. Peer Gynt is no longer Ibsen’s if the actors are dumb” (ibid., 196). It is important to note that the commonplace observation “it would no longer be Ibsen” – which appears so frequently that it passed easily under the radar without argument – loads up that authorial name with a high degree of assumed media essentialism that might be worth revisiting in a new light.

As Hanssen and others have pointed out, the view that Ibsen’s drama is fundamentally unadaptable to film has persisted mostly unchallenged from the time of Lindsay and Münsterberg to this day (Hanssen 2017, 159; Elliott 2013, 27), but it seems worth adding that, both now and then, those making that claim often do so in order to signal an elite command of each medium. That attitude is clear in Lindsay, at any rate, who wants his reader to understand that he knows his theatre. The assumptions guiding that claim, however, deploy models of influence or adaptation still dependent on aesthetic models of fidelity that make it difficult to see the filming of an Ibsen drama as anything other than a failure to find a meaningful equivalent. Both Lindsay and Münsterberg, in other words, approach Ibsen adaptation as they might approach an unusually tricky linguistic idiom, by simply retreating into easy claims of untranslatability.

This is where it might be helpful to pivot to a different model and think about these Ibsen films not as drama-into-film translation measured by successful or failed fidelity, but as examples of multiple movements of remediation within a media environment. A film such as the 1915 Ghosts would in this light be seen less as a failed Ibsenian drama and more as a remediated or repurposed media object in its own right. This eliminates the need to defend Ibsen or his aesthetic achievements, which tends to create a locked-in position where it is difficult to regard the film of Ghosts with anything other than disdain or bemusement. Instead, one might choose to see this film from a 1915 perspective, as an interesting nexus in a media environment, as will now be traced through its relationship to traditions of stage acting and as accompanied by paratextual support.

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Coming for the Show: Acting Styles in Transition Despite the importance of dialogue in Ibsen’s play, in this filmed version of Ghosts one finds it used rather sparingly in the intertitles. There are forty-eight intertitles in the Library of Congress print, but only eight represent dialogue, and of these only three seem to use Ibsen’s dramatic text as a source. In one early example, Pastor Manders states, “Your duty is to your husband” (in Ibsen’s text, this is cast in retrospective dialogue: “[…] And your duty was to hold firmly to the man you had once chosen”3 (1906, 202)),4 and then in another, Helen tells Manders, “I want my son to inherit nothing from his father. He’s mine—all mine” (in Ibsen’s text: “I was determined that Oswald, my own boy, should inherit nothing whatever from his father”5 (ibid., 211)). The third example, the most famous line in the play, comes at the dramatic climax of the film: “Give me the sun, Mother – Give me the sun!” (“Mother, give me the sun”6 (ibid., 294)). The remaining few dialogue intertitles use invented speech for different plot points, especially in showing the backstory sequences for which there can logically be no dialogue to borrow from the play since those actions were either invented for the film or left undepicted or reported elliptically in the play. The more typical intertitles in this film are narrative inserts that advance the plot descriptively in a summary way. (The Oscar Apfel adaptation of Peer Gynt of the same year did attempt intertitles that mimicked conversational turn-taking as in a printed dramatic script, but Ghosts does not pursue that strategy; see also Rees in this volume.)

Compounding the issue of lack of dialogue was the fact that, after 1913, the length of feature films changed from one to five reels (Sandberg 2005). Previous Ibsen adaptations (such as the early ones from 1911 dis-

3

I n the Norwegian first edition: “Og Deres ​pligt var at holde fast ved den mand, som De engang havde valgt” (2008, 429).

4

I use William Archer’s 1906 translation for comparison here since that would have been the likeliest available English version for the film producers in 1915. Vachel Lindsay, in fact, mentions that he prepared for the film viewing by refreshing his memory with the Archer translation (106).

5

“Jeg vilde ikke, at Osvald, min egen gut, skulde ta’ nogetsomhelst i arv efter sin far” (2008, 438).

6

“Mor, gi’ mig solen” (2008, 525).

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cussed elsewhere in this volume; see King and Yalgın) were condensed into a series of summary tableaux presented over the course of 10 to 15 minutes. The 1915 version of Ghosts came closer to one hour in length, and this presented the paradoxical challenge of extending the playing time without being able to rely on all that missing dialogue (there were fewer difficulties in the same year’s film version of Peer Gynt since that play lends itself better to an elaborate string of visual scenes than Ghosts).

It is even more challenging to convey the Ibsenian sense of the unsaid beneath the said when so little is said in the film in the first place.

A 1916 article in Moving Picture World on Ibsen’s creative method confronts this issue of dialogue in the longer five-reel form. Although the article indicates that a five-reel film would have a “scenario of acts” mimicking the overall organisation of a stage play, there was nevertheless clearly a concern about filling the time, given the removal of dialogue and the need to distil all of the reported plot into overt action: An application of this method to the big screen story would be to write a rude scenario of the action. In the first act the characters do so and so, in the second so and so, and so on, to determine, if for no other purpose, whether or not there is sufficient material for five reels. The writer may otherwise reach his crisis long before the fifth reel with a resultant amplification in the wrong place. (Harrison 1916, 1804)

One solution to the problem of length was to turn to other gestural theatrical traditions to fill in for the missing naturalist dialogue, although perhaps not in the way one might assume. Pantomime, the most direct substitution of gesture for speech, would be unsustainably tedious as the main communicative mode throughout a one-hour playing time, clumsier even than overloading the film with dialogue intertitles. Other approaches to gestural expressivity might be too vague and impressionistic to convey the crucial details of the Ibsenian plot and its interplay between the overt and the hidden. But framing the problem like this assumes that contemporary audiences shared the concerns about the faithful adaptation and reproduction of Ibsen on film. That seems unlikely, as there is little actual detailed comparison of the film with the original play in the contemporary press. It would seem that few film 106

viewers knew more about Ibsen than his general literary reputation. In that light, it may be worth exploring whether expressive acting styles could have functioned as an attraction – a show in their own right – as much as a compensatory compromise for what was missing. But first, an examination of the complex historical interplay between stage and screen acting in the early 1910s will help situate this 1915 Ibsen film.

The several studies of transitions in screen acting in the first half of the 1910s note a gradual abandonment of straightforwardly pantomimic styles. As Kristin Thompson notes, “Between approximately 1909 and 1913, acting styles in the American cinema underwent a distinct change: an exaggerated pantomime gave way to a system of emphasizing restrained gestures and facial expression” (1985, 189).

“Facial acting,” she argues, was in part made possible by the closer proximity of the camera but was also a marked preference in the emerging American style (ibid., 190). Thompson rightly points out that, while pantomime in the European style “conveyed a good deal of information” to the audience, it was a poor choice for communicating psychological causality and, in her assessment, was largely on the way out as a dominant acting style by the mid-teens.

Roberta E. Pearson, who devotes an entire chapter of her book Eloquent Gestures to a discussion of Henry Walthall’s acting styles, proposes an overly binary distinction between an earlier histrionic acting practice and an emerging verisimilar style but nevertheless nuances her assessment of Walthall’s career by noting the overlaps and stylistic pivots he could perform as he varied his roles, over the progression of his career and even within a single film: Here we have an actor of preeminent reputation among his contemporaries who clearly thought about his craft and yet who, nonetheless, exhibits no clear “progression” toward the verisimilar code. Rather, Walthall alternates between the old style and the new according to the film’s narrative structure and other signifying practices, as well as according to his character type. (1992, 119)

Surveying the many Walthall films from this period, Pearson also notes that he clearly adjusted his acting style with each filmic genre as well.

1 07

An especially perceptive assessment of trends in acting styles can be found in the work of Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs. Arguing from historical context and sources, they find the identification of “pictorial” acting styles to be more useful conceptually when describing the main trends of the 1910s (1997, 82). The striking of attitudes (moments of dilated or even fully paused temporality in which a posture was struck and held), which was carried over from the tableau traditions of nineteenth-­century theatre into screen acting, allowed for dramatic emphasis: “Like music, posing was used to underscore dramatic moments, to convey and heighten emotions, to elongate and intensify situations” (ibid.). The pictorial mode also provided stage actors with an expressive alternative to cruder forms of pantomime, which Brewster and Jacobs define more narrowly as the simple “substitution of gesture for dialogue” (ibid.). Also relevant to this study, however, is their passing mention that, in stage acting, the Ibsenian drama represented one of the strongest breaks with this pictorial tradition (ibid., 95), which of course made the adaptation of his works to the screen the most challenging: [W]e would like to stress the daring involved in adopting this kind of refusal of pictorial effect in the medium of silent film. Naturalist theatre was famously wordy, and to some extent the emphasis on the language compensated for the opacity of gesture and action typical of the [Naturalist] acting style. It required considerable sophistication to adapt it to the new medium. (ibid., 96)

In sum, this research into American film acting of the early 1910s indicates that at the time Ghosts was being produced, one can identify a rapid waning of directly mimed action, the enduring influence of a pictorial acting tradition, the emergence of new forms of verisimilar acting codes, and, most importantly, a likelihood of encountering any of these acting styles overlapping within or between films. Moreover, where the film in question was using a play from the Naturalist school (like Ibsen’s Ghosts) as source material, there was a further clash between what that play had already accomplished in terms of shifting the norms of stage acting and what was still happening at that time in the emergence of codes for the screen in its new adaptation context. All 108

of this together serves to make the 1915 Ghosts a truly “daring” project.

What one finds in the film itself is indeed a range of styles and a sophisticated extension of pictorial acting styles. Some of the actors offer vestigially pantomimic acting. Al W. Filson, who plays the doctor, uses finger pointing at characters to make relationships visible or at the head to warn of coming disease, along with extensive head-nodding and fist-pounding while talking to himself to show determination.

Although Walthall himself generally avoids the direct substitution of gesture for speech, he too resorts to an extended pantomime in a scene with the doctor immediately after Oswald’s birth. He is shown successively laughing, pointing at the doctor, himself, and the baby’s room, patting himself on the chest, circling his finger in his hand, dusting both hands, opening his arms wide, and laughing again without really getting a clear message across to the viewer. What might this extended pantomime actually mean? Those familiar with the play might guess that the Captain is telling the doctor that, despite his concerns about the parental fitness of a debauched and drunken father, he will continue on happily as he is. Or perhaps, alternatively, that he is a proud father. Or even that he cares nothing about that child in there. In other words, if this is pantomime used as a communicative crutch, it fails.

Sequences like this are not what attract comment in the fan-magazine discussions of Henry Walthall’s acting around the time Ghosts was released. Instead, viewers were more interested in what we might call “expressiveness”. This could take cerebral and affective forms, but in neither case was it framed as communicating the plot detail of the written play. For example, a Swedish actress of the Ibsenian stage, Hilda Englund,7 speculated on the appropriateness of Ibsen’s plays on screen in 1913 by emphasising their suitability for meeting the moviegoing demand for “pictures that think”, for films in which “thought is conveyed by the actions of the character” (1913, 14).

7

or a retrospective overview of her career as an Ibsenian actress, see the letter to the F editor by New York theatre critic Dixie Hines, “Ibsen and Hilde Englund” (New York Times 1926). Englund’s Swedish first name is spelt “Hulde” in the IbsenStage database and may have been normalised when she emigrated to America after the turn of the century.

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Ibsen’s plays are not “merely narrative”, she states, but present actors with the challenge of depicting pictures of thought: “They not only require acting in the conventional sense, they require thought, and the expression of thought in the face and by medium of the body as a whole” (ibid.). This 1913 assessment from the actress’s perspective predated several Ibsen film adaptations, including Majestic’s Ghosts, and is fascinating insofar as it reaches a conclusion diametrically opposed to that of the film theorists Lindsay and Münsterberg, namely that Ibsen is especially suited for film adaptation in a less verbal and more gestural performance mode because he creates “pictures that think”.

More commonly, however, this discourse praises the conveyance of feeling, and Walthall was seen as particularly adept at this.

One can see this most easily in his repertoire of characters gone mad in 1914–15, including the part of Edgar Allen Poe in the two films mentioned earlier, The Avenging Conscience (released earlier in 1914) and The Raven (released on 8 November 1915, after Ghosts’s premiere in Fig. 1. Movie Pictorial profile of Henry B. Walthall emphasising his expressive repertoire. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

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May). That autumn, an article in Movie Pictorial called Walthall a “Master Emotionalist”, referring especially to his performance as the Little Colonel in D. W. Griffith’s film (Fig. 1): Every emotion that can be found upon the strings of human sympathy has been brought into action by this star in “The Birth of a Nation.” Happiness, hope, despair, grief, determination, tenderness, belief, invention, satisfaction, organization, revenge, love, hatred—these and a thousand other reflections of the soul are to be found in Mr. Walthall’s part. And in the expression of each emotion and each mental change will be found the indelible imprint of genius. We do not say that it is Mr. Walthall’s eyes, or his expressions, or his dramatic action, or any other single thing that makes him what he is. It is all of these talents working in unison. (Movie Pictorial, 1915)

The same article continues thus: “In ‘Ghosts,’ his acting was a study and carried with it such pronounced dramatic emotion, it did not seem to be a thing of this world at all. It breathed horror, which means the very frontier of dramatic art” (ibid.). His growing reputation for affective acting is also clear in this assessment of his Ghosts performance in Reel Life (Mutual’s in-house promotional publication for film fans published between 1914 and 1917): “Strong and admirable as his acting has been in the many dramas and Griffith subjects in which he has been starred, the Mutual leading man perhaps never has measured up to the full height of his ability until now” (Reel Life, 1915b).

Especially impressive to some viewers was Walthall’s ability to “get things over” to the viewer, as conveyed in this letter to the editor of the fan publication Motion Picture Magazine: He is the most wonderfully adept actor on any screen. He possesses an untiring energy and ability, perfect control of facial expression, nerve and daring, and the ability to get things over without useless gestures. And if ever his hands and arms are used, they are so tense and filled with expression that they get the idea across; they fill your whole being with the feeling of his every emotion so well that a glance at his face is unnecessary to discern his meaning. Just drop in to your nearest movie and witness his performance of “Ghosts,” and see wherefore I speak. Ugh! I was never filled with horror, dread, not hate of anything so much as I was when I beheld Mr. Walthall as the dissipated father. His hands were hateful, writhing, claw-like things! (Motion Picture Magazine, 1915) 111

Fig. 2. Ghosts actor Henry B. Walthall compared to Shakespeare actor Edwin Booth in Motion Picture Magazine. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

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Although “getting things over” and “ideas across” might sound like the process of pantomime, this viewer’s intense reaction suggests instead that some fans had developed a connoisseur’s appreciation of Walthall’s gestural repertoire itself, his ability to convey feeling, not information, to the viewer. Seeing him test his skills in repeated emotive film roles throughout the mid-1910s was clearly an attraction of its own, independent of any particular narrative context, even a canonical one such as Ibsen’s play. Each story was just another occasion to see the “Master Emotionalist” at work.

Although another article in that same issue of Reel Life goes so far as to call Walthall’s gestural performance in Ghosts a revival of the ancient art of “Greek pantomime”, that use of the term seems to be loosely metaphoric, intended to convey the evocation of profound feeling: “Here is a picture, which in its pantomimic power, in its play upon the emotions, outrivals and outclasses the spoken play […]” This writer even speculates that if Ibsen had been able to see this film, he would have had to admit “how much more effectively the screen has interpreted the message which he wished to bring, than all the many masterly productions of the speaking stage” (1915a). That is a big claim, one that upends the usual aesthetic hierarchies. More interesting than the accuracy of the claim itself – this is after all promotional discourse from the film distributor – is the fact that it was “thinkable” at all, that the substitution of expressive gesture for dialogue could be perceived not as a deficiency or compromise, but as something that could in fact be promoted as a positive feature in the trade press, as it was when, for instance, he was described as the “Edwin Booth of the Screen” (Fig. 2), referring to the most famous Shakespearian stage actor of the nineteenth century (Motion Picture Magazine, 1916).

There is in fact a remarkable degree of nuance and range in Walthall’s performance in Ghosts, and watching his gestural range suggests an interesting extension of the pictorial acting style. One particular gesture can suggest the whole as Oswald’s disease progresses. While the main image in Figure 2 has likely been taken from The Avenging Conscience, the insert image in the upper left is from Walthall’s performance in Ghosts. It isolates the repeated and escalating sign of the “inherited taint”, 113

(a)

(b)

(e)

(f)

(i)

(j)

Figs. 3a-l. Montage of several of Walthall’s gestural winces that signal “inherited taint”. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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(c)

(d)

(g)

(h)

(k)

(l)

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as an intertitle so delicately puts it: a kind of spasm, reaching for the back of the head. Although not strictly a pictorial pose as it does not involve any real stasis or held attitude, Walthall’s repeated wince does involve a “stereotyped posture” that is both repeated and varied over the course of the film, underscoring the character psychology or dramatic situation, which Brewster and Jacobs include as other elements of the traditional style (1998, 101). There are more than a dozen repetitions of this gesture, with a selection of them shown here as a collage (Fig. 3). This is the film’s past made visible, a gesture that communicated dread and approaching doom to the viewers of 1915, to judge from the popular response.

A closer look at these moments even reveals that what Lindsay referred to dismissively as “endless writhings” might instead be seen as the actor’s solo cadenzas within this repeated gestural frame, as Walthall’s body pauses but his face moves rapidly and plastically through a series of minute transformations that signal the progress of the disease. As the film progresses to its conclusion, the writhings become more comprehensive, to be sure, but the continuum from first twinge to final collapse at the end of the film is impressive. What Walthall “gets across” to the viewer is a general affective horror, not plot detail, and to judge from the popular contemporary reactions in the fan magazines, the writhings were a feature, not a bug. Perhaps the impatience of today’s viewers with the frequent repetitions of a seemingly identical gesture is an anachronistic response, an imposition of the standards of narrative economy onto a system designed instead for the appreciation of expressivity.

Paratexts: Elaboration or Remediation?

The historical sources presented above indicate that the substitution of an expressive code for a communicative code (whether actual or pantomimed speech) clearly satisfied those coming to see a Walthall film, but what of those looking for an Ibsen film instead? While our examination of the transitional screen acting context of the early 1910s has suggested ways of recovering the lost pleasures of gestural virtuosity, questions remain about this film’s tether to the dramatic plotting of the original and whether it seemed important to communicate that to the audience as well. As has been mentioned, the lack of sustained insider 116

discussion of plot differences in the trade press suggests that promoters cared or knew little about Ibsen’s originals, and even those who, like Vachel Lindsay, took pride in their knowledge of the dramatic canon seem to have understood their position as exceptional. When Lindsay mentions, for example, that the film of Ghosts had been “furiously denounced by the literati” (2000, 106), he was also marking that response as elite, suggesting indirectly that divergences from a frankly unfamiliar original were unlikely to concern most viewers.

Nevertheless, there seems to have been a nagging sense of obligation to that original text that surfaces in the paratextual discourse about the film. That is, if the 1915 Ghosts had given itself over entirely to the display of virtuoso expressive gesture, one wouldn’t find such a proliferation of textual materials related to the film. In this regard it is worth remembering that films of the silent era have been unnaturally isolated in the archive as discrete objects. In their original performance context, they were projected along with other films and musical accompaniment, and films of the early teens also often relied on what we now would regard as extra-filmic narrative support – plot summaries in printed souvenir cinema programmes and story elaborations in fan magazines – but which at the time are likely to have been considered part of the same media environment, as their archival isolation had not yet occurred (Singer 1993; Sandberg 2001). We can see evidence of this paratextual practice around the time when Ghosts was released as well, for the trade and fan magazines were full of ekphrastic narrative forms.

It is certainly possible to see this interest in “short stories” of the films as an indirect admission on the part of exhibitors that the cinematic narration of dramatic texts still felt incomplete in its visual delivery without full access to the dialogue. But rather than automatically seeking an explanation in this narrative-deficiency model, it may be interesting to note the pivot from adaptation-translation models that occurs when one regards these paratexts not as stop-gap narrative crutches but as a parallel elaboration of the story world of both play and film in a wider media environment. An advertisement in Motion Picture Magazine from 1916, for example, seems to suggest that these short stories were taking on a role of their own, untethered from the films that inspired them, around 117

the time of Ghosts’ release, and, in fact, one can find just such a promotion of a “Film Story” derived from Ghosts in the British fan magazine Pictures and the Picturegoer two months after the film’s initial release.

Entitled “The Inherited Burden” (which was also the title of the Ghosts film itself in its British distribution), this three-page short-story version elaborates on the adapted plot in a way the film cannot given its limited use of dialogue, even as it repurposes stills from the 1915 film as supporting illustrations for the story (Fig. 4). It is worth emphasising here the complicated chain of textual transformations that led to this printed version of The Inherited Burden: the story is credited in the fan magazine to Norman Howard, but the story’s masthead title also traces the material back to both Ibsen (“Based on the celebrated play ‘Ghosts’”) – and the film – (“Adapted from the Majestic Production”) (Howard 1915, 368). Lest we persist in thinking simplistically about adaptation, it is worth emphasising that, technically speaking, the latter example announces itself as an adaptation of an adaptation, but at that point it might be best to let go of all hierarchies of originals and derivatives and to begin to see this in terms of the simultaneous circulation of similar materials, because this “short

Figs. 4a–b. Two of the three pages from the paratext “The Inherited Burden”. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

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story” contains at least as many traces of the drama as of the film.

Note, for instance, the compulsive use of appositional adverbs in this prose elaboration of the film’s plot. As we read here, Mrs Alving repeats “critically”, Manders replies “courteously”, Mrs Alving returns “smiling”; Helen echoes “huskily,” etc. The comma-plus-adverb formally mimics the way stage directions appear on the page in a drama, an effect especially noticeable in the short-story version due to its conspicuous repetition, but also because there is of course no possibility of delivering dialogue “huskily” in a silent film since it is precisely the aural quality of the voice that cannot be conveyed – that is an effect for the page. It is as if the repressed dialogue and stage directions from the play return with a vengeance in this “film story”, which, unlike most actual short stories, consists almost exclusively of speech and no other forms of narration. The “story” here is mostly dialogue in a prose package, supplemented by images taken from the film. In this way it is neither drama nor film but a third thing – yet another version of Ghosts.

Another example gives further evidence of the wider textual activity circulating around the 1915 Ghosts. A one-page prose summary of Ghosts, again from the Mutual Corporation’s promotional Reel Life, includes an extensive dialogue section from the scene in which Oswald returns home from Paris (1915c). (The film, by contrast, includes exclusively the following intertitles in this middle section of the film, with no dialogue: “Oswald’s return to his home”/ “The doctor makes an examination: He recognises the taint but conceals the truth from his patient”/ “As the days go by.”) In the prose version of the story, however, we get dialogue that sounds much more like it is coming from Ibsen’s play: “Mother!” cried the young man at last, “I’ve something to tell you. I cannot go on hiding it from you!”

Helen showed alarm.

“I could never bring myself to write to you about it,” he hurried on. “And since I’ve come home—I feel such a terrible dread! The everlasting gloom of this Norway country—will the sun never shine again?”

“Oswald,” whispered the mother, seizing him by the arm, “what is the matter? You are fatigued? You are not ill?”

“It’s not an ordinary fatigue. No, and I’m not what is commonly called ‘ill’, either.” He clasped his hands above his head. ‘Mother, my mind is 119

broken down—ruined—I shall never be able to work again.”

He buried his head in her lap, sobbing heart-brokenly. (ibid.)

And in fact, it may not be surprising to discover that it is coming from Ibsen’s play – quite directly from William Archer’s English translation of Ibsen, the one that would have been most readily at hand for a trade magazine film journalist on assignment to recreate Ibsenian dialogue for the short prose paratext of the film, which as mentioned would itself have been of no help whatsoever as a source for quoted speech.

These lines from the 1906 Archer translation, however, clearly served the anonymous Reel Life journalist in 1915 very well: OSWALD. [Sits down.] There is something I must tell you, mother.

MRS. ALVING. [Anxiously.] Well?

OSWALD. [Looks fixedly before him.] For I can’t go on hiding it any longer. […]

OSWALD. [As before.] I could never bring myself to write to you about it; and since I’ve come home— […]

OSWALD. […] I’m not downright ill, either; not what is commonly called “ill.” [Clasps his hands above his head.] Mother, my mind is broken down—ruined—I shall never be able to work again! [With his hands before his face, he buries his head in her lap, and breaks into bitter sobbing.]8 (Ibsen 1906, 243–45)

8 O SVALD sætter sig Nu må jeg sige dig noget, mor.

FRU ALVING spændt Nu vel!

OSVALD stirrer frem for sig For jeg kan ikke gå og bære på det længer. […]

OSVALD som før Jeg har ikke kunnet komme mig for at skrive dig til om det; og siden jeg kom hjem – […]

OSVALD

[…] Jeg er ikke rigtig syg heller; ikke sådan, hvad man almindelig kalder syg. (slår hænderne sammen over hodet) Mor, jeg er åndelig nedbrudt, – ødelagt, – jeg kan aldrig komme til at arbejde mere!

Han kaster sig med hænderne for ansigtet ned i hendes skød og brister i hulkende gråd (Ibsen 2008, 472–473).

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This little forensic reconstruction of sources is not undertaken in the spirit of detecting plagiarism but to underscore this rendering of Ghosts as at the very least a triangulation between the film, the play, and the promotional prose. As the conventions of film writing grew to the point where permanent staff could be hired to produce such reading material for each issue that could be recognised within its own discursive niche, there were suddenly Ghosts aplenty in circulation in the summer and autumn of 1915.

What conclusions might one draw from this circulation of materials between the drama, film, and magazine paratexts? For one, it confirms the productivity of thinking about adaptation as an ongoing “transpositional” and “textualizing” process (Sanders 2016, 22; 207) rather than as an issue of fidelity, as that would not account for the several ways in which viewers and readers encountered Ibsen’s Ghosts in 1915. For some who encountered the synopsis or the short story in the fan magazines, this was conceivably their introduction to Ibsen, one that led back both to the film (through the still images) and perhaps to the play (through the quoted dialogue) simultaneously. The “para” in paratext, in other words, places this fan magazine prose “next to” both film and drama in equal measure. In fact, this image from another fan magazine in 1915 (Fig. 5) shows just this phenomenon, the way that all of these mediations were simply gathered under the name “Ibsen”: “What’s in a name? Everything, when that name is Ibsen” (Pictures and the Picturegoer, 1915). Rather than view this as another simple case of film’s crass borrowing of prestige from the world of letters, it might be useful to regard it in this way instead: in 1915, “Ibsen” was the name of a media constellation.

The unidirectional model of literature-to-film adaptation doesn’t account for the complexity of these transactions and assumes too much about the essential qualities of dramatic literature, which as we have seen get dispersed across these written paratexts in several different ways. But the bigger problem seems to be the way that the understanding of adaptation makes the failure or unsuitability of Ibsen drama the main story of its relationship to film. That hierarchical literary prioritisation of dense theatrical dialogue prevents us from seeing many other 121

attractions evident in the film: everything from an actress’s view of “pictures that think” to the ways in which audiences appreciated virtuoso gesticulation as a kind of extreme sport that one could track across Henry Walthall’s various madness films of the mid-teens and to the pleasures of “fan-reading” the films in short-prose form. If, in this film’s original horizon of reception, the word “Ibsen” functioned more as the name of a media constellation than of a canonical author, then it seems safe to claim that there can indeed be a good “Ibsen” film – or at least a historically intriguing one.

Fig. 5. At the height of the “ghostly” summer of 1915, this advertisement ran in Pictures and the Picturegoer. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

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Elliott, Kamilla. 2013. “Theorizing Adaptations/Adapting Theories.” In ­Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, 19–46. London: Bloomsbury.

Englund, Hilda. 1913.“Ibsen Dramas on the Screen.” Exhibitors’Times, 31 May:14.

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Harrison, Louis Reeves. 1916. “Creative Method—Ibsen.” Moving Picture World, 16 September:1804.

Hines, Dixie. 1926. “Ibsen and Hilde Englund.” New York Times, 28 March: n.p.

Howard, Norman. 1915. “The Inherited Burden.” Pictures and the Picturegoer, 14 August:368–70.

Ibsen, Henrik. 1906. The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen.Vol.VII: A Doll’s House; Ghosts. Translated by William Archer. London: William Heinemann, Ltd. ———. 2008. Henrik Ibsens skrifter 7: Samfundets støtter; Et dukkehjem; ­Gengangere; En folkefiende, edited by Vigdis Ystad.

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Mayer, David. 2009. Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American ­Theatre, edited by Thomas Postlewait. Studies in Theatre History and Culture.

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Motion Picture Magazine. 1915. “Letter to the Editor.” October:163.

———. 1916. “The Edwin Booth of the Screen.” February:140.

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Pearson, Roberta. 1992. Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of Performance Style in the Griffith Biograph Films. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pictures and the Picturegoer. 1915. “What’s in a Name?” 17 July:299.

Proctor, George D. 1915. “Ghosts.” Motion Picture News, 29 May:67.

Reel Life. 1915a. “Stories of the New Photoplays.” 8 May:8.

———. 1915b. “Real Tales About Reel Folk.” 8 May:25.

———. 1915c. “Ghosts.” 15 May:16.

———. 1915d. “Where the Movies are Made.” 15 May:22.

Sandberg, Mark B. 2001. “Pocket Movies: Souvenir Cinema Programs and the Danish Silent Cinema.” Film History 13:6–22.

———. 2005. “Multiple–Reel Feature Films: Europe.” In Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, edited by Richard Abel, 452–56. New York: Routledge.

Sanders, Julie. 2016. Adaptation and Appropriation, 2nd edition, The New ­Critical Idiom. London: Routledge.

Singer, Ben. 1993. “Fiction Tie-ins and Narrative Intelligibility 1911–1918.” Film History 5:489–504.

Thompson, Kristin. 1985. “The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909–28.” In The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960, edited

by David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger, 155–240.

New York: Columbia University Press.

Turim, Maureen. 1989. Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History.

New York: Routledge.

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5. Peer Gynt: The Missing Years Peer Gynt (Oscar Apfel, Morosco, 1915) Peer Gynts Jugend and Peer Gynts Wanderjahre und Tod (Victor Barnowsky, Richard Oswald-Film, 1919) Ellen Rees

This chapter examines the insertion of sequences that depict the missing years in the life of the eponymous hero of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867) into early film adaptations directed by Oscar Apfel and Victor Barnowsky and released in 1915 (USA) and 1919 (Germany) respectively. Ibsen describes these missing years, which transpire between the action of acts three and four in the dramatic poem very briefly, but they take on a surprisingly central role in these cinematic remediations.

My focus is thus on what film theorist Robert Stam calls the “amplification” of elements in a hypotext (2000, 66). Both Apfel and Barnowsky use elements from popular film genres, such as the western and the colonial adventure, and both activate racial stereotypes in order to domesticate Ibsen’s text for American and German audiences.

Before moving on to examine how the creators of the two Peer Gynt film adaptations have amplified Peer’s activities during his missing years, it is useful to review how they are described in the dramatic poem itself. At the end of Act 3, we learn that Peer is leaving Norway, headed for “The sea – and ocean […] And much further still” (Ibsen 1995, 72).1 When we next see Peer, he has become a middle-­aged man who reflects over his past experiences. He has been

1

“Mod Havet […]. Og længer endda” (Ibsen 2007, 595).

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a wealthy ship owner in Charleston (Ibsen 1995, 77; Ibsen 2007, 602), sold enslaved Africans, and exported alternately Hindu idols and Christian missionaries to China (Ibsen 1995, 78; Ibsen 2007, 603). He also recounts that he established himself as a plantation owner with enslaved workers (Ibsen 1995, 78; Ibsen 2007, 605). In the auction scene in the fifth act, after Peer has returned home as an old man, we learn that he had worked as a gold miner in San Francisco (Ibsen 1995, 143; Ibsen 2007, 703). Immediately after, as he peels an onion in one of the dramatic poem’s most iconic soliloquies, he finds layers containing both his “gold-digger self” and the time he spent as a Hudson Bay fur trapper (Ibsen 1995, 145; Ibsen 2007, 705). And finally, when pleading his case for being considered a sinner to the Thin Person, Peer again brings up trafficking in enslaved people and exporting images of Brahma to China as among the worst of his transgressions (Ibsen 1995, 164; Ibsen 2007, 736). Ibsen describes none of these episodes in any more detail, and they remain outside the diegesis of the dramatic poem, on what literary theorist Gérard Genette (1980) calls the hypodiegetic level of the literary text. They are in essence kernels of larger stories inserted into the main narrative through only the briefest of references. Their very brevity and obscurity in Ibsen’s original make it all the more interesting to observe how fully they are amplified in these two film adaptations.

Oscar Apfel’s Adaptation: Peer Gynt as Immigrant Oscar Apfel (1878–1938), a prolific director and occasional collaborator with his more famous counterpart, Cecil B. DeMille, directed Peer Gynt at a watershed moment, both in film history and in United States history more generally. As Black Studies scholar Cedric J. Robinson observes, 1915 famously saw the appearance of cinema’s first blockbuster, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the American Civil War and inspired a nationwide revival of the Ku Klux Klan (see also Sandberg in this volume). He further argues that 1915 “was a moment during which the mapping of American culture was re-inscribed, when the contours of the social practices which came to characterise twentieth-century American society 126

were fixed” (1997, 164). The American economy was growing exponentially, transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial society that rivalled the output of the most advanced European nations (ibid., 165). Not surprisingly then, Apfel focuses on the pursuit of wealth as the dominant theme in his adaptation of Ibsen’s dramatic poem, but it is a pursuit carried out at the expense of non-white Others. While it comes nowhere near the overt white supremacist propaganda of The Birth of a Nation, this American adaptation of Peer Gynt has to be understood as part of the broader social context in which that ideology flourished. Film scholar Victoria Williams points out that cinema emerged as a new medium during a time when biological determinism influenced the prevailing scientific and popular views of race and argues that this, in conjunction with the chronological proximity of the Civil War, contributed to the widespread cinematic portrayal of African Americans (and, I would argue, by extension other racialised Others) as inferior to whites (2017, 1).

In the Apfel film, events that occur between Act 3 and Act 4 of Peer Gynt play a major structural role in the narrative. The three inserted sequences primarily comment on America rather than reflecting intertextually on Ibsen’s dramatic poem. They introduce exciting intrigue into the narrative, in addition to illustrating Peer’s moral ambiguity. Eirik Frisvold Hanssen describes Apfel’s film as: a burlesque of Ibsen’s story adapted to US locations, historical events, ethnic diversity, and conflict typical of many other instances of contemporary popular US cinema: the treatment of native Americans, the slave trade, and the system of law enforcement. The liberties taken with the plot in this film in particular illustrate the conflict arising from the attempt to combine highbrow cultural traditions with a popular cultural medium. (2017, 169)

As Hanssen suggests, one factor that may have influenced Apfel’s decision to concentrate so much on the missing years in America was the questionable cultural legitimacy of the early film industry as a whole.

Dominique Brégent-Heald explains the phenomenon: In light of ongoing pressures to regulate and/or censor films, various U.S. film companies adapted […] renowned literary works as part of a broader attempt to elevate the cultural legitimacy of the motion picture 127

industry. An added benefit to this strategy was increased profits; picturizations of notable plays and novels appealed to a middle-class clientele without alienating working-class patronage. Most of these early productions were adaptations of well-known works of fiction that took place in North American settings. (2010, 146)

The opening title indicates that Peer Gynt is a work “by Henrik Ibsen”, who would have been known to educated audiences. Peer Gynt itself, however, was likely far less well known to American viewers than other Ibsen plays, having only been performed for the first time there in 1905, and then only in Norwegian (IbsenStage). While the first reel of Apfel’s film opens with a reference to Norwegian folk tales, and Norway is presented as a pastiche of old-world folk culture, Apfel devotes significant screen time to Peer’s immigrant experience in America, perhaps in an overt attempt to domesticate the narrative for American audiences.

Sadly, the second reel of the film has been lost, but it appears likely that the amplifications of Peer’s “missing years” first appear in the third reel; an intertitle announces that “5 years later — Peer has traveled to America and become a trapper”.2 From this we can surmise that he has become an immigrant, allowing Apfel to tap into one of the most dominant narratives of the American experience. The ensuing sequence, which borrows from the western genre, depicts a rivalry between Peer and an unnamed Native American (who appears to be a white actor in redface) for the affections of the so-called “Half-Breed” Notanah. In the sequence, Notanah betrays Peer and then she and her lover steal from him; the two men confront each other in a knife fight that ends with Peer killing his rival. Other Native Americans pursue Peer, but he escapes after killing a second man.

The sequence activates a number of racially determined cinematic tropes that are also gendered. Peer, who among other things

2

T he second reel probably contains Peer’s encounter with the trolls, given that he meets what appears to be the Woman in Green after returning home to Norway in the last reel. In Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith, A. Nicholas Vardac references a contemporary review of the film that critiques the now missing scene of Aase’s death, which also must have been part of the second reel (1987, 219).

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demonstrates mastery of trapping, knife fighting, and canoeing, embodies “male-centered narratives that celebrated elemental justice, individualism, physical prowess, and virile action, considered to be key elements in early twentieth-century notions of ideal white frontier masculinity” (Brégent-Heald 2010, 161). As a rival for the affections of Notanah, he is held up against her nameless Native American lover.

Michael Hilger argues that there are two main stereotypes of Native American men in American cinema, the “noble red man” and the “savage”, noting that the “Western always measures the goodness of the Noble Red Man and the badness of the Savage by the way these character types react to the superior white characters, never by their intrinsic nature” (1995, 3). Notanah’s lover is clearly meant to be an example of the latter, and in contrast to him Peer comes across as an ideal white frontiersman. Notably, the question of whether it is in fact Peer, as a European interloper, who is stealing from the Native Americans in the first place, rather than vice versa, is never raised in the film.

As a so-called “half breed” woman, Notanah has special status. According to Gretchen M. Bataille and Bob Hicks, compared to “pure” Native Americans the “half breed” was conceived of as “even more vicious and more dishonest, having inherited the worst traits of both Indian and Anglo” (Bataille and Hicks 1990, 10; see also Hilger 1995, 37–38). We see this stereotype clearly manifested in Notanah’s betrayal of Peer. In direct contrast to Notanah, Solvejg is marked as Christian and fully white, and thus ostensibly “pure”. Notanah, supposedly inherently duplicitous because of her mixed racial status, also foreshadows the appearance of the belly dancing North African Anitra (unnamed in Apfel’s adaptation) later in the film, and both women serve as foils to Solvejg.3

3

I t should be noted that both women are played by white actors. A more thorough discussion of the Anitra character falls outside the scope of this chapter, but as Daniel Pike points out, the “seductive belly dancer stereotype” is, along with the Arab “sheik”, “one of the oldest stereotypes in filmmaking”, dating back to the 1890s (2017, 33). Apfel uses a split screen image with Solvejg at the cabin and Peer abandoned in the desert after Anitra has stolen his horse and jewels to underscore the stereotypical demonisation of the Arab woman in contrast with the ostensibly “pure” white woman.

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A new intertitle introduces Peer as a slave runner a further five years later. This sequence, which borrows from the gangster genre, focuses on an attempt to arrest Peer for trading illegally in enslaved people. A female secret service agent is tipped off about Peer’s planned meeting at a hotel and sets up a romantic assignation with him onboard his slave trading vessel in order to entrap him. In the ensuing melee, Peer flees rather improbably through the hold, where numerous black men are being held, and jumps overboard, escaping to land; the question of why Peer manages to escape while the other men remain imprisoned is unresolved in the film, suggesting that the sequence serves primarily as a spectacle of the enslaved black body. Notably, the actors portraying the enslaved men are not white actors in blackface, a practice that dominated the film industry at the time, but African American actors (Gipson and Martinez 2017, 113). They are mostly shirtless men clad only in striped pajama pants, and their bodies dominate the frame. After Peer escapes, the film cuts away to a scene depicting Solvejg, and we see church bells ringing and Solvejg on her knees praying, presumably for Peer’s soul. He is thus presented in a way that again prompts the viewer to sympathise with him, this time as a rakish crook for whom we cheer as he evades capture.

The third and final sequence from America presents Peer, now ensconced as a plantation owner, hosting a party where he flirts with a woman who is accompanied by another man. Viewers are reminded of white domination over black bodies by the insertion of a group of black musicians who play at the party and a black maid who tells her white mistress (the “flirt”) that the dalliance with Peer has prompted a duel set to take place the next morning. This results in Peer shooting the other man dead.4 This plantation sequence echoes what Williams describes as the “mini genre” of the plantation romance, which featured loyal and happy black servants who, according to Williams, might have been “intended to soothe white anxieties about social

4

hile the duel itself is missing in this heavily deteriorated section of the film, we see it W clearly in a flashback in the fifth act.

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change”. She argues that “by depicting African Americans as inept, childlike, and uncomprehending, white audiences could retain comforting feelings of superiority” and further that such depictions “offered white audiences assurances that a stable social order based on racial hierarchy could exist in which all participants were content” (Williams 2017, 4). This parallels Peer’s improbable claims in Ibsen’s text about the slaves he owned: They throve, filled out to such a measure it was, to them and me, a pleasure.

Yes sir; without exaggeration I treated them as father, friend (Ibsen 1995, 79)5

Viewers are thus subtly guided to dismiss the inhumane consequences of the spectacle of the incarcerated black bodies in the previous sequence, and the film ultimately reflects a broader cultural discourse that argued that enslaved Africans were somehow better off under white control. Like the broader forces of white hegemony in the United States, Peer escapes without consequences for his immoral actions, regardless of what role he plays – lowly frontiersman, up-and-coming slave runner, or wealthy plantation owner (see Figs. 1–3).

After the plantation romance sequence, a cut to another intertitle signals that a further ten years have passed and that Peer, for no particular reason, is now on the Barbary Coast of Northwest Africa, and the film picks up the action of Ibsen’s text at the point where he steals the robes and horse of the prophet (Ibsen 1995, 95; Ibsen 2007, 627). Apfel thus essentially replaces the entire first part of the fourth act of Ibsen’s text, which consists of Peer’s conversation with his four international companions, with the sequences from America. It might be argued that this is an instance of cinematic “showing, not telling”, given that Ibsen’s Peer tells his companions about his experiences in North America in

5

“ De trivedes, blev blanke, fede, / saa det var mig og dem en Glæde. / Ja, jeg tør sige uden Skryden, / jeg handled mod dem som en Faer –” (Ibsen 2007, 605).

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Figs. 1-3. Peer (Cyril Maude) as frontiersman, slave runner, and plantation owner in Peer Gynt (1915). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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that conversation, but the content of Apfel’s added sequences is so extensive and differs so much from what Ibsen has Peer recount in his conversation that it needs to be examined as original material. In these three amplified episodes, Apfel constructs a clear narrative of development, with Peer rising in social and economic status in each sequence, at each instance through the overt exploitation of people of colour.

From among the many narrative possibilities latent in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, Apfel chose to develop a classic, linear “rags-to-riches” story as a meaningful way to structure the adaptation for American audiences. In a study of the “rags-to-riches” trope, Manuel Peña documents how deeply rooted it is in American culture, calling it “one of the classic neo-myths of American folklore” (2012, 60). He explains that: Its outlines were drawn as early as the Puritan days, although it found its first champion in Benjamin Franklin [….] For Franklin, as for his successors in the gospel of success-through-personal initiative, material enrichment was the reward for adhering to the tenets of the Protestant creed: obey God’s primary mandate to humanity—to work hard—but always in the spirit of service to his Lord and the public good. (Peña 2012, 60)

There is a certain logic in connecting Ibsen’s text to this narrative. Indeed, Peer himself suggests it in the opening of Ibsen’s fourth act, saying: My friends; consider how my life’s progressed.

What was I when I first went west?

A hard-up lad with empty hands (Ibsen 1995, 76)6

Yet it works only up to a point. If Peer is to be understood as an immigrant, it makes sense that the first three acts, which are set in the “old country”, would function as a kind of vaguely folkloristic and prelapsarian backdrop for the more specifically American story of Peer’s rise

6

“ Kjære Venner; / betænk mit Levnetsløb forresten. / Hvorledes kom jeg først til Vesten? / Som fattig Karl med tomme Hænder” (Ibsen 2007, 602).

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to wealth. The morality of Peer’s actions in America, however, remains an open question. Because the film activates tropes and conventions of popular cinematic genres, in which the protagonist is construed as good, the viewer is prompted to interpret Peer positively. The film also reproduces standard American cinematic conventions that devalue non-white characters and thus implicitly lessen the impact of Peer’s mistreatment of them for the viewer, who is presumed to share this ideological position that privileges the white protagonist.

After arriving in Africa, however, the film seems to stray from the rags-to-riches narrative. Apfel presents Peer’s persona in the first scenes on the Barbary coast in a way that would have made him legible to American audiences in 1915 as a wealthy “robber baron”, an unethical business tycoon. One could argue that Peer has reached the pinnacle of financial success, and that this film, as a rags-to-riches tale, could have ended at this point. Yet Apfel sticks to the geographic trajectory of the hypotext, if not its existential exploration, and has Peer continue on into the perceived incomprehensibility of Africa after his four companions steal his yacht. The last we see of him before the fifth act commences is that he is wandering alone in the desert, still wearing the robes of the prophet and bewildered by Anitra’s betrayal.

The final reel of the film is introduced with the intertitle “Ten Years Later: Peer has tired of his travels and decides to return to his native land”. This is a strikingly unconvincing motivation for the action of the plot. One contemporary reviewer blamed Ibsen for the difficulty in maintaining a convincing movie plot, writing rather ambivalently: The ways in which the peculiar brain of Ibsen may be spread on the screen are so limited that scenario writer and director are apt to flounder about for a while and then strike out for shore. But as both scenario writer and director, Mr. Apfel has found a way to make almost a continuous, coherent story out of Peer Gynt’s allegorical vagaries, and an impressive picture is the result. (Thew 1915, 66)

Not originally intended for performance, Ibsen’s dramatic poem is, in addition to being an exploration of national identity, more of an exis134

tential journey than a physical one, a point that seems to have escaped the reviewer. By returning home again to the pure (white) Solvejg, Peer reinforces the dominant social order for American audiences.

Through the insertion of hypodiegetic sequences depicting the non-white bodies that Peer exploits in his quest for wealth and power, Apfel strengthens a message of specifically white American exceptionalism in the film. Peer rises to wealth at their expense, and his mistreatment of them does not undermine his redemption. While not a simple rags-to-riches narrative, Apfel’s Peer Gynt artfully encapsulates and activates the same complex relationships between wealth, race, and faith that continue to dominate the US today.7 Victor Barnowsky’s Adaptation: Peer Gynt as Coloniser Victor Barnowsky’s (1875–1952) Peer Gynt also shifts attention away from major scenes in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and instead explores hypodiegetic narratives, not only from between the third and fourth acts but also from Peer’s life before the first act. It appears to follow Ibsen’s text less closely than Apfel’s film, although this is difficult to determine because the extant print was at some point significantly shortened by almost two thirds of its runtime, and the full original is now considered lost. Barnowsky inserts a long opening sequence or prequel depicting Peer’s childhood and the downfall of his father, Jon Gynt, and then rather briefly presents Peer’s journey to America and rise to wealth mining for gold in California. Most notably, Barnowsky devotes significant screen time to Peer’s experiences as a slave trader in Africa, though not, it should be noted, to his time as a slave owner running a plantation in America. It seems likely that this is because Barnowsky’s main interest in adapting Ibsen’s text lies in the African setting.

7

similar case could be made regarding Peer’s exploitative treatment of women in the film, A although this is complicated by the female federal agent and Anitra, both of whom almost get the better of Peer.

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This lack of fidelity has nothing to do with insufficient familiarity with the hypotext. As director of the prestigious Lessing Theatre in Berlin from 1913 to 1924, Barnowsky chose Peer Gynt as his very first production for the company, receiving widespread critical acclaim for it. Although Peer Gynt arrived late to the German stage, it virtually exploded in popularity there after 1910, and Barnowsky was particularly central to its dissemination (Hanssen 2018, 199).

Heiko Uecker speculates that Peer Gynt took on special significance for the German public during and immediately after the Great War “as a joyful, helpful message to a people at war” (1985, 167).8 None of the sources I have consulted indicate that Barnowsky explored the missing years of Ibsen’s dramatic poem in his many Peer Gynt stage productions.9 The fact that he went on to restage the dramatic poem numerous times at the Lessing Theatre in the years up to 1924 attests to his deep familiarity with and commitment to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the time he produced his film adaptation. The significant contrast to his stage versions makes the amplifications in Barnowsky’s film adaptation all the more striking.

Produced in 1918 during the Great War and distributed in two parts the following year, Peer Gynts Jugend [Peer Gynt’s Youth] and Peer Gynts Wanderjahre und Tod [Peer Gynt’s Migratory Years and Death], this harshly criticised adaptation became Barnowsky’s first and last foray into filmmaking. Thor Holt argues that Barnowsky’s film fits into a broader attempt on the part of the German film industry to support the war effort in a manner similar to the theatrical adaptations discussed by Uecker, and that “[i]ntended or not, this adaptation by star producer Richard Oswald, born Ornstein and rumored to have taken his professional last name after the character Oswald in Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881), resonated with attempts to bolster

8

“[…] als eine erfreuliche hilfreiche Botschaft für ein Volk im Krieg […].”

9

mong other sources, I checked the lists of characters for each of Barnowsky’s various A stage productions of Peer Gynt to see if there are any names related to Peer’s “missing years”. See the entries for these productions in IbsenStage: ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/pages/ contributor/444813.

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national sentiments in World War I” (2019, xviii). Holt documents a shift in the early twentieth-century German reception of Ibsen from an interest in the social problem plays to earlier works, and Peer Gynt in particular; the dramatic poem developed into a kind of national epos for Germany during the first decades of the twentieth century, and Peer’s circular journey out into the world and back again functions allegorically to justify the growing focus on the importance of Heimat and an increasing xenophobia that would reach its peak during the German Third Reich (ibid., xviii).

Barnowsky, then, “domesticates” Peer Gynt for a very different audience than Apfel, and the film needs to be understood within its specific historical context. While it may well have been initially conceived as a means of generating nationalistic support for the German war effort, it can be linked to a broader preoccupation with the European colonial enterprise. German colonial activity in Africa began in 1884 with the Berlin Conference and the ensuing “Scramble for Africa” and effectively ended with the German loss of the Great War and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II – the emperor – in 1918. Germany was formally stripped of its African colonies in the Versailles Treaty of 1919.

It thus appears that Barnowsky uses the sequence depicting Peer’s activity in America as a mere pretext for the real heart (of darkness) of the film, Peer’s imperial project in Africa.

Barnowsky structures the film explicitly around a narrative of empire. The question of empire arises in the opening sequences of the film, in which Barnowsky presents the viewer with two separate hypodiegetic imperial visions of Peer. In the first, Peer as a child imagines his adult self being married to the king’s daughter. In the second, Peer, now a young man, imagines that he himself is king. These build on passages in Ibsen’s dramatic poem, but the notion of empire is taken much more literally and is connected later in the film with the contemporary German context of empire and colonialism. In Ibsen’s text, Peer’s dreams of being an emperor essentially express his lack of connection to reality – his delusions of grandeur, as it

1 37

were.10 In Barnowsky’s Peer Gynt, this also appears to be the case in the early fantasy sequences, but the notion of empire takes a strikingly realistic turn in the latter half of the film once Peer arrives in Africa.

Roughly thirty minutes into the extant version of the film, after the prelude from Peer’s childhood and depictions of the action of the first three acts, we see Peer signed up as a sailor on a large vessel where he gets in trouble for lying around and fantasising. An intertitle asks “O, Peer, where is your empire?” (“O, Peer, waar is je Keizerrijk?”) and the film immediately cuts to an idyllic image of Solvejg and her goats.11 It is unclear whether Peer himself actually realises that Solvejg is the answer to that question at such an early point in the narrative; it is only near the end of Ibsen’s text that he understands this (Ibsen 1995, 147; Ibsen 2007, 706). In Barnowsky’s adaptation, the sequence serves to establish the search for a supposedly external empire that in reality lies hidden at home as the major organising theme of the film.

We next encounter Peer working in a bar that caters to gold miners in a loose reference to Ibsen’s text. There is a spectacular brawl and Peer causes a distraction that creates an opportunity to steal the equipment he needs in order to set up as a gold miner himself. Soon after, he surreptitiously claims a huge chunk of gold that allows him to establish himself as a slave trader. We then see him kitted out like a European colonial overlord – complete with pith helmet and parasol – on a ship that is presumably on the coast of Africa taking on a cargo of enslaved black people. Barnowsky thus moves very quickly through the North American material latent in Ibsen’s text and shifts the focus of the film to Africa instead; North America serves only as background – a source of wealth to support Peer’s activity in Africa.

10

e first see this motif in one of Peer’s monologues from the first act, in which he fantasises: W “The women curtsey and each soul admires / Emperor Peer Gynt and his thousands of squires. / […] / England’s great nobles and England’s great king / Rise up from high table at Peer’s riding in” (Ibsen 1995, 19–20); “Kvinderne nejer sig. Alle kan kjende / Kejser Peer Gynt og hans tusende Svende. / […] / Engellands Stormænd og Engellands Kejser, / der Peer rider frem, sig fra Højbordet rejser” (Ibsen 2007, 504–505).

11

The intertitles in the version of the film I had access to are in Dutch; this and all other translations from the Dutch are my own.

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At this point, Barnowsky introduces a series of events with no direct source in Ibsen’s text. After two enslaved men escape from Peer’s ship, Barnowsky cuts to a sequence entitled “Caravan of Death” (“De Doodenkaravaan”), in which a parade of enslaved people bearing heavy burdens passes and one man is tied to a stake. An intertitle comments, “The hand of the slave trader rests heavily on the recalcitrant.”12 This is followed by a sequence that aims to depict the supposedly duplicitous nature of the Africans whom Peer enslaves. The intertitle states, “Through piety, Peer Gynt silences the voice of conscience.”13 We see Peer in clerical attire and attended by nuns as he surveys a group of black Africans in the background; as soon as he passes by, the Africans raise their fists in defiance. The sequence is both brief and ambiguous. The intertitle sets “piety” up against “conscience”, suggesting that Peer uses religion to justify his mistreatment of the Africans (presumably the reason for his pangs of conscience). Peer cuts a ridiculous figure as a missionary and the Africans seem justified in their anger, making it all the more difficult for the viewer to identify where the director’s sympathy lies. The implication is that Peer is not really where he belongs.

Whereas non-white bodies in Apfel’s adaptation produced associations with slavery in America, in Barnowsky’s film, non-white bodies connote colonialism. As Krista O’Donnell explains, “Germans drew on popular readings of scientific and literary representations of race and empire. In ordinary Germans’ minds, encounters with Africans took on the tenor of ‘colonial contacts’ and informed their understanding of Germanness and empire” (2005, 42). Notions of the domestic (the Heimat) and the foreign (the colony) are explicitly gendered and racially inflected in the German colonial enterprise: Among other striking differences, the image of Heimat was widely perceived as female, whereas, statistically, German colonialists were overwhelmingly male and symbolically the colonies were a male space. The

12

“Zwaar rust de hand van den slavenhandelaar op den weerspannige.”

13

“Door vroomheid legt Peer Gynt het zwijgen op aan de stem van het geweten.”

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Heimat also appeared as indisputably German and white, while the colonies represented the exotic, other, and nonwhite. (O’Donnell 2005, 44)

Barnowsky’s insertion of the text of Solvejg’s song in the intertitle and a shot of her sitting in front of the cabin Peer built for her with her spinning wheel at her side at the point in the narrative when Anitra has betrayed Peer firmly establishes the feminine purity of the Heimat in contrast to the perceived treachery of the colonies.

After the digression into slave trading in Africa, an intertitle rather inexplicably tells the viewer that “not satisfied with his success, Peer sets off again in search of his empire”.14 At this point Barnowsky’s film starts to intersect more recognisably with the action in Ibsen’s text; Peer finds the emperor’s clothes and horse and has encounters with Anitra and Begriffenfeldt, all of which are key elements in the fourth act of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.

After being abandoned by Anitra, a new intertitle tells the viewer that Peer “goes in search of his empire again and decides to travel to Egypt as an explorer in order to become the emperor of the researchers”.15 While this is technically no longer an episode from Peer’s “missing years”, thematically it relates to the question of colonialism and empire in important ways. Peer meets Begriffenfeldt alone in the desert, who promptly crowns him “emperor of the realm of the researchers” (“den Keizer het Rijk der Navorschers”) and not, as in Ibsen’s text, “emperor of the interpreters” or “emperor of the self”.16 This alteration appears to reference the development of the emerging scientific field of archaeology, and Egyptology in particular; Germany was in direct competition with Great Britain and other nations in a race to discover

14

“Niet tevreden met zijn success, gaat Peer weder op weg, op zoek naar zijn Keizerrijk.”

15

“ Peer Gynt gaat weer op zoek naar zijn Keizerrijk en besluit als naturronderzoeker naar Egypte te reizen, om Keizer van de Navorschers te worden.”

16

ohn Northam mistranslates “Fortolkernes Kejser” (Ibsen 2007, 654 – literally “emperor J of the interpreters” – as “the prophesied Emperor” (Ibsen 1995, 114). Northam’s “Self’s Emperor” (Ibsen 1995, 123) for “Selvets Kejser” (Ibsen 2007, 669) is more naturally rendered as “emperor of the self”.

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Figs. 4-6. Peer (Heinz Salfner) as slave trader, missionary, and researcher in Peer Gynts Wanderjahre und Tod (1918). Courtesy of the EYE Filmmuseum.

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and claim important antiquities. These fields have come under criticism in recent years for their complicity in colonial exploitation (see for example Lydon and Rizvi 2010). Barnowsky thus in short order has Peer take on three of the most powerful roles that Europeans played in their attempt to subjugate and colonise Africa, namely the slave trader, the missionary, and the researcher (see Figs. 4–6).

In Imperial Projections: Screening the German Colonies, film scholar Wolfgang Fuhrmann documents a rich body of cinematic representations of Germany’s colonial history, arguing that the German colonial endeavour held a central place in the popular imagination during the early twentieth century, and even beyond 1919, when Germany’s role as a colonial power effectively ended (2017, 267). He emphasises the obvious but almost entirely overlooked fact that the development of early cinema coincided with late imperial colonialism and that the two cultural phenomena are in some ways inextricably linked (ibid., 1). Moreover, Fuhrmann argues that “[b]y watching films from the colonies, viewers participated in colonial rule, conquest, racism and salvage ethnography, as well as in virtual travelling, urbanism, moral uplift, visual spectacle and wildlife protection” (ibid., 2). Early German fiction films, in particular, “offered an identification with the white hero” and “[t]hrough their nationwide distribution the films joined the official discourse of war propaganda by creating an ideological bond between the colonies and the German Heimat” (ibid., 20).

Although Fuhrmann does not refer to Barnowsky’s Peer Gynt, I argue that it shares a number of important similarities with the films that are the main focus of his work.

Just as Apfel’s Peer Gynt was domesticated to suit particularly American preoccupations with race, Barnowsky’s Peer Gynt represents another kind of domestication that addresses particularly German preoccupations with empire. Like Peer, the newly forged nation of Germany essentially failed in its quest for empire. Peer’s ultimate return home and salvation through the love of Solvejg thus provide a reassuring narrative of redemption, and his path back to Solvejg is remarkably unhindered by any of the existential hurdles that Ibsen’s Peer faces. Barnowsky seems to suggest that German colonial expansion was, like Peer’s adventures, a 142

misguided external search for the riches that remained hidden at home all along. Barnowsky thus remoulds Ibsen’s Peer Gynt into a paean to the Heimat in contrast to what might be viewed as an ill-conceived attempt at global imperial dominance on the part of Germany.

Conclusion It is notable that the kind of “amplified” adaptation we have seen in the films by Apfel and Barnowsky is extremely rare in the long and complex production history of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Other adapters have most often chosen quite different strategies. These include rearranging the sequence of episodes, significant cutting of scenes, relocations in time and setting, substantial changes to the cast of characters, and even using multiple actors in one production to play various aspects of Peer, as in the critically acclaimed stagings directed by Peter Stein in 1971 and Erik Ulfsby in 2018.

There has certainly been no lack of experimentation with Ibsen’s dramatic poem, yet none of the major productions discussed by Frederik J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker in their seminal study of early Ibsen stage production history contain amplifications of Peer’s “missing years”.

Marker and Marker (2005) cover the most important international productions, from (among others) the premiere in Christiania in 1876 to Ingmar Bergman’s existentialist adaptation in Malmö in 1957 to Peter Stein’s spectacular Berlin production from 1971. While there may be some exceptions among the more than 3,000 Peer Gynts produced between 1876 and the present that are registered in the IbsenStage performance database, I know of no major stage productions that amplify Peer’s “missing years”. Nor does this kind of amplification appear as a strategy in contemporary adaptations of Peer Gynt to the novel genre, such as Terje Holtet Larsen’s Peer Gynt-versjonen (The Peer Gynt Version, 2003) or Atle Næss’ Innersvinger (Inside Tracks, 2002), or in the two major television productions, Bentein Baardson’s Norwegian Peer Gynt from 1993 and Uwe Janson’s German Peer Gynt from 2006.

In fact, while experimental adaptations of Peer Gynt abound in many different media, I have found only two other remediations of the text that amplify the missing years between the third and fourth acts, 143

namely Per Opøien and Arne Øverland’s comic strip Peer Gynt from 1970 and Geir Moen and David Zane Mairowitz’s graphic novel adaptation of Peer Gynt from 2014.17 Notably, both of these Norwegian adaptations are comics, which, like silent cinema, is a multimodal medium that combines image, sequence, and text. One can only speculate as to why amplification suggests itself as a strategy for adapting Peer Gynt in such specific (and quite different) cultural and historical contexts. It may be that the sequential breaks in the visual narrative brought about by the intertitles in silent films and the gutters between frames in comics serve to divide the adaptations into units that lend themselves to amplification; the inherently interrupted sequences of these media contrast with the flow of both stage performance, where the breaks between acts are far less frequent, and mainstream contemporary cinema, which tends to strive for the illusion of continuity.

In this chapter, I have suggested that in the case of America, Apfel constructed a narrative of white innocence and exceptionalism during a time of racial unrest, while in the case of Germany, Barnowsky created a narrative that underscores the superiority of the Heimat over the colony during a time of geopolitical losses for the nation. While none of these themes can be said to be central issues in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, they are not entirely absent either: Ibsen satirises them in hypodiegetic narrative “kernels” that Apfel and Barnowsky chose to explore in much more depth through amplification. Ironically, these directors thus appear to embrace some of the very positions that Ibsen satirised in the dramatic poem. In doing so, they inserted potent references to predominant cinematic genres and prevalent racial stereotypes in order to make Ibsen’s Peer Gynt relevant to specific non-Norwegian audiences.

17

A facsimile of the Opøien and Øverland comic is available at the National Library of Norway. Mairowitz and Moen’s graphic novel Peer Gynt was published by Minuskel forlag in 2014. Also see my Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Production of Meaning (Oslo: Acta Ibseniana, 2014) and “Ibsen som tegneseriefigur: Fra Sfinksen til Dovregubben” (Kunst og Kultur no. 1, 2015) respectively for analyses of these comics adaptations of Peer Gynt.

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Bibliography

Bataille, Gretchen M., and Bob Hicks. 1990. “American Indians in Popular Films.” In Beyond the Stars: Stock Characters in American Popular Film, edited by Paul Loukides and Linda K. Fuller. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Press.

Brégent-Heald, Dominique. 2010. “Women in Between: Filmic Representations of Gender, Race, and Nation in Ramona (1910) and The Barrier (1917) during the Progressive Era.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 31(2):145–76.

Fuhrmann, Wolfgang. 2017. Imperial Projections: Screening the German Colonies.

New York: Berghahn.

Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse, translated by Jane E. Lewin.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gipson, Brooklyne, and Michelle Martinez. 2017. “Blackface.” In Race in American Film: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation, Volume 1, edited by Daniel Bernardi and Michael Green, 110–114. Santa Barbara: Greenwood.

Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold. 2017. “Silent Ghosts on the Screen: Adapting Ibsen in the 1910s.” In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, 154–178. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hanssen, Jens-Morten. 2018. Ibsen on the German Stage 1876–1918: A Quantitative Study. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.

Holt, Thor. 2019. “Far from Home: Ibsen Through the Camera Lens in the Third Reich.” PhD diss., University of Oslo.

Hilger, Michael. 1995. From Savage to Nobleman: Images of Native Americans in Film. London: Scarecrow Press.

Ibsen, Henrik. 1995. Peer Gynt: A Dramatic Poem, translated by John Northam.

Oslo: Scandinavian University Press.

———. 2007. Henrik Ibsens skrifter 5: Episk Brand; Brand; Peer Gynt, edited by Vigdis Ystad. Oslo: Aschehoug & University of Oslo.

IbsenStage. University of Oslo. Accessed 21 April 2020. ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/ pages/contributor/444813.

Lydon, Jane, and Uzma Rizvi, eds. 2010. Handbook of Postcolonial Archeology.

Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

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Marker, Frederik J., and Lise-Lone Marker. [1989] 2005. Ibsen’s Lively Art: A Performance Study of the Major Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

O’Donnell, Krista. 2005. “Home, Nation, Empire: Domestic Germanness and Colonial Citizenship.” In The Heimat Abroad: The Boundaries of Germanness, edited by Krista O’Donnell, Renate Bridenthal, and Nancy Reagin, 40–57.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Opøien, Per. 1970. Peer Gynt, illustrated by Arne Øverland. Facsimile of 178 comic strips printed in Aftenposten 2 January – 24 July 1970.

Peña, Manuel. 2012. American Mythologies: Semiological Sketches. London: Routledge.

Pike, Daniel. 2017. “Arab and Muslim Representation.” In Race in American Film: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation,Volume 1, edited by Daniel Bernardi and Michael Green, 31–39. Santa Barbara: Greenwood.

Rees, Ellen. 2014. Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Production of Meaning.

Oslo: Acta Ibseniana.

———. 2015. “Ibsen som tegneseriefigur: Fra Sfinksen til Dovregubben.” Kunst og Kultur 98(1):15–26.

Robinson, Cedric J. 1997. “In the Year 1915: D.W. Griffith and the Whitening of America.” Social Identities 3(2):161–92.

Stam, Robert. 2000.“Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation, edited by James Naremore, 54–76. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Thew, Harvey F. 1915. “Peer Gynt.” Motion Picture News, 2 October.

Uecker, Heiko. 1985. “Peer Gynt in Deutschland: Vorläuflige Bemerkungen und Marginalien zu einem vielleicht möglichen Projekt.” Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen 5:154–79.

Vardac, A. Nicholas. 1987 [1949]. Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Williams, Victoria. 2017. “African Americans in U.S. Film.” In Race in American Film: Voices and Visions that Shaped a Nation,Volume 1, edited by Daniel Bernardi and Michael Green, 1–20. Santa Barbara: Greenwood.

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6. “The Best Swedish Film Ever Made” Terje Vigen (Victor Sjöström, Svenska Biografteatern, 1917) Bo Florin

It was January 1917 and Europe was at war. The French film industry, which had blossomed up to that point, collapsed like a house of cards.

Denmark, also a cinematographic leader at the start of the decade, had lost ground as well. American films had triumphantly crossed the Atlantic and invaded Europe. Meanwhile, the enthusiasm and expansiveness of the production company Svenska Biografteatern’s first years at the studio in Lidingö outside of Stockholm had ebbed. Calls for public supervision of the industry had long since won a hearing.

The censorship board, which had been institutionalised in 1911, continued to irritate producers by cutting out sequences or, worse still, banning entire films. The time had come to try new approaches.

On 29 January 1917, Victor Sjöström’s Terje Vigen, based on Henrik Ibsen’s poem by the same name, opened simultaneously at the Röda Kvarn Theatre in Stockholm and Paladsteatret in Copenhagen (and a week later at Bøndernes Hus in Kristiania, Norway). The daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter’s cultural section contained something quite unusual the following day – a review of Svenska Bio’s new film signed B B-n, otherwise known as Bo Bergman, an established poet and a theatre critic for the newspaper (normally film was discussed in the entertainment section of the paper). The article started off by paying tribute to the contribution that Terje Vigen had made to the prestige of filmmaking, “the artistic significance of which has always been the 1 47

subject of controversy”1 (Dagens Nyheter, 1917). For an industry that was striving mightily to shed the label of vulgarity, those were eagerly awaited words. The investment had apparently paid off. At a cost of 60,000 Swedish kronor, Terje Vigen was the most expensive Swedish film made up to that point, with a budget three times as big as that of any earlier production (Forslund 1980, 87). Moreover, it represented a big step forward in Svenska Bio’s steadfast new focus on fewer but higher quality productions (Florin 1997, 9–10).2 The decision to change the production policy was taken by Svenska Bio as the dominating “international style” seemed to have become less successful at attracting new film spectators. Terje Vigen was the first of a number of more expensive Swedish film productions that, in retrospect, comprise what has been defined as the “Golden Age” of Swedish cinema and which are often based on prestigious literary works, several of them by Nobel laureates. Historians largely agree that this occurred during the period from Terje Vigen in 1917 to Gösta Berlings saga in 1924 (Forslund 1980, 83). However, it would be a serious mistake to see this period as an isolated phenomenon. On the one hand, the release of the quality film Ingeborg Holm in 1913 had already prefigured the shift (Olsson 1994). On the other hand, of the 115 Swedish films made during the period, several were not part of a general transition but spread over a number of different initiatives and genres and some were produced by a number of smaller film companies (Florin 1997, 11ff). Thus, Terje Vigen was not the starting point of a “new Swedish cinema” but the result of a newly established film policy that would eventually lead to a number of significant changes.

In this chapter, my focus is dual. Firstly, more generally, I address the idea of a “national style” of Swedish cinema, of which Terje Vigen has been cited as the first, and one of the most prominent, examples, versus the explicitly transnational character of both the devices

1

All quotes from Swedish newspapers are translated by the author.

2

T he outline of the starting point for the “Golden Age” of Swedish cinema in the first paragraphs of this article is based on the introduction to my dissertation Den nationella stilen, Studier i den svenska filmens guldålder (1997).

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and sources that served as the foundation for this style. Secondly, I intend to go into more detail to study the specific adaptation of Ibsen’s poem from one medium to another against the background of the more general concept of intermediality. These two considerations – the national/transnational and the adaptational/intermedial – are indeed closely intertwined themselves. Silent cinema in around 1920 was, nationally as well as internationally, dependent to a considerable extent not only on literary adaptations but also on intermedial circulations, where the dynamics between words and images were put into play in complex ways (Rajewsky 2005).

While Bo Bergman’s status as a critic in a field more established than film and the fact that his review appeared in the cultural section of a major newspaper might have led historians to exaggerate the influence he wielded, his assessment of Terje Vigen was far from unique (Furhammar 1991, 68). On the contrary, the press was remarkably unanimous in its praise. Stockholms Tidningen (1917) wrote that “Svenska Biografteatern’s ‘Terje Vigen’, eminently directed by Victor Sjöström, is indisputably a welcome departure from traditional films”.

According to Aftonbladet (1917), “Yesterday’s opening of Ibsen’s Terje Vigen at the Röda Kvarn Theater scored a notable triumph for the art of Swedish moviemaking.” Stockholms Dagblad (1917) agreed: “It is no exaggeration to call Svenska Biografteatern’s production of Terje Vigen the best Swedish film ever made.” Svenska Dagbladet (1917) raised expectations even more: “Terje Vigen is not only a major artistic triumph for Svenska Biografteatern and everyone who contributed to its making, it is likely to lend Swedish industry an illustrious international reputation.”

At the time, Ibsen was in the air, both in Sweden and internationally. In 1911, the US production company Thanhouser Film Corporation made three one-reel film adaptations of Ibsen’s works (see King and Yalgın in this volume), and a short film based on Terje Vigen was also made the same year in Germany (Hanssen and Rossholm 2012, 159; see also the filmography in this volume). In 1915, a number of feature films were made, based on Gengangere and Brand in Russia and, in the US, on Gengangere and Peer Gynt, followed by Samfundets 1 49

støtter – Pillars of Society – in 1916. Of these films, only the American version of Gengangere – Ghosts, starring Henry B. Walthall, and with Erich von Stroheim in a minor role – came to Sweden (Wredlund and Lindfors 1991, 84; see also Sandberg in this volume). In Sweden, the rights to four works by Ibsen had already been acquired in 1913, but this did not include Terje Vigen (Forslund 1980, 83). Nevertheless, the Swedish actor and director Gustaf Molander wrote a script in 1915 based on Terje Vigen, for which he also acquired the rights that same year, and which would later form the basis for Sjöström’s film (Åhlander 1986, 346f). Sjöström, though, already had a history of his own with Ibsen’s literary works. Early in his career as an actor, Sjöström had, according to his own records, failed completely in his 1898 role in Kongs-Emnerne (The Pretenders) by Ibsen (Forslund 1980, 28). In the summer of 1911, the year before he enrolled with Svenska Bio, he returned to Ibsen while working for a theatre company (“Skådebanans ambulerande teatersällskap”) where he appeared more successfully as both actor and director of Hærmændene paa Helgeland (The Vikings at Helgeland) (Forslund 1980, 36). Thus, at the time when Sjöström started working on Terje Vigen, he was already familiar with Ibsen as a writer and Ibsen was also well-known and appreciated within the general context of Swedish culture. Thus, when Svenska Bio was changing its production strategy, its choice to make this film based on Ibsen’s poem the first in the new vein was well grounded, primarily given the author’s literary reputation and his standing within the wider cultural context, including that of theatre and film.

In retrospect, one of the most striking things about Terje Vigen is the degree to which Sjöström, in his adaptation, stays close to Ibsen’s poem. The film recounts the story of an ageing sailor who looks back on the injustices he has suffered at the hands of the British but who refrains from exacting revenge by virtue of the wisdom that life has taught him. While Sjöström abridges, compresses, and rearranges individual scenes, the intertitles are largely true to the wording of the poem. As I hope to show here, what he does is animate the poem by making changes to the text, mostly to the extent that certain sections become redundant once you can physically see what is going on.

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Below, I explore the relationship between the film adaptation and the original text of Ibsen’s poem and the relationship between the film, written text, and original illustrations to the poem by the Norwegian painter, illustrator, and author Christian Krohg, which were first published in 1892. In 1975, John Fullerton noted the similarity between Krohg’s illustrations and the film, but without providing any detailed analysis (51–54). In an article on Sjöström’s adaptation, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen and Anna Sofia Rossholm note how “the poem of Terje Vigen was associated with specific imagery long before the film was made” (2012, 151) and furthermore argue that certain scenes in Sjöström’s film “actually attempt to recreate motifs, poses, and compositions from Krohg’s illustrations, establishing further intertextual links” (ibid.) but without visual exemplifications. Hanssen and Rossholm, however, had a very broad aim – the application of an adaptation and translation studies approach to this case – whereas my own is to explore the intermedial approach in more detail and consider what the film adds to the text and the illustrations.

Intermediality can, as literary scholar Irina O. Rajewsky has shown, be understood either in a broad sense as “a fundamental condition or category” or in a narrower sense “as a critical category for the concrete analysis of specific individual media products or configurations” (2005, 47). In my approach to intermediality, I follow Rajewsky’s more specific definition of what she calls “a literary conception of intermediality”, which narrows the concept down to three distinct subcategories: medial transposition, media combination, and intermedial references (51–52; see also Holt in this volume). These three subcategories are all highly applicable to the film Terje Vigen. As an adaptation of a poem, it is a clear example of medial transposition. By including both the text of the poem and the visual imagery, it also combines two different medial forms of articulation. In the film’s clear references to Christian Krohg’s illustrations of the poem, which themselves are examples of a media combination within Ibsen’s literary work, the film also includes several intermedial references. The intersections between these subcategories, however, are overlapping rather than clearcut.

1 51

How, then, has Ibsen’s Terje Vigen more concretely been integrated into Sjöström’s film? In the intertitles of the film, the exact wording has been retained but includes three different types of adaptations: 1. Mere shortenings: Whole stanzas or parts of stanzas have been omitted.

2. Compressions: One and the same intertitle contains a shortening insofar as the beginning of the text originates in one stanza and ends in another.

3. Inversions: On three occasions the order of the stanzas has been reversed.

Naturally, shortenings and compressions are justified in the first place by the length of the poem (43 stanzas in all),3 but it is also important to note that some parts of the poem become redundant when they are rendered visually – a clear example of media transposition at work. One example is the scene in the film where Terje is sitting at home with his child on his knees and his wife standing in the background. A gang of sailors enters, laughing. They are clearly trying to persuade Terje to come along but do not succeed and leave. The scene in the film corresponds to stanza nine of the poem, which appears only partly in the intertitles: On Sunday evenings, when the dance-tunes blare wild from the nearest-by farm, he would sing his happiest ditties there where little Anna tugged his brown hair and lay in his folding arm. (Ibsen 1986, 65)4

Thus, one of Sjöström’s strategies, though rarely used in Terje Vigen, is to rework parts of the poem by rendering them cinematically. But the

3

ll quotes from Ibsen’s Terje Vigen have been translated by John Northam (Ibsen 1986 A [1862]). All original Norwegian quotes are from the first edition published in 1862 and reprinted in Henrik Ibsens skrifter 11 (Ibsen 2009).

4

I n the Norwegian first edition: “Om Søndagskvælden, naar Dandsen klang/ Vildt fra den nærmeste Gaard,/ Sine gladeste Viser han hjemme sang,/ Mens lille Anna laa paa hans Fang/ Og drog i hans brune Haar” (Ibsen 2009, 386). The first two lines are omitted from the intertitle.

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Fig. 1. Scene from Terje Vigen (1917). Courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, © AB Svensk Filmindustri.

film also includes an addition that does not correspond with any part of Ibsen’s text, when, later in the film, Terje is hiding from his pursuers beneath a heap of spruce twigs. This introduction of narrative suspense between pursuer and pursued is a highly cinematic strategy, a clear motivation for which is its visual efficiency.

Another interesting example in the film concerns its use of flashbacks, which Sjöström employs to add a cinematic dimension to the poem. The first occurrence is the intertitle quoting stanza 23 of the poem, in which the imprisoned Terje thinks about his home: […] his shoulders rounded, his hair it turned grey From dreaming about his home. (Ibsen 1986, 68)5

The intertitle is followed by an image of the graying Terje, which then fades out and is succeeded by an image of Terje with his child, an image which has already appeared earlier in the film. After another fade-out, an image of his wife before a window with the child on her lap fades in.

This image, however, does not appear earlier in the film. Thus, whereas

5

“Hans Nakke bøjed sig, graat blev hans Haar/ Af Drømmene om hans Hjem” (Ibsen 2009, 390).

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the first flashback is a clear image of a past story event, the second presents an image from Terje’s imagination, of his wife and child waiting for him at home (Fig. 1) (see also Hanssen and Rossholm 2012, 152).

In the 1955 article “The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism”, art historian Lorenz Eitner discusses these two central iconographic commonplaces.

He notes that the motif of the window, where one looks from inside dark rooms through open windows at the landscape outside, is frequent in both French and German art, particularly in the circles around Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) in Dresden, which also had a great influence on Nordic art and artists. The window was frequently used as a metaphor in contemporary poetry as well. Eitner analysed the window as a symbol of the human longing for infinity, with the window frame as an element both opening up and closing in.

By linking the open window and the storm-tossed boat, Eitner offers a useful framework for the imagery of Sjöström’s film: In contrast to the image of the open window, which is easily mistaken for simple genre, the symbolism of the storm-tossed boat is ancient and familiar. Used to dramatize man’s struggle against fate or against nature, or to point up the need for salvation, it occurs in poetry and painting with the frequency of a popular figure of speech. (1955, 287)

The film adaptation thus adds an imagined window image to the frequent images of the storm-tossed boat, which stands out in both the poem itself and its later illustrations. According to Eitner’s definition, this additional flashback indeed places Sjöström’s Terje Vigen at the very heart of Romantic iconography, exemplifying how media transposition may be turned into media combination, as the film medium is used to add another dimension to the poem by way of a subjective flashback.

The aesthetic of the view, however, is not exclusively a Romanticist endeavour. It was also frequently used in early photography, where such Romantic motifs were turned into a template, and practically a cliché, in the realm of artistic photography and cinematography, as described by Tom Gunning (1997, 9–24), among others. Sjöström’s film is thus based both on tropes from art history and devices from 154

early cinema. Below, the relationship between moving images and illustrations will be explored in more detail.

A second example of the use of flashbacks in Terje Vigen occurs in the intertitle quoting stanza 27, when Terje has come to rescue the wrecked English ship: The pilot let go of the craft. (Ibsen 1986, 69)6

Here, Sjöström includes a flashback to an earlier scene in the film where Terje is shown on deck as a prisoner of the English. Following this flashback, there is a fade-in back to the present. Thus, the connection to the past is presented as Terje’s memory. In Ibsen’s poem, however, the memory is ascribed to the English lord, as much later – in stanza 32 – in “a lightning” he remembers “a deed half-lost in the memory” (Ibsen 1986, 71)7: […] he knew, now, the sailor that on his knees had crouched on his deck and wept. (Ibsen 1986, 71)8

By appropriating the memory for Terje, Sjöström accentuates his focus on the main character, placing his memories and his imagination at the centre of the narrative by highlighting them visually.

These examples in particular stand out in sharp relief against the background of the generally striking redundancy of the film, where a course of events is often rendered twice, in text as well as in imagery. This is also true of dramatically important events, as when the Norwegian flag is raised at the end, after already having been announced in an intertitle.

But just as often, it is true of less important passages as well, as in the scene described earlier when Terje refuses to leave his wife and child as his fellow sailors try to convince him to join them. The fact that it is not

6

“Men Lodsen slap Roer og Rat” (Ibsen 2009, 392).

7

“(…) et Minde om halvglemt Daad” (Ibsen 2009, 393).

8

“Han kjendte Matrosen, som laa med Graad/ Iknæ paa Korvettens Dæk!” (Ibsen 2009, 393).

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possible to trace a consistent structuring principle in the adaptation seems to indicate that Sjöström, while striving for a new cinematic mode of narration to render the poem, remained faithful to the literary source to such an extent that he hesitated to express the literary content by visual means only. This, however, would change in his later work (Florin 1997, 160–84).

Finally, of the three inversions, one deserves particular attention.

While Terje is on his way home, with the boat filled with food that he is bringing back to the village, the English have their sights on him, as he is trying to escape. After “the shoal with the hidden top just east of the Hombor sound” (Ibsen 1986, 67)9 is established in an intertitle, Terje is seen rowing. Then, after a short interlude, a new intertitle is introduced: the English officer shouted ‘stop’!

He hoisted an oar butt and let it drop and stove in the dory’s shell. (Ibsen 1986, 67)10

A visualisation of the event follows, with a duplication of the dramatically profitable stroke with the oar. Immediately afterwards, there is a dialogue in which Terje appeals to the Englishman: ‘there on the most innermost beach-a-shore watches my wife at our pitiful door and waits with our baby for bread!’ (Ibsen 1986, 67)11

In the poem, this part of the text is situated earlier, where it has a quite different function, being a prayer to God. In the film, Sjöström instead makes use of this prayer on a later occasion as a dialogue intertitle, thus transforming Ibsen’s literary idealism into a more realist and direct cinematic mode – yet another example of media combination.

In his poem, Ibsen employs a grandiose style, but aptly describes Terje’s feelings and gestures. If that kind of pathos is understandable

9

“de blinde Skjær/ Lidt østenfor Homborgsund” (Ibsen 2009, 388).

10

“ Fra Stavnen bød Officeren «Stop!»/ Han hæved en Aare med Bladet op/ Og hug den i Skjægtens Bund” (Ibsen 2009, 389).

11

“ Inderst derinde paa Strandens Grus/ Sidder min Viv ved det fattige Hus,/ Og venter med Barnet paa Brød!” (Ibsen 2009, 389).

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in the historical context that spawned the poem, it appealed even more to the era in which the work enjoyed its greatest popularity. First published in 1862, the poem was widely read during the period leading up to the 1905 dissolution of the Swedish-Norwegian Union (Forslund 1980, 85). Similarly, nationalistic sentiment during World War I no doubt contributed to the film’s success. According to a rather revealing notation in the script (signed by screenwriter Gustaf Molander), the original intention was not to directly convey the tenor of Ibsen’s poem on the screen without comment but rather to frame it as a literary work.12 The script opens with a scene that appears neither in the poem nor in the final version of the film: Scene 1: Ibsen’s study. Ibsen sits at his desk, looks straight ahead, writes – the screen darkens: intertitle ‘There lived a remarkably grizzled man…’.13

The idea was that Ibsen’s study would reappear in Scene 4, before the main plot began, with the beginning of the third stanza: And now, all I’ve heard about Terje I’ll try to tell from the first to the last (Ibsen 1986, 63)14

In other words, Terje Vigen was intended to have a kind of meta-­ framework. If the film had started with such a prologue, its emphasis would have been more on Ibsen as creator of the work – the “I” of the poem – and the conveyor of its feelings. By eliminating this idea, Sjöström instead situates himself as the originator of the film. While still clearly attributing literary authorship to Ibsen and faithfully rendering the essence of his poem, Sjöström in fact appropriates both work and feelings for cinema (Florin 1993, 19; Hanssen and Rossholm 2012, 150).

But there is more to the picture. In 1892, the Danish publishing house Gyldendal published Terje Vigen with drawings by Christian

12

Sjöström’s annotated script, Swedish Film Institute library collections.

13

Ibid. “There lived a remarkably grizzled man” is Northam’s translation (Ibsen 1986, 63) of the opening of Ibsen’s poem “Der bo’de en underlig graasprængt En” (Ibsen 2009, 381).

14

“Nu skal jeg fortælle, hvad jeg har hørt/ om Terje fra først til sidst” (Ibsen 2009, 384).

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Krohg for the first time; this was also the first time the poem had been published as a separate book. This illustrated edition, the first visualisation of the text, came to be the “blueprint” for almost every new edition. As previously noted, others have observed that Sjöström drew inspiration from Krohg’s illustrations for his image composition. Elsewhere, I have shown that both book illustrations and paintings inspired not only Sjöström but also his contemporaries. For instance, Albert Edelfelt’s illustrations for the 1904 edition of Selma Lagerlöf’s Herr

Fig. 2. Book illustration by Christian Krohg. From the collection of the National Library of Norway.

Fig. 3. Scene from Terje Vigen (1917). Courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, © AB Svensk Filmindustri.

158

Arnes penningar clearly inspired Mauritz Stiller’s screen version of the story (1919), and Adolph Tidemand’s paintings, which have a clear link to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s novel, have similarly been adapted for John W. Brunius’ film Synnöve Solbakken (1919) (Florin 1997, 100–ff; Florin 2017). Circulation, repetition, and the variation of motifs in different media were already being made frequent use of in the visual culture around 1910 to enhance and establish the new medium of film (Uricchio and Pearson 1993). The Swedish film industry at the time sought cultural acceptance by relying on famous literary sources, but it achieved this just as much by integrating its imagery into a common cultural iconography (Florin 1997, 185ff). This complex web of relations all exemplifies the extent to which intermedial references – the third subcategory introduced by Rajewsky – are at play here.

How, then, was this put into practice? A few examples may illustrate the different methods used.15 An obvious example is the illustration accompanying stanza eight, where Terje is back from the sea and standing outside his house, peering “through the curtain of white” (Ibsen 1986, 65).16 In the film, the same scene is almost a copy of the composition made by Krohg (Figs. 2–3).

The stanza goes on to describe what he sees: indoors there were two bestowed,– his wife sat and span in the peaceful light, but the crib held a rosy, healthy mite, a baby girl, and it crowed. (Ibsen 1986, 65)17

The scene after Terje peers through the window is a staging of this description, in which we can see Terje through the window in the background (Fig. 4). Interestingly, this scene is an inverted staging of the next illustration in the poem (Fig. 5). Stanza ten introduces the theme

15 Some of Christian Krohg's drawings used as illustrations in this chapter have been slightly cropped.

16

“Han glytted ind bag det hvide Gardin” (Ibsen 2009, 385).

17 “Da saa han i Stuen To, –/ Hans Kone sad stille og hespled Liin,/ Men i Vuggen laa, frisk og rød og fin,/ En liden Pige og lo” (Ibsen 2009, 385–386).

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Figs. 4 and 7. Scenes from Terje Vigen (1917). Courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, © AB Svensk Filmindustri.

Figs. 5–6. Book illustrations by Christian Krohg. From the collection of the National Library of Norway.

Fig. 8. Book illustration by Christian Krohg. From the collection of the National Library of Norway.

Fig. 9. Scene from Terje Vigen (1917). Courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, © AB Svensk Filmindustri.

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Fig. 10. Book illustration by Christian Krohg. From the collection of the National Library of Norway.

Fig. 11. Scene from Terje Vigen (1917). Courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, © AB Svensk Filmindustri.

of the war year of 1809 and describes its miseries for the people as a whole. Here, in both the illustration and the film scene, we see Terje in the pose of a worried father (Figs. 6 and 7). In the book illustration, he is sitting beside his daughter’s bed, whereas in the film, his wife has just carried their child to her bed and he is sitting alone by the fire.

A further example demonstrates that the likeness may not always be that obvious. Here, Terje is in prison, and the illustration shows an almost empty room with Terje in the front right, looking to the left (Fig. 8). The composition of the room in the film differs, however, in terms of Terje’s placement as well as his stare, clearly recalling Krohg’s composition. Ibsen’s line “his hair it turned grey” (Ibsen 1986, 68)18 (stanza 23) receives even more emphasis in the film; in K ­ rohg’s illustration his grey hair remains a metaphorical expression, whereas it becomes literal in the film (Fig. 9).

Even more obvious are the similarities between illustration and film image in the highly dramatic scene where Terje raises his oar butt, only to drop it again (stanza 29), as well as in the harmonious composition of the scene with “milord and lady” (stanza 40), when they come by to thank Terje for his heroic deeds (Figs. 10–13).

18

“graat blev hans Haar” (Ibsen 2009, 390).

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Fig. 12. Book illustration by Christian Krohg. From the collection of the National Library of Norway.

Fig. 13. Scene from Terje Vigen (1917). Courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute, © AB Svensk Filmindustri.

Whether the visual material compared is dramatic or harmonious, reproduced or inverted, almost identical or only loosely inspired, whatever the methods used, these comparisons across media are quite illustrative. The similarities between the illustrations and the film, as well as the recurring motifs across text, drawing, and film, clearly show that the intertext of the film is not only literary but also intermedial in the sense defined earlier, using medial transpositions, media combinations, and intermedial references. Sjöström’s fidelity to Ibsen’s text in his transformation of the text into film is just as obvious in his transformation of Krohg’s drawings into moving images. Intermediality here could be regarded as a relationship between three different media – literature, drawing and film – with different transpositions, combinations, and intermedial references at play in a constant and ongoing dynamic. Another way to describe the intermediality in Terje Vigen, however, would be to view it as a relationship between two interrelated intermedial texts, both operating through a dynamic between text and image – on the one hand the illustrated poem and on the other the silent film with its intertitles – but still containing the same three subcategories: transpositions, combinations, and intermedial references.

In this way, Sjöström’s Terje Vigen appears as an intermedial node, both based on and extending into different media through a complex web of cross-references.

As I have argued, however, Terje Vigen is not an isolated case.

Owing to the widespread enthusiasm that the film aroused, particu162

larly in Bo Bergman’s review, it has come to be regarded as the starting point of a new epoch in the history of Swedish film. While Mauritz Stiller’s Gösta Berlings Saga of 1924 normally marks the end of the era, Sjöström’s Körkarlen of 1921 indisputably represents its climax (Furhammar 1991, 81). Dominated by the works of Sjöström and Stiller and serving as the crucible for the distillation of a national style, this period is often referred to as the Golden Age of Swedish film. Although the concept of a golden age has been questioned (Florin 1997, 10ff), it is an apt expression, particularly with regard to the aspirations that the industry harboured at the time, which were described in newspaper and magazine articles of the period, often celebrating the success of Swedish film as well as its distinctive character. At the request of Filmjournalen, Nils Bouveng, a big shot at the newly formed Svensk Filmindustri (a merger of Svenska Bio and several other studios), wrote a highly polemical article in 1919 provocatively entitled “Swedish Film as National Advertising: How the Industry Plans to Conquer the World”. Bouveng may have been a businessman more than anything else, but his tone is typical of the age and by no means at odds with that adopted by many contemporary critics: Why has our country’s film industry been able to carve out a leading position in the international market? Quite simply because it’s a Swedish product in the best sense of the word – a mark of quality […]. Our cinematography is firmly rooted in time-honoured culture and unfailing taste. We can make films from literary masterpieces – we have already begun to specialise in quality when it comes to that very field. […] Our movies are already circling the world alongside their American counterparts. They don’t grab the public with the power and suggestiveness of smash hits, but they are what they are – little gems of art. (1919, 30)19

19

“ Varför har vårt lands filmindustri kunnat skapa sig en rangplats på världsmarknaden?

Helt enkelt därför att den är en svensk produkt, svensk i ordets bästa betydelse: en kvalitetsprodukt. […] Vår filmkonst har alla förutsättningar att kunna bygga på gammal kultur och säker smak. Vi kunna skapa filmer av litteraturens mästerverk, det har redan blivit vår specialitet att just på det området göra kvalitativ insats. […] Våra filmer gå redan över världen vid sidan av de amerikanska. De ta publiken inte med schlagerns kraft och suggestion, utan därför att de äro vad de äro – små konstverk.”

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The author’s aspirations for Swedish cinema are crystal clear here, and he unashamedly appropriates anything that the transnational film culture of the late 1910s might add to the international success of Swedish cinema. Interestingly, and despite Bouveng’s claims of a national cinema, these “Swedish products” made from “literary masterpieces” (apart from those by the hand of Selma Lagerlöf) came from Ibsen, Bjørnson, and Hamsun, and from Gjellerup and Pontoppidan, from Sigurjónsson and Linnankoski. For that matter, the “little gems of art” came in part from such artists as Christian Krohg, Albert Edelfelt, and Adolph Tidemand. “The best Swedish film ever made”, as well as many other films from the period, were thus neither uniquely Swedish nor exclusively cinematic but, rather, international and intermedial. The unique quality of Terje Vigen and its equivalents in the Swedish cinema of the “golden years” is precisely their active embrace of many different sources and medial expressions, national as well as international, which were turned into something completely new and hitherto unseen in the melting pot of cinema.

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Bibliography

Aftonbladet. 1917. Review of Terje Vigen. 30 January: n.p.

Bergman, Bo. 1917. Review of Terje Vigen. Dagens Nyheter. 30 January: n.p.

Bouveng, Nils. 1919. “Svensk film som nationell reklam. Hur den svenska filmtrusten tänker erövra världen.” Filmjournalen 2:30.

Eitner, Lorenz. 1955. “The Open Window and the Storm-Tossed Boat: An Essay in the Iconography of Romanticism.” The Art Bulletin 37(4):281–90.

Florin, Bo. 1993. “Från Terje Vigen till Körkarlen – en studie över stilen i sex filmer av Victor Sjöström.” Unpublished licentiate thesis, Stockholm University.

———. 1997. “Den nationella stilen. Studier i den svenska filmens guldålder.”

PhD diss., University of Stockholm. Stockholm: Aura Förlag.

———. 2017. “Norwegian Tableaux – Synnöve Solbakken.” Kosmorama 269.

Accessed 10 July 2018. www.kosmorama.org/en/kosmorama/artikler/­ norwegian-tableaux-synnove-solbakken.

Forslund, Bengt. 1980. Victor Sjöström. Hans liv och verk. Stockholm: Bonniers.

Fullerton, John. 1975. “The First Swedish Film Masterpiece: Terje Vigen.”

Focus on Film 20:51–54.

Furhammar, Leif. 1991. Filmen i Sverige. En historia i tio kapitel.

Höganäs: Förlags AB Wiken.

Gunning, Tom. 1997.“Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic.” In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction film, edited by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum.

Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold, and Anna Sofia Rossholm. 2012. “The Paradoxes of Textual Fidelity: Translation and Intertitles in Victor Sjöström’s Silent Film Adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Terje Vigen.” In Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, edited by Lawrence Raw, 144–61. London and New York: Continuum International Publishing.

Ibsen, Henrik. 1986 [1862]. “Terje Vigen.” In Ibsen’s Poems, translated by John Northam, 63–73. Oslo: Norwegian University Press.

———. 2009. Henrik Ibsens skrifter 11: Dikt, edited by Vigdis Ystad. Oslo: Aschehoug & University of Oslo.

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Bibliography

Olsson, Jan. 1994. “‘Classical’ vs. ‘Pre-classical’. Ingeborg Holm and Swedish Cinema in 1913.” Griffithiana 50:113–23.

Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6(Fall):43–64.

Stockholms Dagblad. 1917. Review of Terje Vigen. 30 January: n.p.

Stockholms Tidningen. 1917. Review of Terje Vigen. 30 January: n.p.

Svenska Dagbladet. 1917. Review of Terje Vigen. 30 January: n.p.

Uricchio, William, and Roberta E. Pearson. 1993. Reframing Culture.The Case of the Vitagraph Quality Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wredlund, Bertil, and Rolf Lindfors. 1991. Långfilm i Sverige 1910–1919.

Stockholm: Proprius. Åhlander, Lars, ed. 1986. Svensk filmografi 1, 1897–1919.

Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell.

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7. Fragment and Failure Hedda Gabler (Giovanni Pastrone, Itala Film, 1920) Angela Dalle Vacche

In times of economic crisis and historical transformation, cinematic versions of prestigious literary texts may produce disappointing results. This feeling of disappointment or lost opportunity may loom even larger when radically different cultural sensibilities meet on-screen. In the case of Italian film director and producer Giovanni Pastrone’s (1883–1959)1 encounter with Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), the result is all the more awkward and difficult to evaluate since only a fragmentary version of his film adaptation of Hedda Gabler (1920) has survived. Hedda Gabler was developed for the production company Itala Film in Turin. This meant a regional set-up without any adequate vertical integration of production, distribution, or exhibition on a national level. Despite the failure of this project, something historically valuable can be learnt from Pastrone’s production.

In 1920, Italian film cameras could move within a closed frame, but Friedrich W. Murnau’s mobile framing with permeable borders had not yet appeared as a component of film style. Overall, Pastrone’s use of the point-of-view shot, intertitles, and the close-up, as well as his approach to costumes and reliance on objects, struggles to compensate

1

iovanni Pastrone directed Hedda Gabler under the pseudonym Piero Fosco, which he G used during the years 1915–1919 (Encyclopedia Britannica).

1 67

for the absence of camera movement in the surviving fragment. This chapter situates the weaknesses of Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler within a period of stagnation that clashes with its director’s pioneering reputation due to his monumental, operatic, and orientalist epic Cabiria (1915). The stakes involved in the passage of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (1890) from Norway to Italy, from Protestantism to Catholicism, and from spoken language to written intertitles become easier to appreciate if the problems faced by Pastrone are situated in an appropriate context, which will allow them to resonate.

The role of Hedda Gabler was played by film diva Italia Almirante Manzini. A superstar in the Italian film industry, Almirante Manzini had developed an operatic, hieratic, and statuesque acting style that escalated her into the ranks of “divas”. In contrast to a “star”, the term “diva” articulated a tripartite persona fed by three cultural types at the turn of the century: the modern woman who resists patriarchal conventions; the vamp, or femme fatale, from Northern Europe; and the mater dolorosa, or suffering single mother, who becomes a social outcast (see Dalle Vacche 2008 for further discussion of the Italian diva film). Even if Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler was written by 1890, the character is deeply attached to her powerful father, a military man. She is also indifferent to the idea of working.

Thus, she does not qualify as a modern woman eager to make a living for herself. Furthermore, Almirante Manzini’s Hedda Gabler as a destroyer of men and self-destructive femme fatale was not compatible with the frequent implantation of the Catholic mater dolorosa within the operatic diva from Southern Europe. Possibly due to its origin in Catholicism, the facet of mater dolorosa remains outside of Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler adaptation and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. After all, Pastrone was working in Turin, an Italian city influenced by French Positivism and secularism. On stage, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler continues to be a masterpiece and a living text because it changes according to which actress impersonates this role.

168

Language and the Self Unfortunately, even though Pastrone’s images become lifelike, thanks to their movement on screen, Ibsen’s text struggles with outdated conventions instead of acquiring a new life of its own through silent cinema. In the history of European theatre, Henrik Ibsen is a towering figure: one of the most famous playwrights in the world after Shakespeare. Inspired by figures such as Macbeth and Hamlet, Ibsen anticipated modern psychology’s discovery that human beings make decisions based more on intuition and emotion than on cognitive reasoning.

Ibsen’s creative energy went into developing extremely complex characters whom no interpretation can fully master. Their profound personae cannot be explained by nationality, class, or gender alone.

Since Freudian psychoanalysis emerged right after Ibsen’s generation, the Scandinavian dramatist was unaware of the role played by the unconscious. Instead of relying on Freud, Ibsen was in touch with the irrational side of the human experience through the Danish philosopher and dissident Protestant Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).2 Filled with anxiety to succeed and paranoia about failure, Ibsen’s works powerfully dramatise the pressures of a Protestant ethos based on public scrutiny. In the wake of this social imperative, darkness and depression inhabit his male and female creatures. Haunted by the necessity of public transparency, Ibsen was the first modern playwright to explore suicide in ordinary life.

Due to how Ibsen’s characters exist fundamentally alone in the world and before God, and deprived as they are of any chance of spiritual mediation or social forgiveness, a sense of tragic failure often prevails over their melodramatic reversals of fortune. This is not to say that Ibsen ignores or dismisses the poetics of melodrama. Rather, his sense of existential angst is imbued with enough irreversible finality to override melodramatic coincidences. As interested in irrational states of mind as Kierkegaard was, Ibsen’s prose stands out not only for its

2

ee De Figuereido 2019; see also Jensen 2019. Additional sources on Ibsen include Moi S 2006 and Alonge 1995. On Søren Kierkegaard and Scandinavia, see Ferguson 2017.

1 69

democratic simplicity, but above all for its mathematical precision, depth, and subtlety in describing slippages of consciousness.

Famous for charging the bourgeois living room with realist conflict, he was modern enough to introduce the problem of self-destruction in the literature of his own time through the ordinary language of daily life. Every single word and punctuation sign, every single adjective and use of tense is carefully chosen. With Ibsen, every banal word counts; it is irreplaceable, and it remains unforgettable. No wonder James Joyce (1882–1941) admired him so much. A master of the well-made play without loose ends and with a careful chain of causes and effects, Ibsen’s plots are so psychologically complex that they do not lend themselves easily to silent cinema. There, spoken words are inevitably constricted to intertitles. One must admit that Pastrone faced an extremely difficult adaptation by working in a medium with no live language.

Ibsen and Italy Every filmic adaptation is an encounter between cultural sensibilities and industrial circumstances. The journey from Ibsen’s text to Pastrone’s film cannot start without some preliminary information on Ibsen’s long sojourns in Italy. The tragic darkness of Ibsen’s modernist realism in Hedda Gabler strikes a note of contrast against the light and colours of the Mediterranean. This is not to say that his prose becomes lighter and more colourful in the wake of his trips to the South.

Restrained and analytical at all times, his language never becomes rebellious or impulsive. This is the case because he holds on to bourgeois respectability without ever questioning the social imperative of a stable self. His sense of tragedy derives from his very bourgeois attachment to this impeccable façade. Consequently, for him, the blind spots of personal choice are always responsible for self-defeat. Social acceptance can be achieved only after the individual experiences enough public shame and social scandal that the status quo of bourgeois values prevails. Public opinion requires, and rewards, individuals’ accountability to social institutions.

The Italian dramatist Scipio Slataper (1888–1915) reports that Ibsen was based in Rome from 1864 to 1868, and from 1878 to 1885 170

(1916, 99). However, he had no knowledge of nineteenth-century Italian literature. Despite his extended stays in Rome, he never read or met Carducci, D’Annunzio, Pascoli, Verga, Scarfoglio, Serao (Slataper 199). All these Italian writers, however, came to know Ibsen through Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), the most important actress in Italy; she performed the Norwegian playwright’s works from stage to stage whilst travelling all over the world.

Ibsen’s geographical familiarity with Northern Italy and Rome stands in a paradoxical relationship with his cultural disconnection from Italian intellectual life. The point of mediation between the Scandinavian author and the Italian literary sphere came through, once and for all, thanks to the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). In his Prison Notebooks (1929, 35), Gramsci’s discussion of Ibsen’s Nora, from A Doll’s House (1879), became very famous. Here, Gramsci subordinated an analysis of changing gender roles to class identity. More specifically, Gramsci’s writings on the theatre and the cinema offer a conflicting array of statements on the new woman. In his 1917 review of Henrik Ibsen’s Doll’s House, written for the socialist paper L’Avanti, Gramsci celebrates Nora Helmer’s sense of self and her desire to seek an independent life. Unfortunately, Gramsci argues, this model of emancipation had not fully implanted itself in Italian life because the bourgeois Italian woman tends to prefer the freedom of coquetry or the hypocrisy of charitable sacrifice to Nora’s dignity and sincerity. Instead of analysing the differences between Norwegian and Italian modernity, Gramsci concludes that Italian middle-class women live between the stereotypes of the frivolous socialite and the mater dolorosa. Gramsci contrasts this with the case of two proletarian women who, with the consent of their husbands, left their families to achieve a fuller inner life. By contextualising Ibsen’s heroine in pre-WWI Italy, Gramsci indicates that the sources of a new moral code leading to legal reform can be found only in the ethos of the working class. The diva film was not enough to capture Gramsci’s sympathy. Gramsci’s faith in the potential of the working class to change the perception of gender relations stemmed from his positive view of modernity and industrialisation. Even though proletarian ethics were more in touch with historical change, Gramsci himself 171

exhibited fairly traditional tastes when it came to matters of art (Dalle Vacche 2008, 52–53; Forgacs and Nowell-Smith 1985).

Despite his comments on the women’s movement in Italy and Norway, Gramsci was more conservative than it may seem. He remained attached to the stage and could not bring himself to side openly with the dubious medium of the cinema for children, seamstresses, and governesses on their day off. Intensely critical of the Italian film diva Lyda Borelli (1884–1959), Gramsci had to be aware of Pastrone’s Cabiria (1915) starring Almirante Manzini. Yet, since he was sceptical of the cinema, Gramsci probably never saw Pastrone’s 1920 filmic version of Hedda Gabler, with Manzini again in the leading role.

So steeped was Ibsen in his middle-class milieu and so concerned was Gramsci with the Italian working class that neither of them ever fully supported the struggle for female emancipation (see also Yalgın in this volume). Wary of extremist positions and equally interested in both women and men, Ibsen devoted his life to a scathing depiction of the Scandinavian bourgeoisie. Much more than gender, the hang-ups of the middle class, ranging from its highest to its lowest levels, became Ibsen’s lifelong subject of investigation. For Ibsen, to criticise the middle class was a way to interrogate his own ego as an exploratory artist at odds with a respectable life, by confronting his own fears of public rejection and moral disapproval.

The reception of Ibsen in Italy goes well beyond both Gramsci’s comments and Pastrone’s adaptation of Hedda Gabler. By the time silent Italian cinema had reached its golden period prior to World War I, Ibsen’s fame was solid. In 1916, a year before she starred in her one and only film, Cenere (Ashes, 1917), Eleonora Duse (1858–1924) committed to a film on Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. Due to a car accident while Duse was travelling, the film was cancelled. In 1918, Ermete Zacconi, the male equivalent of Duse on the Italian stage, worked with set decorator and director A. G. Caldiera on a cinematic adaptation of Ghosts for Milano Films. Zacconi’s performance is lost. In 1919, Febo Mari, an under-researched yet very talented protagonist of early Italian cinema, directed and acted in A Doll’s House, financed by his own production company, Mari Films, out of Turin. This film is also lost.

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In 1922, director Nino Valentini relied too much on a Mediterranean setting for The Lady from the Sea with actress Renée Pelar in the role of Ellida Wangel, which Eleonora Duse was simultaneously touring the country with (IbsenStage). Due to Valentini’s unhappy choice of landscape, the film reviews were negative, so that Valentini’s filmic adaptation of The Lady from the Sea stands out as an example of geographical displacement (see the filmography in this volume).

Discrepancies: Literary Text and Filmic Fragment What remains today of Pastrone’s appropriation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is very little, since out of an original nitrate print of circa 140 minutes, only a 24-minute fragment has survived (Cherchi Usai 1986).

This means that different episodes have been strung together to feign some degree of narrative continuity.

Briefly, the plot: Unhappily married to the scholar Giorgio Tesman (Oreste Bilancia), Hedda (Italia Almirante Manzini) meets again the brilliant writer Loevborg (Ettore Piergiovanni), whose youthful love she had rejected earlier on. Thanks to Thea Elvsted’s (Diana D’Amore) emotional support, the young artist has already published a successful book and has now produced a second manuscript of great value. A rising star on the Norwegian intellectual scene, Loevborg finds himself competing for a university post. His rival is the good-­ natured but not so bright Tesman. With a wedding ring on her finger, Hedda walks into Loevborg’s modest apartment. Soon after a long kiss rekindles the lovers’ passion, serious complications loom on their horizon. To begin with, Hedda is jealous of her former schoolmate, Thea, to whom Loevborg has dedicated his first book. Hedda has also been bored to death since her expensive honeymoon with Tesman in the Italian Alps. She is restless, but prudish enough to reject the idea of a ménage-à-trois proposed by her Macchiavellian family friend, Judge Brack (Vittorio Rossi-Pianelli). He is the only character who can do whatever he wants and seems unconcerned about what other people might think of him. He is consistently better informed than all the other characters. He operates above anyone’s approval. He embodies the rule of law, but he is lawless.

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Judge Brack has known Hedda, Giorgio, and Loevborg for a long time, but he is a false friend, a corrupt individual, and a regular visitor to Diana Ragnhild’s (Letizia Quaranta) brothel, where Loevborg gets into fights. Diana Ragnhild’s boudoir is located inside an apartment building. This kind of domestic architecture is suggestive of modernity and it fits the middle-class milieu. Instead of being surrounded by a beautiful garden, as Hedda’s villa is, Diana’s place is accessible from the street. These details alone spell out a transition from the grand to the petty bourgeoisie.

In order to assuage Italian censorship (Dalle Vacche 2008, 92), Pastrone makes Diana’s brothel look like a fun-loving salon of male and female friends. This environment, however, is quite explosive because of the heavy drinking there along with the reckless firing of pistols. Without any scruples, Diana does not hesitate to throw the older Judge Brack out her door as soon as she becomes tired of him.

The only male character not involved with Diana’s brothel seems to be Hedda’s husband. He cherishes a very domestic lifestyle, all alone in his study filled with books, drowned in dust.

The character of Brack is at odds with comparable figures in Italian silent cinema. In fact, Brack is a strong male and a womaniser who never loses control in difficult situations. In silent Italian cinema, male roles were usually reserved for refined, weak men who would waste their lives gambling, seducing women, or paying for their sins in some forsaken colonial post. An evil creature, Judge Brack is perfectly capable of moving among different levels of the bourgeoisie; he is a guilt-free, rational creature who uses all his powers to amuse himself and become more powerful. Despite his legal profession, he cherishes immoral behaviour.

Ibsen’s plot further complicates itself once the manipulative Hedda manages to temporarily separate Thea from Loevborg. Thus, she can encourage Loevborg, a former alcoholic, to attend an academic banquet in honour of her husband. Besides challenging the young writer to socialise without drinking, Hedda intercepts his second manuscript, which discusses the future of humankind. So jealous is she that modest Thea has been involved in Loevborg’s career that Hedda 174

gives him one of her father’s dangerous pistols. Well aware of Loevborg’s frailty, Hedda assumes he will commit suicide with a shot to the head. She wants to be the instigator of a heroic and quick death that celebrates the lofty ideals of Greek antiquity. Her favourite, youthful memory of Loevborg repeatedly comes up when she thinks of him with vine leaves around his curly hair.3 Little does she know that the young man, drunk and confused, will shoot himself in the lower stomach, thus staging an accidental act of self-castration. This theme is reinforced by the fact that Hedda’s father walks around limping. Such an additional reminder of castration amplifies Hedda’s dangerous familiarity with pistols. It also underlines that the local grand bourgeoisie is in a state of crisis and that its power has been replaced by lower-level administrators such as Judge Brack. Even though they seem to apply the rules, they do not personally follow them.

As he spies on Hedda from behind a curtain at Loevborg’s deathbed, Brack’s facial expression spells out contempt for the writer’s stupidity. Now he is ready to blackmail the arrogant Hedda with the threat of scandal. Nothing could be more unbearable than public humiliation in a Protestant society where personal relations must be publicly transparent for the sake of the community’s well-being. His pleasure in her surrender to his erotic ambitions is self-evident. Yet the general’s daughter will not humiliate herself by accepting Brack’s advances in exchange for his silence. Faithful to the use of off-screen space and in line with Ibsen’s original text, Pastrone’s film ends with a rejection of visual spectacle in favour of darkness and iconophobia.

After leaving her living room and becoming invisible, Hedda commits suicide with the second pistol she inherited from her father. This elimination of the image suggests that self-annihilation and secrecy are preferable to public exposure.

A destroyer of men and competitive with other women, Hedda destroys herself without ever becoming Loevborg’s muse. A failed

3

This idealised image was probably lifted from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (1872).

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aristocrat, her perfectionism, grandeur, and thirst for intellectual recognition make her incompatible with the mediocrities of modern life and the economic uncertainties of a society in transformation. Unlike Hedda, Thea has had the courage to ignore scandal. She left her own husband and children to follow Loevborg for the sake of his writing career. She helped him in his struggle with alcohol, and she believed in his talent. Thea is the ultimate anti-conformist petty bourgeois who adjusts and moves forward. After Loevborg’s death, she becomes Tesman’s loyal assistant, thus turning his pedantic inclinations into a new source of affection and intellectual productivity.

Through the character of Hedda Gabler, one can begin to set up an imaginary dialogue between Ibsen and Pastrone. A man of culture, Pastrone dabbled more in art history and opera than in literature. Yet, aware of Ibsen’s stature, the Italian director was eager for a prestigious topic to overcome the stagnation of the silent Italian cinema of 1920.

Fig. 1. Segundo de Chomón’s overprinted titles for Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

1 76

During the making of Hedda Gabler, Pastrone and his co-author, Gero Zambuto (1887–1944), worked with the amazing Segundo de Chomón (1871–1929). Chomón was a Spanish cinematographer and an inventor of special effects who was famous all over Europe for his dream sequences, intertitles, and use of colour. Perhaps spurred on by Ibsen’s exacting language, Segundo de Chomón came up with at least 30 overprinted titles or somewhat transparent verbal superimpositions (Fig. 1). Considering that the original film was 140 minutes long, with a total of 185 captions, 155 were traditional intertitles, but significantly, 75 percent of these intertitles were locutional – that is, words spoken by the characters to each other.

What is most interesting is that Pastrone and Zambuto experimented with free, indirect discourse. In the hospital sequence, when Hedda rushes to the bed of her dead lover, the Mephistophelian Brack discloses how Loevborg’s accidental death took place. In this case, a flashback would mean that the judge was present, and is remembering.

The free, indirect discourse is also justifiable, assuming that the judge heard by word of mouth that Loevborg, the writer, was desperately looking for his lost manuscript.

For the record, Pastrone uses the point-of-view shot whenever someone is reading a letter or when printed matter is involved. Despite the Italian director’s interest in subjectivity, however, during an intense dialogue between Hedda and Loevborg, the shot/reverse shot is replaced by the use of cutaway shots with the two characters facing the audience (Fig. 2). This frontal stance was anachronistic in 1920. This example alone proves that Pastrone’s eagerness for innovation was undermined by an inadequate editing approach, with the consequent loss of eye-line matches stitching one shot to the next. In short, the filmic adaptation of Hedda Gabler delivers old-fashioned results, were it not for Segundo de Chomón’s contribution.

Famous for his film melodramas with film divas modelled on the singing prima donnas of Italian opera, Pastrone’s spectacular sensibility was very far from Ibsen’s linguistic restraint. Whereas the latter was an author keen on a microscopic verbal scale, the Italian director specialised in monumental sets. Stifled by too many decorative details in Hedda’s living room, Pastrone’s taste for excess is a major problem in his 177

Fig. 2. Ernesto Loevborg (Ettore Piergiovanni) and Hedda Gabler (Italia Almirante Manzini) in Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

literary adaptation. By contrast, in the original play Ibsen intentionally focuses on the plainness of 36 hours of boredom, oblivion, mediocrity, emptiness, and two deaths. Pastrone’s reliance on too many props waters down the verbal power of Ibsen’s tragedy. Yet his kitsch, orientalist mise-en-scène fully conveys Tesman’s petty bourgeois status. He simply cannot keep up with the prosperous middle class from which Hedda comes. As a married woman, Hedda Gabler is no longer the general’s daughter with many privileges but is instead Hedda Tesman on a budget. Forever restless, she longs for something heroic that no longer exists in the new modern world she lives in. Accordingly, Pastrone preserves Ibsen’s title, Hedda Gabler. This verbal choice spells out the young wife’s rejection of her new, married situation.

The problem is that the Italian director forgets to include the portrait of the defunct general in Hedda’s living room. How can Hedda Gabler, the character, become Hedda Gabler, the text, without the gen1 78

eral’s portrait to mark that she will always remain the daughter of a military man, no matter whom she marries? In the literary version, Hedda burns Loevborg’s book, but, in Pastrone’s living room, there is no stove. Pastrone’s set never includes any windows. Notwithstanding this lacuna in the interior set design, the film includes exterior scenes in Hedda’s garden. Pastrone’s adaptation features only doors and curtains, as if daily life was out of touch with transparency and could welcome only secret agreements. In Ibsen’s text, by contrast, an adjacent veranda allows light to stream into the living room. In contrast to how Patrone’s Hedda seems to live on a set without visible windows, only Diana’s well-known brothel is marked by tall windows. Clearly this space is used by many guests unconcerned with public reputation.

These are inexplicable omissions which even the loss of footage cannot justify. Could these be mistakes due to the chaotic circumstances of Pastrone’s film production, which involved conflict with both Itala Film, the Board of Censors, and, as a result, a heavily delayed release of the film (Alovisio 2007, 193–95)?

Italia Almirante Manzini as Hedda In terms of costuming, claustrophobia rules as soon as Hedda wears a beautiful long, silky gown with a butterfly on the front. She is the precious butterfly who cannot fly anywhere. By becoming a married woman, she has put herself in a trap. She is a rebel who seeks approval.

In contrast to this stunning outfit, her black clothing looks like funeral attire meant to purge her body of any sexual longing. The repressed sexuality of Italian divas found expression in the scattering of flowers in bloom and doomed to wither across the mise-en-scène. Yet Pastrone’s costumes for Hedda are fit exclusively for stiff public appearances.

These clothes strike a note of contrast with domestic chores. They are also at odds with activities outdoors. Constantly anxious about how she looks in public, Hedda is far more elegant than Thea, who always wears the same modest black coat. The general’s daughter is eager to compete with her neighbour, Lady Falk, whose expensive villa Tesman has bought for his new bride. At one point, the film fragment even includes an elegant tea served by the Tesmans to Thea, Loev1 79

borg, and Brack in the garden of their villa. Despite the beautiful lawn and the late summer weather, the female dynamics remain haunting and haunted by secrecy and rivalry.

In the original text, Ibsen shows us Hedda sitting down quite a bit. By contrast, Pastrone’s Hedda often stands up when she is alone with Loevborg. This vertical approach might be due to the director’s wish to underline how tall his actress was. Height can grant an unusual degree of poise and authority, even to a contradictory figure such as Hedda Gabler. Manzini’s interpretation of Hedda does not quite fit an Italian diva or prima donna of the operatic stage. In Italian opera, the diva struggles against men. In the diva film, women are often raped, exploited as prostitutes, or abandoned by selfish male figures. Until recently associated wrongly with escapist values, the Italian diva film is much closer to a protofeminist docudrama.

With Ibsen, men and women alike struggle because of Hedda.

She destroys Loevborg, dismisses Tesman, is ungrateful towards her aunt Giulietta, who helps with money, and despises Thea. In the fragment, however, melodramatic acting takes over tragedy only once, during a self-contained flashback. As a young woman, Hedda tries to shoot Loevborg. After aiming her pistol at him, she throws herself onto the grass and mimes an attack of hysterics with all the customary convulsions (Figs. 3–4). In contrast, for her characterisation of Hedda as a married woman, Manzini comes up with something more modern. As Silvio Alovisio points out, her acting style embraces Ibsen’s dictum of limited expressiveness for the sake of psychological complexity (2016, 97). From young rebel practising her pistols outdoors to poised married woman trapped in her own living room, Manzini deepens her character through stiff or static postures. She repeatedly uses her hands to signify Hedda’s silent unhappiness. Meanwhile, her long gazes seem to speak for themselves. Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler also features sparse use of close-ups underlining not only faces and hands, but, most importantly, crucial objects such as pistols and books. For example, Hedda hides Loevborg’s book inside her drawer, next to her father’s case containing two pistols (Fig. 5). When Judge Brack opens the case of pistols to check if anything is missing, he handles this it as if looking inside a book.

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Figs. 3 and 4. Italia Almirante Manzini in the title role in Hedda Gabler (1920).

Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

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Fig. 5. Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

The reasons why the prestigious role of Hedda Gabler went to Italia Almirante Manzini are worth speculating on. An aristocratic marriage had obliged the blonde Lyda Borelli to retire from acting in 1917. Furthermore, between 1915 and 1920, Francesca Bertini (1892–1985) starred in so many films that Manzini may have emerged as the best alternative.

Inside Pastrone’s production house, Itala Film of Turin, Manzini was competitive with Pina Menichelli. Specialising in femme fatale roles, Menichelli was the blonde Sicilian that Pastrone had launched with Il Fuoco (The Fire) and used again successfully in Tigre Reale (Royal Tiger) in 1916. Menichelli and Manzini were exactly the same age, whereas their rivals, Francesca Bertini and Lyda Borelli, were slightly older.

Manzini’s ranking in the Italian film industry, however, is open to speculation. Many of her films have been lost, and the reviews of her work are more impressionistic than specialised. It is thus extremely difficult to reconstruct the stages of her career. We know that she died in 1941 of a venomous insect bite in São Paolo, Brazil, where she had emigrated.

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Even though Manzini was considered a diva of silent Italian cinema, her interpretation of Ibsen’s character intentionally leaves out that special aura of suffering spirituality that a Catholic diva must always have as a mater dolorosa. There is nothing maternal about Hedda, who loathes her pregnancy and wishes to hide her enlarged belly. From Ibsen’s text, the reader learns that Hedda is unhappily pregnant. In Pastrone’s manuscript, there is no reference whatsoever to childbearing. Ibsen’s Hedda is totally secular and materialistic. In Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler, Manzini clearly stays away from the gestures and postures of the mater dolorosa, or suffering mother. This latter cultural type, together with the New Woman of Modernity, was crucial in the construction of the Italian film diva. In the role of Hedda Gabler, Manzini does not embody the New Woman of Modernity with a profession of her own. In contrast, Thea may not be a regular employee, but she constantly puts herself to work. Exhausted by her efforts with Loevborg, and as the mother of numerous children, she even takes a nap at Hedda’s house. Eager to shine in the good society of Kristiania (Oslo), Hedda spends all her time at home, except for a brief visit to Loevborg’s modest room.

(Im)moral values Whereas the Italian diva film relies on a centrifugal relationship with the ills of the Italian patriarchy, Ibsen’s literary approach is self-consciously centripetal. Line after line, his text deepens our understanding of how a small group of characters lends itself to myriad internal permutations.

For example, Brack’s proposal of a ménage-à-trois does happen in a Platonic sense as soon as Thea switches her attention from Loevborg to Tesman. Likewise, the naïve Giorgio is so financially dependent on his aunt Giulietta that his marriage to Hedda slips inadvertently into an economic ménage-à-trois. The real problem, however, is that Ibsen’s shifting configurations function well, thanks to a highly sophisticated verbal text, which Pastrone’s intertitles never approximate.

Ibsen’s and Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler fits the type of the soulless femme fatale. In keeping with this model, Manzini’s Hedda invokes the American silent film star Theda Bara (1855–1955). In her 183

famous film, A Fool There Was (Frank Powell 1915), Bara is a generic social evil comparable to alcohol and bankruptcy, indeed her character is listed as “The Vampire” in the film’s credits. Because Bara’s character is an enigmatic symptom of social unrest, she has no family and no circle of friends. Likewise, Hedda’s friends are out of town because she has returned from her honeymoon before the end of summer. Theda Bara is a sort of negative force that operates outside any level of causality. She is evil for evil’s sake. In the case of Ibsen’s and Pastrone’s Hedda Gabler, female jealousy combined with economic limitation leads to suicide – not because of guilt, but because of public humiliation. Pastrone’s quasi-surrealist composition – with one shot containing numerous accusatory eyes – spells out the triumph of Protestant shame over Catholic guilt (Fig. 6).

Alcoholism is another reason why Ibsen’s tragedy is similar to American silent cinema rather than to the maternal melodramas of Italian silent cinema. In Powell’s film, Bara strikes and succeeds in transforming each man into a social outcast. Then she exits the narrative, completely unscathed and unpunished. This evil woman can seduce a husband away from his wife because her appeal is comparable to drinking. A frequent theme in Scandinavian literature and Danish silent cinema, alcoholism never appears in early and silent Italian cinema. Compared to the American, orientalist Theda Bara, Ibsen’s Hedda is a much more complex character. One can detect in her Ibsen’s own insecurities over a clash between radical creativity and his own bourgeois way of living. To some extent, Hedda, Loevborg, and Giorgio Tesman engage in a conceptual ménage-à-trois because they are all possible alter egos of Ibsen himself.

What does it entail to be a productive artist in a modern world that is based on bourgeois profit if the artist is calling into question the moral values of the very same social class to which he belongs? In order to get to the heart of Hedda Gabler, one must revisit the role of Judge Brack. Always unpunished, even when he indulges in pleasures, Brack is the keeper of the status quo, a Satanic presence, and an ageing administrator who is too selfish to understand suicide. Untouched by alcoholism, rejected by Diana, and tolerated by Hedda, he is the trium184

Fig. 6. L’Assessore Brack (Vittorio Rossi Pianelli) and Hedda Gabler (Italia Almirante Manzini) in Hedda Gabler (1920). Courtesy of La Cineteca del Friuli.

phant and provincial side of the middle class described by Ibsen. He enjoys breaking the rules, but he never allows himself to lose control, either for a woman or for the bottle.

Moreover, Brack is the ultimate, anti-intellectual pragmatist who does not care for books. Neither does Hedda, who as a young woman proves to be a very bad reader. For her, a book is interesting only if she can use it in the same competitive way as she handles a pistol. Unflappable and self-absorbed, Brack is incapable of understanding tragedy and too uncaring to analyse the social malaise that surrounds him. Without any moral values or intellectual ideals, he is the enemy of art, love, friendship, and thought. Filled with too many impossible dreams, Hedda is the opposite of Brack – even if these two figures share an equal thirst for power. Set next to Loevborg’s struggle with alcoholism and Hedda’s fear of failure, Brack is as cold as a mechanism that cannot look beyond or inside itself. He exempli185

fies total indifference towards existential issues and displays a hypocritical observance of social rules. Brack stands for a utilitarian bureaucracy in touch with present modernity, but without any vision of the future or understanding of the past. He consumes only in the present tense.

With the exceptions of the cooperative Thea and obtuse Giorgio, all of the characters in Hedda Gabler struggle between pistols and books, because it is easier to shoot a pistol than to write or read a book.

Set against Hedda’s rejection of childbearing and in competition with Loevborg’s alcoholism, Ibsen’s artistic creativity is the only and the best antidote to the philistine boredom of middle-class life. Thanks to his connections with books and art, suicide and social conventions, Ibsen anticipates the existentialist themes of authenticity, choice, self-expression, and nihilism which Jean-Paul Sartre explores decades later through his own philosophical engagement with the compensatory function of art. Unfortunately, Pastrone’s adaptation is structurally incapable of achieving the existential depth of Ibsen’s text due to the absence of spoken language.

Possibly aware of a linguistic impasse, the Italian director turned to Segundo de Chomón to compensate for the innate limitations of his project. The mixture of tragic and melodramatic moments along with discrepancies between Ibsen’s descriptions of his sets and Pastrone’s set design confirm the climate of confusion plaguing the silent Italian film industry in 1920. Granted all these shortcomings, the surviving fragment of Hedda Gabler is extremely valuable for the ways in which it meditates on the bonds between aristocratic fathers and rebellious daughters. Instead of an oedipal narrative where a young woman replaces an old mother, in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, the challenge is less generational and more social.

After the general’s death, with the disappearance of his portrait from the written page to the silent screen, Hedda’s suicide creates a vacuum in the social fabric which cannot be filled. Meanwhile, the intellectuals in this narrative become increasingly weak and marginal as academic research and creative writing retreat into the ivory tower of narrow domesticity.

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In both Ibsen and Pastrone, there is a search for a new kind of leadership that is enlightened enough to rebalance the economic shifts of modernity in the arts and in society. Interestingly, three decades after Ibsen, Pastrone’s adaptation offers a diabolical solution to this problem in the corrupt figure of Brack. With the First World War just around the corner, one might say that Pastrone’s adaptation in 1920 – only two years before Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 – proposes a first inkling of an inflexible will to power leading to dictatorial figures in the European thirties.

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Bibliography

Almirante, Pasquale. 2016. Da Pasquale a Giorgio Almirante: Storia di una ­famiglia d’arte. Venice: Marsilio.

Alonge, Roberto. 1995. Ibsen: L’Opera e La Fortuna Scenica. Florence: Le Lettere.

Alovisio, Silvio. 2007. “Hedda Gabler, A Cinematographic Fragment of 1920.”

Northwest Passage 4:189–211.

Cherchi Usai, Paolo. 1986. “Hedda Gabler, un frammento.” Segnocinema 22(March):56–58.

Dalle Vacche, Angela. 2008. Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Cinema.

Austin: University of Texas Press.

De Figuereido, Ivo. 2019. Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask.

New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press.

Encyclopedia Britannica. “Giovanni Pastrone”. Accessed 31 March 2022. www.britannica.com/biography/Giovanni-Pastrone.

Ferguson, Robert. 2017. Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North.

New York: Overlook.

Forgacs, David, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, eds. 1985. Antonio Gramsci: Selections from the Cultural Writings, translated by William Belhower.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

IbsenStage. University of Oslo. Accessed 30 March 2022. ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/ pages/event/83169.

Jensen, Morten Høi. 2019. “Escape Artist.” The New York Review of Books, 17 November.

Moi, Toril. 2006. Henrik Ibsen and The Birth of Modernism: Art,Theatre, Philosophy.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Slataper, Scipio. 1916. Ibsen. Turin: Bocca.

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8. Trauma, Aesthetic Treatment, and Intermediality Das Haus der Lüge (Lupu Pick, Rex-Film, 1926) Thor Holt

The main influence of Henrik Ibsen on film history may lie beyond traditional and announced adaptations of his plays in ways that remain to be explored. One intriguing example can be found in the celebrated German Kammerspielfilm – a genre that merged the chamber play aesthetics of theatre director Max Reinhardt with groundbreaking cinematographic devices in the early 1920s. This resulted in a small number of films with sparse use of intertitles: anti-spectacles of everyday life that, in the words of Siegfried Kracauer, anticipated “truly cinematic narration” in their obsession with objects and rejection of the written word (2004, 104). The canon includes Lupu Pick’s Scherben (Shattered 1921) and Sylvester (New Year’s Eve 1923), Leopold Jessner’s Hintertreppe (Backstairs 1921) and Erdgeist (Earth Spirit 1923), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Michael (1924), and F. W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh 1924). Screenwriter Carl Mayer masterminded the genre by providing scripts and key input on cinematography.1 The brash introduction of Ibsen as integral to the Kammerspielfilm is admittedly in need of justification: the Norwegian dramatist is barely

1

nly two of these Kammerspielfilme are adaptations of literary works: Michael (1924) is O based on the novel Mikaël (1904) by Herman Bang and is the only film listed here not penned

by Carl Mayer, whereas Erdgeist is based on Frank Wedekind’s Lulu play from 1895.

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discussed in the scholarly research on the genre and none of the above-mentioned films are based on any of his dramas.2 This chapter explores Lupu Pick’s Das Haus der Lüge (The House of Lies 1926), based on Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (Vildanden 1884), as a missing piece in the canonical story of the Kammerspielfilm.3 As the first step towards understanding the interconnections between Ibsen and this genre, intermedial exchanges are discussed along three inter-connected lines: historically, in the film per se, and in the historical moment of the adaptation. I argue that Das Haus der Lüge punctuates illusions of wholeness promoted by still photography and the ideology of the bourgeois family. The film thus responds to widespread familial tensions and anxieties in the wake of World War I. Its warning against mistaking pictorial surfaces for realities, moreover, comments on the explosion of images in the Weimar Republic (1918–33) in ways that resonate with today’s digital and social media.

Das Haus der Lüge tells the story of the nuclear family Ekdal, which is exposed to past and present pressures from the broken family Werle. The time span represented is merely four days, in which the film focuses on the mundane life and marriage of Gina (Lucie Höflich) and “photographer” Hjalmar Ekdal (Werner Krauß), a naïve man with a fragile ego who lives under the illusion that Hedwig (Mary Johnson) is his daughter and that he will revolutionise photography by inventing an underwater camera. Readers of Ibsen will note a high degree of fidelity to the source text; the bourgeois families are depicted as equally farcical and falsified. The film adaptation, however, comes with a change of dramaturgy which sees the dinner party of Act 1 give way to an exposition with significant changes to the backstory of The Wild Duck. Arguably the most significant change is that Gregers Werle (Walter Janssen) returns home disabled and rejects not only the offer to succeed his

2

T here are several insightful studies on the German Kammerspielfilm (see Eisner 1969, 177–221; Kracauer 2004, 96–106; Schectman 2012, 148–152; Vonderau 2012, 105–110; Kaes 2013, 152–153; and Thompson and Bordwell 2019, 95–96).

3

T hanks to Ellen Rees, Mark Sandberg, Anton Kaes, the editors, and one anonymous peer reviewer for their most useful comments on earlier drafts.

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father, Jan Werle (Albert Steinrück), as business owner but also the dinner party thrown in his honour in the play. The film also makes it abundantly clear that the powerful merchant is the father of Hedwig.

Hjalmar’s illusions are partly the construct of his friend, neighbour, and frequent visitor Dr Relling (Eduard von Winterstein), who bolsters Ekdal’s self-image by asserting that he is a true artist and that “nearly all great men have simple wives”, while the film ironically and obsessively shows Gina running both the household and the Ekdal atelier.4 As indicated by communication devices (a telephone), the spelling of Ekdal’s atelier (Fotografisk atelier), and a dinner menu, the action takes place in a Norwegian town around the turn of the century.

The harmony of the Ekdal family is haunted by the parental issue soon to be revealed. Subsequent to the exposure of Hedwig’s parentage, Gregers leads his half-sister to sacrifice what she holds most dear in order to restore the happiness of Hjalmar: Hedwig commits suicide rather than killing the treasured wild duck that lives in the loft of the Ekdal apartment. The film’s coda shows Hjalmar and Gina Ekdal on the anniversary of Hedwig’s death, preparing to lay a wreath upon on her grave in the company of Dr Relling.

Intermedial Frameworks In this 1926 Ibsen adaptation, the narrative proper is literally framed by Gina Ekdal photographing an extended family and a bridal couple in the opening sequence and the added coda, respectively. In between these acts of photographing, static shots from a myriad of angles display a plethora of photographs, paintings, and sculptures. Christine Geraghty’s claim (2009) that adaptations tend to come with a proliferation of medialities is thus driven to the extreme in Das Haus der Lüge. By inserting a number of intertitles – many of them quotes from Ibsen’s play – Das Haus der Lüge also makes a radical break with the conventions of the Kammerspielfilm in ways that trigger questions of intermediality.

4

“ Fast alle grossen Männer hatten einfache Frauen.” All translations are by the author of this chapter unless otherwise noted.

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Ibsen scholars have discussed The Wild Duck within the context of the photographic realism of the late 1800s and issues of what is seen and what is hidden (see for instance Østerud 1996). In the film adaptation, the additional layer of moving images allows for a more complex treatment of still photography than in Ibsen’s play. The film, I suggest, calls for a theoretical framework sensitive to differentiating intermedial layers along diachronic and synchronic points of departure. This chapter draws inspiration from intermediality scholar Irina O. Rajewski and the method proposed by Jørgen Bruhn and Anne Gjelsvik in Cinema Between Media (2018). The diachronic perspective allows me to chart how Ibsen is embedded in intersections between literature, theatre, and Weimar cinema – intermedial relations considered fundamental to the Kammerspielfilm (Vonderau 2012; Kaes 2013). The synchronic perspective revolves around three sub-categories that highlight different levels of exchange in the filmic text and its cultural and sociopolitical context: medial transposition, media combination, and intermedial reference (Rajewsky 2005, 52–54; Bruhn and Gjelsvik 2018, 20–22).

In Rajewsky’s terminology, medial transposition concerns exchange from one media to another, in this case how dialogue, setting, and characters are transposed from Ibsen’s text to Pick’s film.

Bruhn and Gjelsvik use “transformation” for similar processes, stressing the temporal aspect of the adaptation process (2018, 20). The credits of Das Haus der Lüge inform audiences that the film is “based on the immortal drama by Henrik Ibsen”.5 I suggest, however, that it is more productive to focus on infidelity in order to identify and discuss ideological implications. This entails approaching the film as a composite that draws on other intertexts and medialities than Ibsen’s social play exclusively.

Media combination occurs simply when distinct forms of media are present in the same cultural product. Besides the photographing in the Ekdal atelier, the film conspicuously draws on a pictorial acting style that would bring to the minds of contemporary audiences the

5

“Nach unsterblichen Drama des Henrik Ibsens.”

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theatre or films of the previous decade (see also Yalgın and Sandberg in this volume for further discussion of acting styles). The critic in Der Kinematograph, for instance, saw “shadows of the Brahm era at the Lessing Theatre” in this adaptation of The Wild Duck (1926, 23).6 Consequently, it would be more accurate to describe Das Haus der Lüge as an intermedial composite than a one-way adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

Finally, and most importantly, intermedial reference concerns how a film “thematizes, evokes, or imitates elements or structures of another, conventionally distinct medium through the use of its own media-specific means” (Rajewsky 2005, 53). Bruhn and Gjelsvik stress how features often refer to other films in both intended and unintended ways that also qualify as intermedial reference (2018, 22). I employ this category as an analytical tool when discussing how Das Haus der Lüge self-reflexively positions itself in relation to other arts, most notably still photography and cinema.

I loosely follow Bruhn and Gjelsvik’s three-step model on how to analyse filmic composites “by cataloguing, structuring and contextualizing medialities” (2018, 25). The authors approach intermediality as a motif that produces different layers of meaning and demonstrate how contextualisation often holds the key to a fuller understanding of the intermedial issues at stake in individual films. To read Das Haus der Lüge in its historical moment, then, means to frame it within the visual turn of the Weimar Republic, when an explosion of images challenged literature, theatre, and traditional newspapers in ways that have been discussed as no less than an alteration of perception (Weitz 2007, 207–50).

The opening sequence introduces Gina and Hedwig Ekdal photographing an extended family on the occasion of the matriarch’s ninetieth birthday. The fabricated nature of the portrait is underscored by how Gina meticulously choreographs a boy’s posture and how the arrangement is endangered by a restless toddler playing with a doll.

Hedwig successfully directs the toddler as her mother seeks the perfect

6

“Bei diesem Film…stiegen die Schatten der Brahm-Epoche im Lessing-theater auf.”

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Fig. 1. Gina Ekdal (Lucie Höflich) seeking the perfect photographic moment in Das Haus der Lüge (1926). Courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek. Fig. 2. Gregers Werle (Walter Janssen) returning back home as a disabled “soldier” in Das Haus der Lüge (1926). Courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek.

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photographic moment. The film self-reflexively hints at the collaborative effort of filmmaking by explicitly positioning the framing of the camera within the cinematic frame. The stilted tableau apes traditional family portraits in art history, with support from a background that resembles Roman landscape painting. In the words of Brigitte Peucker, “tableau vivant moments in film set up tension between the two- and three-dimensional, between stasis and movement, between the ‘death’ of the human body in painting and its ‘life’ in cinema” (2007, 26).

Lupu Pick thus addresses the relation between cinema, literature, still photography, and painting in a tripartite mise-en-abyme, with Pick’s adaptation framed within Ibsen’s “immortal drama”, Gina Ekdal’s family photograph framed within the cinematic frame, and the family portrait framed within the painted background (see Fig. 1). The opening sequence of Das Haus der Lüge consequently triggers intermedial reflections, destabilises notions of authorship, and questions issues of reality and representation.

The War Comes Home After the introduction of the Ekdals, the film cuts to an outdoor scene with Gregers Werle returning home in a horse-drawn carriage after a long absence. A vignetted close-up of his shoes highlights that one sole is significantly higher than the other (see Fig. 2); the film cuts to a back shot which reveals a limp. The deformation may bring to mind limping, Lucifer-like characters such as Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust (1808), or how Relling identifies him as “the devil” in the play (Ibsen 2019, 106). The close-up, moreover, suggests a prosthesis or a serious injury that resonates in the aftermath of the lost war. As Deborah Cohen asserts, “[M]ore than any other group, disabled veterans symbolized the First World War’s burdens” (2001, 2). The critic in Die Filmwoche linked the disability of Gregers with “a conspicuous mitigation of this character’s fanaticism” (1926, 204).7

7

T he actor “hat allerdings das Fanatische dieses Charakters wesentlich gemildert, wie auch sein körperliches Gebrechen…das vielleicht unmittelbar Ursache zu seinem Fanatismus ist”.

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Gregers rejects the dinner invitation and refrains from any metaphysical quest or absolutes in the film; the burning idealist of Ibsen’s play is thus transformed into a disabled and aloof character in Pick’s film. The return of physically or psychologically damaged characters, moreover, was a common motif in Weimar cinema. In Leopold Jessner’s Backstairs, for instance, the plot revolves around the return of an injured fiancé without mentioning the war once – there was simply no need to do so for audiences in Germany in the early 1920s (Kaes 2009, 117–18).

By the time Das Haus der Lüge premiered in Germany, illegitimate children conceived during World War I were approaching Hedwig’s age. This social context may explain why the filmmakers removed any ambiguity over the paternity issue, making the film ask more direct questions about the destinies of illegitimate children in the context of postwar Germany. As Hedwig receives the wild duck as a gift from old Ekdal (Paul Henckels), the film cuts to a medium shot of Hjalmar and Gina as the latter serves her husband a meal. “See how happy she can be,” Hjalmar exclaims to his wife. “Isn’t it horrible to think that she will lose her sight!”8 Gina grabs her husband abruptly by the arm when the topic is brought up. The camera cuts to Gina in a vignetted medium close-up; her facial expression changes swiftly from surprise to sadness, and her chest heaves heavily as she looks towards her daughter off-screen for ten seconds of running time. The camera cuts back to a medium shot which highlights the difference between husband and worried wife. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs have explored how such pictorial acting transferred from theatre to cinema in the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing that: pictorial effects convey to the audience which of the many objects and people visible to them are significant for the development of the action, while changes on the stage picture overall, and in the attitudes of the actors, indicate new centres of attention and changes in the situation.

Shot-based accounts of the cinema assign these functions largely to fram-

8

“ Sieh nur, wie sie sich freuen kann! … Ist es nicht schrecklich zu wissen, dass sie das Augenlicht verlieren wird!”

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ings that isolate the significant element—hence the importance in such accounts of the emergence of the close-up—and to the shot changes that shift the attention from component to component of a scene. (1997, 13)

As the viewer has already been informed of old Werle’s declining eyesight at this point, the pictorial acting and the close-up remove any doubt about the paternity issue. This is a significant departure from The Wild Duck where, in the words of Ibsen scholar Toril Moi, “the question of paternity is surrounded by doubt” (2006, 248). The film adaptation provides no background on the relationship between Jan Werle and Gina, which suggests an act of unfaithfulness rather than the sexual abuse of the former housemaid that is implied in the play.

Das Haus der Lüge dramatises the fate of an innocent child and the hidden secrets of her parentage in ways that adhere to contemporary debates on illegitimate children, as documented by Sybille Buske in Fräulein Mutter und ihr Bastard (2004). Sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld described World War I as “the greatest sexual disaster in the civilized history of mankind” and understood the dramatically increasing divorce rates in Germany as indicators of “a bankruptcy of marriage and sexual ethics” (1966, 437). A number of feature films gave aesthetic responses to the dissolution of families and issues of illegitimate children towards the end or in the aftermath of the war, as we see in, for example, Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Woman 1918) and Fräulein Mutter (Maiden Mother 1919). Das Haus der Lüge can also be seen in continuation of Pick’s two-part Aus den Erinnerungen eines Frauenarztes (From the Memoirs of a Gynecologist 1922), which was conceived as a protest against the heavily debated law criminalising abortion in Germany.

The weight of the past in Ibsen’s Wild Duck only intensifies within the context of mid-1920s Germany – a society in which lies, deceit, death, disability, and (hereditary) disease were lurking beneath the façade of bourgeois family portraits. “If we wanted to write a social history of mistrust in Germany, then above all the Weimar Republic would draw attention to itself. Fraud and expectations of being defrauded became epidemic in it,” writes Peter Sloterdijk. “In those 197

years, it proved to be an omnipresent risk of existence that from behind all solid illusions, the untenable and chaotic emerged” (1987, 483). The mostly static camera in Das Haus der Lüge ensures that the atmosphere is truly claustrophobic, in the spirit of the Kammerspielfilm. It shows no landscapes and barely strays beyond the Ekdal and Werle homes (with the exception of two outdoor shots in the opening sequence and the painted cityscape outside the windows of the apartment building).

Instead, the camera investigates the interior of the Ekdal household from multiple angles, like a spy in constant motion, in ways that suggest confinement and constraint.

By transforming Hedwig and Gregers into wounded half-siblings, Das Haus der Lüge morphs into post-traumatic cinema; it is a film that supports Anton Kaes’ suggestion that a number of Weimar films “translate military aggression and defeat into domestic tableaux of crime and horror” (2009, 3). The adaptation reads as a dissection of bourgeois life from the perspective of someone who has experienced the war. Key concepts from Ibsen’s play, such as lies and sacrifice, take on additional meanings from this perspective. Having fought a war propagated to defend German Kultur against foreign Zivilisation, many veterans were alienated by the Heimat they returned to. For what kind of Germany had millions of soldiers sacrificed their lives and health? In The Wild Duck, Gregers’ pathological quest for truth is partly motivated by his mother’s suspicion before her death that Werle and Gina Ekdal had an affair. In Das Haus der Lüge, any mention of Gregers’ mother or Gina as a housemaid is removed from the storyline.

Seen as a disabled veteran, Gregers’ quest for truth is instead motivated by a desire to clean house in a homeland permeated by lies. This reading is further supported by Pick having changed the title from The Wild Duck to Das Haus der Lüge, downplaying the symbolism of the play and its wounded animal in the process.

Production Notes and Critical Reception Das Haus der Lüge was made by Pick’s production company, Rex-Film, under the wings of Ufa (Universum Film AG). To replace his former scriptwriter Carl Mayer, the director turned to Fanny Carlsen to 198

co-write the script based on Ibsen’s play. The term Kammerspielfilm alludes to the theatre constructed by Max Reinhardt that was referred to as Kammerspiele – a section of the Deutsches Theater built specifically for intimate theatre and inaugurated with a staging of Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) in 1906. At least four of the actors in Das Haus der Lüge had been trained by Reinhardt and performed in this famous version of Ghosts in the early 1900s: Werner Krauß, Lucie Höflich, Eduard von Winterstein, and Albert Steinrück (IbsenStage). Cinematographer Carl Drews had worked with Karl Freund, the celebrated innovator of the “unchained camera” (entfesselte Kamera) who worked on Der letzte Mann (filmportal.de). The set designer was the renowned occultist Albin Grau, best known for his work on Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922).

The esteemed film composer Giuseppe Becce composed the musical score for the premiere in Berlin on 22 January 1926.9 Das Haus der Lüge was officially rated as Volksbildend (educative of the people) and the immense praise it received upon its release resembled the critical reception of Der letzte Mann. Deutsche Filmwoche called it one of “the best German works”10 (Ludwigg 1926, 10) and Filmtechnik found it “one of the most artful film creations in recent years”11 (A.K. 1926, 101). Several writers framed Pick’s Ibsen adaptation as a Kammerspielfilm along the lines of Scherben and Sylvester.

8-Uhr-Abendblatt referred to it as a “chamber play” (Kammerspiel) (1926, n.p.), whereas Der Film elaborated on this, calling it “a vintage chamber play”12 (W. 1926, 23). Critics saw the film as proof that cinema was capable of producing true works of art. With thinly veiled pride, some hailed Das Haus der Lüge as film art superior to US pro-

9

T he version of Das Haus der Lüge explored here is a digital restoration by the National Library of Norway in cooperation with Deutsche Kinemathek, which plays at eighteen frames per second and has a running time of 111 minutes. The print was made available as recently as 2019. For further information, see www.filmportal.de/node/9417/stock#sichtungskopie.

10

“ Zusammen mit seinen Schaispielern errang [Lupu Pick] eine geschlossene Leistung, die diesen Film zu den besten deutschen Arbeiten macht.”

11

“Eine der kunstwahrsten Filmschöpfungen der letzten Jahre.”

12

“Ein erlesenes Kammerspiel.”

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ductions and as a new apotheosis for German cinema (A.K. 1926, 100; Die Filmwoche 1926, 204; –s. 1926, 176). Both the director’s cinematic treatment of Ibsen’s play and the acting were singled out for special praise. Die Filmwoche considered that Pick deserved the same fame as F.W. Murnau (ibid.), whereas Heinz Ludwigg dubbed Swedish actor Mary Johnson (Hedwig) the German Mary Pickford (1926, 10). The reviews write themselves into discourses on intermediality, Hollywood hegemony, and the German star culture of the mid-1920s.

Intermedial Tensions I suggest that the mixed mediality of Das Haus der Lüge serves at least three different functions: it positions the film in the contemporary and competitive media market, it bridges the opposites in the so-called Kino-Debatte (debate about cinema), and it serves a crucial role in the film’s function as a trauma narrative.

Firstly, Pick’s film differs in nature from the rapid editing of Hollywood productions in the tradition of D.W. Griffith and from more recent developments in Weimar cinema, such as the unchained camera of Der letzte Mann and the star-studded ensemble of Die freudlose Gasse ( Joyless Street, 1925), with Greta Garbo in the lead role.

Thomas Elsaesser has remarked that: many of Weimar cinema’s classics are films about filmmaking itself, that is, self-referential. Such “reflexivity” is, however, in this case due less to the directors belonging to a specific aesthetic avant-garde and pursuing a modernist agenda. Instead, I see it as evidence of a historical conjuncture in which a prominent segment of the Weimar film community (counting next to producers, directors and screenwriters also set designers and cameramen) found itself in an intense dialogue or even struggle on at least two fronts: domestically, they had to compete with other, more established arts and their social institutions, and internationally, with the permanent threat of Hollywood hegemony, both on the German market and in the rest of Europe. (2000, 5)

Within these cultural coordinates, Das Haus der Lüge harks back to the intersection between earlier Kammerspielfilme and German theatre.

Conceived and received as a film that distances itself from Hollywood, 200

the film pleased critics eager to promote the superiority of German Kultur over the alleged superficial arts of America. In Filmtechnik, for instance, the writer could not see how “this film will find any buyers in the US” (A.K. 1926, 101).13 Secondly, the Kino-Debatte of the 1920s polarised literature and theatre against their new rival, cinema (Kaes 1987; Walk 2007). A number of critics saw film as a threat to nothing less than German Kultur itself. Murnau, taking the opposite position in the debate, called for cinema to free itself from the weighty tradition of theatre (Walk 2007, 177). Pick saw theatre and film as non-competitive forms of expression, stressing how cinema differs in its capacity to transmit affect. “My love belongs to the cinema. I do not see the medium as a threat to theatre,” Pick explained in 1928. “To me, cinema is an art of intensity […]. The lifeless, moving shadows on the big screen can make us cry and laugh. What in the end decides the value of a film, however, is always the personality behind these shadows” (as cited in Treuner 1928, n.p.).14 The Kammerspielfilme of Pick, Jessner, and Murnau can be described as intermedial transpositions and combinations that undercut the fierce fronts of the Kino-Debatte in terms of their forms.

As Kaes states, “[T]he Kammerspielfilm imbued the photographic medium of film with theatrical gravity” (2013, 152). Kammerspielfilme share a number of generic markers with the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg: situated in small settings and offering intimate portraits of few characters over a short period of time, they emphasise character psychology by means of their slow tempo and telling acting, in films that are more naturalistic in character than expressionist films (Thompson and Bordwell 2019, 94). The mixture of frail masculine egos and claustrophobic atmospheres more often than not results in death as the out-

13

“Wir glauben nicht, daß dieser Film Käufer in U.S.A. finden kann.”

14

“ Meine Liebe gehört dem Film. Ich sehe in ihm auch keine Konkurrenz für das Theater. Film spielen und Filme stellen bedeutet für mich eine Kunst der Intensität…. Die an sich leblosen, beweglichen Schatten auf der weißen Wand können uns weinen und lachen machen.

Entscheidend für den Wert oder Unwert wird letzten Endes immer die Persönlichkeit sein, die hinter diesen Schatten steht.”

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come of the narrative. The interconnections between Ibsen and this genre are perhaps most obvious in Ghosts and The Wild Duck, which are both plays aligned with naturalism that stretch beyond the bourgeois spheres of his other social dramas.

Thirdly, the intermediality of Das Haus der Lüge can be discussed as a mode of address. Considering that the film attacks bourgeois corruption, it is significant that it premiered at Berlin’s Mozartsaal – a theatre that screened literary adaptations and drew bourgeois audiences. Many of these viewers saw themselves as guardians of the German Bildungsbürgertum (the educated middle-class) and were inclined to encounter the film with a thorough knowledge of Ibsen’s play and the theatre traditions on which it draws. Not even the intimate theatre of Max Reinhardt could show facial expressions and body language to such striking effect as the close-ups in the film; the pictorial effects of Das Haus der Lüge pierce the thin veneer of bourgeois role-playing and hold it up for audiences to see.

Time and Trauma Das Haus der Lüge stays close to the issues of knowing and not knowing that Sigmund Freud identified as central to traumatic experience and which Cathy Caruth (1996) has explored as hallmarks of trauma narratives. Despite the Norwegian historical setting and the dated pictorial acting, the film only seems to depict a space detached from the war experience. The setting and the linear narrative of the film are disrupted by the historical moment in which it was produced and seen, in ways that reflect spatial and temporal ruptures of traumatic experience. As Richard J. Evans puts it, “[W]hen Germans referred to ‘peacetime’ after 1918, it was not to the era in which they were actually living, but to the period before the Great War had begun. Germany failed to make the transition from wartime back to peacetime after 1918” (2004, 72). For viewers familiar with Ibsen’s play or Pick’s previous Kammerspielfilme, moreover, the coming death and disaster are already known to have happened. In this light, the Norwegian setting functions both as a utopian space of pre-traumatic innocence and the displaced double of the Weimar Republic.

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Figs. 3a–d. The pictorial acting highlights the obliviousness of Hjalmar and the terror of Gina Ekdal (Werner Krauß and Lucie Höflich) in Das Haus der Lüge (1926). Courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek.

Pick transforms Ibsen’s play about destructive idealism into a trauma narrative that negotiates two contrasting positions: what we may call the pre-traumatic stress syndrome of Gina Ekdal and the sheer obliviousness of Hjalmar. As the husband accepts Gregers’ request to stay with the Ekdals for a period of time, the camera cuts to Gina, who is coming in through the double door to the loft. She reacts with terror at the sight of the young Werle. The film then cuts back to Hjalmar and Gregers staring back at her in a medium shot. A reverse eye-level shot shows Gina panic-stricken (see Figs. 3a–d). As Hjalmar introduces the intruder to his wife, her chest heaves heavily and rapidly in a medium close-up. “This is my wife Gina, the mother of our beloved daughter Hedwig,” Hjalmar says, which only emphasises his ignorance of what Gina, Gregers, and the audience already know.15 As Hjalmar leads

15

“Das ist meine Frau Gina, die Mutter meinen lieben Tochter Hedwig.”

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Gregers to the Ekdals’ guest room, an over-the-shoulder shot shows Gina closed-fisted and frozen, apart from her rapidly heaving chest, in a pose that is held for more than 20 seconds of running time. The pictorial effect of this scene guides the viewer’s attention towards Gina’s awareness of the disaster about to unfold, whereas Hjalmar is caught completely off-guard. The film thus negotiates trauma so as to also warn the audience and prepare it for coming disasters in the turbulent Weimar Republic.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1925), published in the same year that Das Haus der Lüge was produced, Sigmund Freud pays attention to how psychological wounds sharpen one’s capacity for anticipating danger: In the case of the ordinary traumatic neuroses two characteristics emerge prominently: first, that the chief weight in their causation seems to rest upon the factor of surprise, of fright; and secondly, that a wound or injury inflicted simultaneously works as a rule against the development of a neurosis. ‘Fright’, ‘fear’ and ‘anxiety’ are improperly used as synonymous expressions; they are in fact capable of clear distinction in their relation to danger. ‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. ‘Fear’ requires a definite object of which to be afraid. ‘Fright’, however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise. (1955, 12)

In light of Freud’s remarks, Gina’s pre-traumatic awareness develops from anxiety into fear with the arrival of Gregers, whereas Hjalmar’s obliviousness heightens his vulnerability.

Intermedial Combinations The trauma narrative of Das Haus der Lüge comes with intermedial combinations and references that shed light on how the film was formed and how it functioned as a cultural text. Ibsen’s plays are intertwined in the genealogy of the Kammerspielfilm in ways that go well 204

beyond Pick’s adaptation.16 To gain a fuller understanding of these interconnections one would do well to start with Leopold Jessner, a director who took part in both Carl Heine’s and Gustav Lindemann’s Ibsen theatres before becoming one of the Norwegian dramatist’s bestknown directors on the German stage of the 1910s (Hanssen 2018, 173ff.). F.W. Murnau was an avid reader of Ibsen in his formative years (Eisner 1969, 15). In a remark that describes the Kammerspielfilm well, Elsaesser pointed out that “Murnau’s debt to Scandinavian masters consisted in his ability to adopt their naturalism and heighten it further in the direction of ordinary actions and simple gestures suffused with an atmosphere at once lyrical and uncanny, ethereal and mysterious” (2000, 228). It is also a curious fact that Carl Mayer in the early 1920s was contracted to write the script for an adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll’s House, a project that appears to have been scrapped (Kasten 1994, 28). Pick played Rørlund in a performance of Ibsen’s Pillars of Society (1877) at the Schiller Theatre in Hamburg in November 1911 (IbsenStage). He also co-wrote the infamous Aufklärungsfilm (sexual education film) Es werde Licht (Let There Be Light 1917) with Richard Oswald, who produced and oversaw the two-part film adaptation Peer Gynt (1919; see also Rees in this volume).

The neglect of Ibsen in discussions of the Kammerspielfilm may be traced to Lotte Eisner’s seminal The Haunted Screen (1969).

Eisner’s omission is remarkable, considering Ibsen’s formidable influence on the legendary theatre director. Reinhardt worked on no fewer than forty Ibsen events between 1894 and 1920 (Hanssen 2018, 210).

Somewhat paradoxically, The Haunted Screen provides anecdotes that imply that Ibsen, both via Reinhardt and more directly, had a more significant influence on Weimar cinema than hitherto acknowledged.

“Max Reinhardt had realized what power there was behind that kind of shadow which fuses decoration and enigma into symbol,” Eisner observes. “In his first production at the Kammerspiele in 1906—

16

Anton Kaes’ comment that Leopold Jessner’s Backstairs is a Kammerspielfilm “in the tradition of an Ibsen play” is suggestive here (2009, 118).

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Ibsen’s Ghosts—in the scene in which the panic-stricken mother runs after her delirious son, Reinhardt got them to pass in front of a lightsource, and immense shadows shot around the walls of the stage like a pack of demons” (1969, 130). Reinhardt’s Ghosts, in other words, anticipated Nosferatu’s shadows.

Even more suggestive is Eisner’s anecdote about a disagreement between Pick and Mayer putting an end to their planned trilogy of Kammerspielfilme (1969, 207). The rift is described by film historian Carl Vincent as follows: [Their collaboration] lasted until a dispute over the characterization of the porter in The Last Laugh [Der letzte Mann] separated them. This film was planned as the third part of a trilogy that started with Scherben and continued with Sylvester. Lupu Pick was not only to bring the manuscript to life, but also embody its pitiful hero. This conflict caused Murnau to take over directing the film and he gave the role of the porter to [Emil] Jannings. (1939, 149)17

In F.W. Murnau’s Der letzte Mann, we meet an ageing porter who has been relegated to cleaning the gentlemen’s lavatories and forced to relinquish the uniform that represents his whole identity. Desperate to not let the humiliation become publicly known, he steals the uniform back and carries it with pride back and forth to the luxurious hotel. Murnau and Mayer’s plot thus circles around an Ibsenesque “life-lie” couched in tragicomedy (Ibsen 2019, 202). Old Ekdal in The Wild Duck, who also clings to his old uniform to keep going after being humiliated, may come to mind as a literary predecessor. Pick, in other words, left Der letzte Mann and went on to complete the trilogy with an adaptation of Ibsen.

Das Haus der Lüge adheres closely to the formula established by Mayer, except for its use of intertitles. This break led to a complaint

17

“ Elle dura jusqu´au jour où un différend, au sujet du caractère à donner au portier du Dernier des Hommes, les sépara. A L’origine, ce film devait constituer la troisième partie d’une trilogie commencée avec Le Rail et poursuivie avec La Nuit de la Saint-Sylvestre.

Lupu Pick devait non seulement donner vie au scénario mais encore incarner son pitoyable héros. Ce différend fit que Murnau reprit la mise en scène et confia à Jannings le role du portier.”

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from the critic in Filmtechnik, who in an otherwise panegyric review lamented that “many intertitles could have been spared, since these reiterations emphasize the intellectual elements of the play and testify to an exaggerated worship of authority irrelevant for the film” (A.K. 1926, 101).18 I suggest that the intertitles in Das Haus der Lüge can be interrogated in two ways. Firstly, the film acknowledges the literary roots of the genre hitherto clouded by Mayer’s scripts. Secondly, the intertitles are essential to the film’s thematisation of itself in relation to Ibsen’s play and are thus a crucial semiotic component of the film as a whole.

Intermedial References It is striking how Das Haus der Lüge displays photographic frames within cinematographic frames combined with pictorial effects of anxiety. The harmonic surfaces of still photography are thus contrasted with the looming disharmony beneath the veneer of the film’s bourgeois families.

As old Werle seeks out his son in the Ekdal apartment, a panic-stricken Gina Ekdal pretends to be cleaning photographs in the hallway as she eavesdrops on their conversation, in which Gregers stresses the need to reveal the parentage of Hedwig. The stasis of the family portrait contrasts with the tremor of the lived moment; the film pits the staged harmony of pictures against the danger of truth and spoken words.

Pick’s Scherben is framed with still images of shattered glass that reflect the broken lives in the narrative (Kaes 2013, 152). As Gregers is about to reveal the unpleasant truth, viewers familiar with Pick’s first Kammerspielfilm would have recognised this motif in Das Haus der Lüge: it is certainly no coincidence that the symbolic destiny inscribed in broken glass is repeated when he enters the Ekdal household on Hedwig’s birthday. The reference to Scherben implies a parallel in how an intruder can destroy a family. Gina Ekdal is seen cleaning the family photos from the opening sequence as Gregers enters the living room.

18

“ Viele Titel hätte man sich ersparen können, da das wiederholte Unterstreichen der gedanklichen Elemente des Ursprungsstückes nur eine für den Film gesetzwidrige, übertriebene Autoritätenverehrung überflüssig bezeugt.”

2 07

Fig. 4. Hedwig (Mary Johnson) framing the wild duck; as Gregers Werle enters, the frame shatters.

Fig 5. The shattered glass of the photographic frame, caused by Gregers Werle’s entrance.

Courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek.

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The mother’s facial expression suddenly changes, from focused to fearful, and once more her rapidly heaving chest signifies inner distress in a drawn-out medium shot. Upon his entrance, Hedwig loses her grip on the frame she uses to envision the perfect picture of the wild duck; the camera cuts rapidly to a close-up of the shattered glass and back again to signal unexpected violence (see Figs.4–5). An intertitle states that Gregers wishes Hedwig “great happiness” on her birthday, which contrasts with the tragic foreboding.19 The frail veneer of the Ekdal family is juxtaposed with the fixed portrait of the extended family: bourgeois families can transform into broken existences in an instant.

Peucker refers to such constellations as “intermedial layering” and argues that it allows film to enter a dialogue with other art forms and make the spectator aware of ontological differences between media (2007, 14, 26). One way of exploring frames within the cinematic frames of Das Haus der Lüge, then, is to approach them as a series of mise-en-abyme compositions that pit photography and film against each other in a battle over the meaning of modernity. The rise of photography had already led to debates on whether pictures captured reality better than other media (Weitz 2007, 212). From this perspective, Das Haus der Lüge exhibits its hybridity and questions the “realism” of still photography by exhibiting it as artificial and staged events – a motif that is repeated in the coda of the film.

Das Haus der Lüge depicts the perspective of Gregers Werle as radically different from that of the circle around the Ekdal family. The intruder’s counterpart is Relling, who is described as “a doctor with little experience, excessive thirst, and a warm, good heart”.20 Gregers Werle and Dr Relling – highly ambivalent characters in Ibsen’s play – function as Manichean opposites of realism and illusionism respectively in the film adaptation.

Upon entering the Ekdal household, the perspective of the intruder is marked by a string of eye-level shots: Hjalmar and old Ekdal

19

“Ein grosses, reines Glück.”

20

“Ein Arzt mit wenig Praxis, viel Durst und einem warmen, gütigen Herzen.”

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with a dead rabbit in their hands after hunting in the artificial woods of the loft; the terror in the eyes of Gina Ekdal; and a ragged student of theology lecturing Gregers’ half-sister. It is amidst such bourgeois deceit and role-playing that the doctor tells Gregers, “I hope I won’t catch you here too with such silly ideas.”21 The warning is preceded by a medium close-up that shows Dr Relling ensuring that Hedwig does not listen; the intertitle and the camera imply that the doctor will be keeping her parentage a secret. The polarisation of Gregers Werle and Dr Relling leads our attention to a number of opposites that structure the conflict in the film: nuclear family and broken family, home and away, rich and poor, life and death, truth and lies, and reality and illusion. These opposites are already there in Ibsen’s play; what is new, however, is the heightened intermediality within which these opposites are framed and the sociopolitical pressures of postwar Germany.

The verse about the Tower of Babel that introduces Mayer’s Sylvester script would be perfectly apt here as well: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7). Siegfried Kracauer aptly comments that “this motto clearly indicates Mayer’s design to continue in New Year’s Eve what he had begun in Shattered: the representation of social chaos by two social spheres separated by an abysmal gulf” (2004, 98).

Pick continues to explore the danger of spoken words in Das Haus der Lüge by inserting intertitles that amplify this message. The postwar context is further signalled by the more military rhetoric that catalyses the main tragedy of the film. In Ibsen’s play, Gregers encourages Hedwig to sacrifice her most sacred belonging, the wild duck, to restore the harmony of the family. In Das Haus der Lüge, Gregers Werle gives the following answer to Hedwig’s question of how to prove her love for someone: “By fighting for him…or suffering for him…or to make sacrifices for him.”22 Many veterans described how World War I continued to live in and through them. In light of the postwar context, the

21

“Ich hoffe, ich ertappe Sie nicht auch hier auf solchen Flausen.”

22

“Indem man für ihn kämpft … oder um ihn leidet … oder Opfer für ihn bringt …”

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disabled Gregers Werle brings the war with him into the Ekdal household, with revelatory and tragic consequences as the piercing perspective of the disabled veteran collides with the illusions of the bourgeois family. By means of intermedial references, Das Haus der Lüge updates Ibsen’s play for German audiences and ties in with a number of Kammerspielfilme in its negotiation of the social turbulence that played out in the postwar years.

The Moral Occult Peter Brooks has taught us that the absence of a moral order linked to the sacred led melodrama to strive towards a “moral occult”, defined as “the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality” (1976, 5). I argue that Das Haus der Lüge promotes a “moral occult” in the form of a love doctrine that promotes freedom from the hypocrisy of the most central institution of bourgeois culture, the family, which was ill-prepared to deal with the aftermath of the war.

This moral message is conveyed in the close-up of a neck ring with the inscription “I belong to Hedwig” in the hands of Hedwig; it is a birthday gift from Dr Relling intended as a symbol of ownership and love to be worn by the wild duck. Strikingly, the close-up is repeated after the death of Hedwig and the end of Ibsen’s plot. This second appearance brings the narrative to a halt and marks a rupture in space, time, and causality. On the one hand, one may read the re-introduction of the ring as a flashback, which has been discussed as the one device allowed to disrupt temporal continuity in mainstream cinema. However, at least two aspects of the duplicated appearance complicate this reading. When the ring appears for the first time, it is seen from the perspective of Hedwig or Dr Relling. The second appearance, however, is not coherent with the film’s presentation of events in the narrative chain and introduces a rupture regardless of perspective. The ring reappears after Hjalmar and Gina weep over the dead child, and this reappearance is followed by Gregers Werle leaving the apartment accompanied by a double shadow and a panning camera. Adding to this rupture, the second appearance of the ring comes with a different 211

language, which further obscures its place in the filmic narrative: “I belong to Hedwig” in English changes into “Jeg tilhör Hedwig”, which is a mixture of Norwegian and Swedish (see Figs. 6a–b). One possible reason for this change of language is that the restored version is a composite print; another concerns the filmmakers ensuring that the moral message of the film reached an international audience. A third way of reading the mysterious ring is that it exhibits what Kristin Thompson discusses as “excess”, a break with classical narrative cinema that exceeds the linear narrative and punctuates the “realism” of the story (1977, 54–64). In this light, the ring presents audiences with a deviant structure of temporality and showcases a counter-cinematic practice that draws the spectators’ attention to the fact they are watching a film.

The ring functions as the opposite of bourgeois corruption and egotism in the film. As Hedwig protests upon receiving it from Dr Relling: “Isn’t that like putting a shackle around the foot? She shall not feel that she is a free bird anymore.”23 If the ideology of love and marriage involves a ring as a symbol of “ownership”, Hedwig is having none of it. Keeping the ring to herself, she denies the role-playing of the bourgeois family and stresses freedom from such constraints. The reappearance of the ring, which lingers strikingly in strong chiaroscuro for almost a minute, thus functions as an authorial comment and as an antidote to bourgeois corruption – a brief cinema of attraction amid the otherwise linear narrative structure.

Hungarian film critic Béla Balázs, who wrote the script for a film produced by Pick titled Das Mädchen mit den fünf Nullen (The Girl with the Five Zeros 1927), declared in 1924 that “at present a new discovery, a new machine, is at work to turn the attention of men back to a visual culture and give them new faces” (as cited in Gunning 1997, 1).

As Tom Gunning puts it, “For theorists such as Balázs, the motion picture camera had the ability not only to capture reality, but to penetrate it as a new instrument of the visible which had a revelatory mis-

23

“ Ist es nicht, wie wenn wir ihr eine Fessel um den Fuss legen; sie soll doch nicht fühlen, dass sie kein freier Vogel mehr ist.”

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Fig. 6a. The ring presented as a birthday gift to Hedwig from Dr. Relling, with the inscription in English. Fig 6b. The ring in the hands of Hedwig, subsequent to her death, with the inscription in Swedish/Norwegian. Courtesy of Deutsche Kinemathek.

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sion” (ibid.). In this light, Das Haus der Lüge arguably promotes a love doctrine that exceeds classical narration, literature, and still photography; the antidote to illusions, in other words, is expressed visually in cinematographic close-ups.

Coda and Crises It is telling that the last dialogue in the narrative proper is a direct quote from Ibsen’s play, in which Gina Ekdal exclaims: “Now I believe that she belongs to us both, half and half.”24 The film thus tricks the viewer familiar with Ibsen’s play into believing that the narrative is nearing the end, whereas the added coda makes for a surprising twist, one that inserts authorial power and intention on the part of the filmmakers. The importance of the love doctrine extends to the unexpected coda, an added sequence which begins with the intertitle “Life went on… Only little Hedwig was no longer there…”25 The coda is deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, it allows audiences to envision a new and better future. On the other hand, it puts forth a sustained critique of bourgeois façades with still photography as its emblematic medium: the Ekdals cash in on portrait photography and continue to perform their social roles despite the death of their child. Nothing has changed – except that Hedwig is no longer there.

This was the first time Pick had included a reconciling ending in a Kammerspielfilm. Spectators could recall the inserted (and ironic) happy ending of Murnau’s Der letzte Mann as another intermedial reference and thus read the ending of Das Haus der Lüge as a comment on the psychosocial function of the Kammerspielfilm. The intermedial layering of the opening sequence is repeated in the coda when Gina Ekdal agrees to take a picture of a bridal couple that arrives unexpectedly. Where Murnau and Mayer flirted with Hollywood conventions

24

“ Jetzt meine ich, gehört sie doch uns beiden. Dir zur hälfte und mir zur hälfte.” The English translation in The Wild Duck says, “[N]ow at least she is ours half and half” (Ibsen 2019, 105). In the original Norwegian version: “Den ene får hjælpe den anden. For nu er vi da halvt om hende, ved jeg” (Ibsen 2009, 232).

25

“Das Leben aber ging seinen Gang weiter… Nur die kleine Hedwig war nicht mehr dabei…”

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in their happy ending, Das Haus der Lüge insists on work and rituals as life goes on. In this light, the film promotes the struggles of everyday life rather than the sensationalism of Hollywood endings.

Literary scholar Peter Szondi situated Ibsen in opposition to Renaissance drama, which was based on dialogue and thematised interpersonal relationships in the present. Szondi observed that “the past dominates instead of the present” in Ibsen and stressed that “the past itself and not a past event is thematized; it is remembered and still active internally” (1987, 45). Das Haus der Lüge performs a radical temporal reorientation of Ibsen’s play: rather than depicting characters infected by a past they cannot get rid of, the coda allows the Ekdals and, by extension, audiences to envision a future free of past guilt and complexities. The more freely moving camera and the not so wrought acting in the coda suggest newfound freedom, as if the “house of lies” has been cleansed of a toxic past. Das Haus der Lüge works through familial tensions and traumas and advocates leaving the ghosts of the past behind; as post-traumatic cinema, the reconciling ending takes on an alleviating function for German cinemagoers in the aftermath of World War I. In this light, the family portraits in Das Haus der Lüge, if not the whole business of still photography, point towards a desire for wholeness and harmony, however illusory. The critic Felix Hanseleit espoused this reading in Reichsfilmblatt, hailing Das Haus der Lüge as a “praise song for the illusion” (Preislied für die Illusion) (1926, 11).

Illustrierter Film-Kurier, a programme accompanying the film, also followed such melodramatic logic and informed cinemagoers that “Hedwig died because there are foolish and overbearing human beings who forget that souls do not need truth and enlightenment at all, but only love – love – love” (1926, 5).26 A closer reading, however, indicates that still photography is just as deceitful as the veneer of the bourgeois family itself. Whereas in

26

“Hedwig starb, weil es törichte und…anmaßende Menschen gibt, die da vergessen, daß die Seele überhaupt nicht Wahrheit braucht und Aufklärung, sondern nur Liebe --- Liebe --- Liebe.”

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Ibsen’s play there is a cacophony of voices talking past each other, the film adaptation extends the question of referentiality to photographic media itself. The coda begins with the camera panning from the bedroom of the dead child to Hjalmar in a deep-focus shot in the Ekdal bedroom. One function of the panorama shot is to show that photographs have been removed from the walls in the hallway and the bedroom, which indicates that Gina and Hjalmar see photography differently after Hedwig dies.

Upon the arrival of the couple who want to have their wedding portrait taken in the Ekdal atelier, Gina rolls down a backdrop with cupids. The painted background points to the artificiality of the wedding portrait and the ideology of marriage per se. Pictures are surfaces that say little about the stories behind them. Das Haus der Lüge thematises photography to show that the medium is capable of producing only illusions of indexical reality; beneath the surface of the family portraits in the Ekdal atelier are radically different stories, of which the tragedy of the Ekdal family is only one. The film insists on “the drama of ordinary people” that Pick referred to as the mission of his filmmaking career and dramatises the struggles behind photographs and beyond Hollywood endings (Bock 1984, n.p.).27 In the words of the critic in Die Filmwoche, “[W]e can only be grateful to people like Pick, when they do what they can to destroy America’s stupid myth of happy endings” (–s.

1926, 8).28 As Germany debated in the mid-1920s whether pictures capture reality better than other media, Das Haus der Lüge responds by linking still photography to the thin veneer of the bourgeois family. The reciprocity of photography and family ideology is further illuminated

27

“ I try to overcome the expressionistic delirium in my films in order to be more inspired by the mundaneness of everyday life. The technology or the decoration only interests me up until a certain point; the drama of ordinary people, however, interests me more than anything else.” (Ich versuche in meinen Filmen, das expressionistische Delirium zu überwinden und mich mehr von der Alltäglichkeit des Lebens inspirieren zu lassen. Die Technik beschäftigt mich bis zu einem gewissen Grade, wie auch die Dekoration; was mich aber vor allem interessiert, ist das Drama der kleinen Leute.)

28

“ Wir können uns nur wieder und immer wieder bei Menschen vom Schlage Picks bedanken, wenn sie das Ihrige tun, um die alberne happy-end-Legende Amerikas zu zerströren…”

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by how Gina’s portrait of the wedding couple suggests the commercial aspect of the business of photography. The very last frame of the film mirrors still photography. As the Ekdals and Dr Relling leave the room, the cinematic frame shows an empty stage that points to still photography as the basis of cinema. The warning against being duped by pictorial surfaces thus extends to the cinematic medium per se: Das Haus der Lüge warns against photographic media as a potential source of commercial speculation and ideological manipulation.

Concluding Remarks Murnau’s Der letzte Mann has been discussed as the apotheosis of a genre that lost relevance after 1924 (Thompson and Bordwell 2019, 95).

Read as a coda to the Kammerspielfilm, Das Haus der Lüge reveals the inherent intermediality of the genre and positions itself in opposition to Hollywood and recent Weimar films; consequently, the adaptation emphasises Bruhn and Gjelsvik’s premise that films are “mixed constellations” that inflect the text with meaning in various ways (2018, 12). Pick’s Ibsen film warns against the manipulative potential of the cinematographic apparatus by means of its intermedial references to photography and Hollywood endings. It is a film conscious of its own history, prey to and in competition with other media practices, film cultures, and technologies.

The contrast between moments of textual fidelity and infidelity highlights the creative licence of the filmmakers to create something new from the written text. One should not underestimate the way that Pick drew on theatre traditions to address bourgeois audiences, and several contexts are important with regard to why photography is a dominant theme in the film. Das Haus der Lüge belies the opposition between literature and film in the Kino-Debatte, updates Ibsen’s play to thematise the illusions that came with a plethora of magazines and illustrated newspapers in the 1920s, and pinpoints how family portraits and bourgeois families are equally illusory. Germany was haunted by a past that threatened the façade of the family. From the perspective of Gregers as a war veteran, the Ekdal family, and by extension Germany, is marked by what Kracauer called a “general retreat into a shell” 217

removed from sociopolitical realities (2004, 87). By dramatising the chaos behind “solid illusions”, the film promotes the love doctrine of Hedwig in the face of bourgeois family ideals.

Weimar Germany, claims historian Eric D. Weitz, saw the most radical media transformations since Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press. Within this media context, Das Haus der Lüge opposes the voices of those who saw the camera as the most capable means of capturing reality. Lupu Pick’s third Kammerspielfilm comments on the gulf between photography and reality and sides with critic Joseph Roth and his warning against photographs as essentially untrustworthy. “People who had completely ordinary eyes, all of a sudden obtain a look,” Roth observed three years later. “The indifferent become thoughtful, the harmless full of humor, the simpleminded become goal oriented, the common strollers look like pilots, secretaries like demons, directors like Caesars” (as cited in Weitz 2007, 248).

Moreover, Das Haus der Lüge arguably resonates strongly in our own times – dominated as it is by (social) media and the unforeseen avalanche of images susceptible to manipulation online. Read within our own contemporary media context, the 1926 Ibsen adaptation serves as a warning against “fake news”, misleading commercials, and social media built on the inherent ease of manipulating photographic media.

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Bibliography

8-Uhr-Abendblatt. 1926. Review of Das Haus der Lüge. 13 February: n.p.

A.K. [pseud.]. 1926. “Rotstift und Ratschlag.” Filmtechnik, 3 March:101.

Bock, Hans-Michael, ed. 1984. CineGraph: Lexicon zum deutschsprachigen Film Vol. 5. Munich: edition text + kritik.

Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. 1997. Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brooks, Peter. 1995. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, ­ elodrama, and the Mode of Excess. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

M Bruhn, Jørgen, and Anne Gjelsvik. 2018. Cinema Between Media: An Intermediality Approach. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Buske, Sybille. 2004. Fräulein Mutter und ihr Bastard. Eine Geschichte der Unehe­ lichkeit in Deutschland 1900–1970. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.

Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Cohen, Deborah. 2001. The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Der Kinematograph. 1926. Review of Das Haus der Lüge. 14 February:23.

Die Filmwoche. 1926. Review of Das Haus der Lüge. 24 February:204.

Eisner, Lotte. 1969. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. London: Thames and Hudson.

Elsaesser, Thomas. 2000. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary.

London: Routledge.

Evans, Richard J. 2005. The Coming of the Third Reich. London: Penguin Books.

Filmportal.de. “Die entfesselte Kamera.” Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum. Accessed 11 March 2022. www.filmportal.de/thema/die-entfesselte-kamera.

Freud, Sigmund. 1955 [1920]. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 18, translated by James Strachey, 7–64. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of ­Psycho-Analysis.

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Geraghty, Christine. 2009. “Foregrounding the Media: Atonement (2007) as an Adaptation.” Adaptation 2(2):91–109.

Gunning, Tom. 1997. “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film.” Modernism/Modernity 4(1):1–29.

Hanseleit, Felix. 1926. “Das Haus der Lüge.” Reichsfilmblatt. 20 February:11.

Hanssen, Jens-Morten. 2018. Ibsen on the German Stage 1876–1918: A Quantitative Study. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.

Hirschfeld, Magnus. 1966 [1929]. Sittengeschichte des Ersten Weltkrieges.

Hanau am Main: Schustek.

Ibsen, Henrik. 2009. Henrik Ibsens skrifter 8:Vildanden; Hvide heste; Rosmersholm; Fruen fra havet, edited by Vigdis Ystad. Oslo: Aschehoug & University of Oslo.

———. 2019. “The Wild Duck,” translated by Deborah Dawkin and Erik Skuggevik. In Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, edited by Tore Rem. London: Penguin Books.

IbsenStage. “Max Reinhardt.” University of Oslo. Accessed 11 March 2022. ­ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/pages/contributor/427222.

———.“Die Stützen der Gesellschaft.” University of Oslo. Accessed 11 March 2022. ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/pages/event/79512.

Illustrierter Film-Kurier. 1926. Review of Das Haus der Lüge. no. 388, 1926:5.

Kaes, Anton. 1987. “The Debate about Cinema: Charting a Controversy (1909–1929).” New German Critique 40(Winter):7–33.

———. 2009. Shell Shock Cinema:Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. ­Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2013. “Scherben.” In Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto 32, edited by ­Catherine A. Surowiec, 152–53. Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

Kasten, Jürgen. 1994. Carl Mayer: Filmpoet. Ein Drehbuchautor schreibt Filmgeschichte. Berlin: Vistas.

Kracauer, Siegfried. 2004 [1947]. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ludwigg, Heinz. 1926. Review of Das Haus der Lüge. Deutsche Filmwoche, 26 February:10.

Moi, Toril. 2006. Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art,Theater, Philosophy.

Oxford: Oxford University Press. Østerud, Erik. 1996. “Henrik Ibsen’s Theatre Mask. Tableau, Absorption and Theatricality in The Wild Duck.” Orbis Litterarum 51:148–77.

Peucker, Brigitte. 2007. The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film.

Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités 6(Fall):43–64.

Roth, Joseph. 1984. “Alte und neue Photographien.” In Berliner Saisonbericht.

Unbekannte Reportagen und journalistische Arbeiten 1920–39, edited by Klaus Westermann, 323–25. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.

–s. [pseud.]. 1926. Review of Das Haus der Lüge. Die Filmwoche 8, 17 February:176.

Schechtman, Robert. 2012. “Der letzte Mann Explores Limits of Modern Community.” In A New History of German Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson, 148–52. Rochester, NY: Camden House.

Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason, translated by Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Szondi, Peter. 1987. Theory of the Modern Drama, edited and translated by Michael Hays. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Thompson, Kristin. 1977. “The Concept of Cinematic Excess.” Ciné-Tracts 1(2):54–64.

———, and David Bordwell. 2019. Film History: An Introduction. Boston: McGraw-Hill Education.

Treuner, Hermann, ed. 1928. Filmkünstler:Wir über uns selbst. Berlin: Sibyllen.

Vincent, Carl. 1939. Histoire de l’Art Cinématographique.

Bruxelles: Editions du Trident.

Vonderau, Patrick. 2012. “Lupu Pick’s Scherben and the Advent of the Kammerspielfilm Cycle.” In A New History of German Cinema, edited by Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson, 105–10. Rochester: Camden House.

W. [pseud.]. 1926. Review of Das Haus der Lüge. Der Film 7, 14 February:23.

Walk, Cynthia. 2007. “Cross-Media Exchange in Weimar Culture: Von morgens bis mitternachts.” Monatshefte 99(2):177–93.

Weitz, Eric D. 2007. Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy.

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9. Silent Ibsen: Filmography

Edited by Maria Fosheim Lund

Introduction Many sources have been consulted in the assemblage of this filmography, which builds on Karin Synnøve Hansen’s comprehensive publication in Norwegian and English, Henrik Ibsen, 1828–1978. En filmografi / Henrik Ibsen, 1828–1978. A filmography, and the updated 1992 edition. The filmography at hand is similarly international in scope and seeks to include all of Henrik Ibsen’s works made into film during the silent era – both the films that are considered lost and those that are extant. As a result, this filmography includes films from the years 1911–1926 and spans two continents and seven states, one of which has since been dissolved (the Austro-Hungarian Empire). It consists of 28 titles, nineteen of which are still considered lost.

The intention has been for this filmography to include as much verifiable metadata as possible about the films it lists, including names of cast and crew members, character names, production companies, dates of theatrical release, and length1, as well as discrepancies and insecurities. Many sources have been consulted in order to assemble

1

L ength is given in feet and metres, respectively, the first system of measurement pertaining to US productions, the second to European, as they also appear in the primary sources referred to.

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the most complete version of such a filmography, including national print filmographies and online databases from Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia, Sweden, Great Britain, and the USA. However, such information is difficult to compile, due to the fact that a majority of the titles included are considered lost and cannot be consulted. Furthermore, as films generally did not include credits until circa 1915 (Bowser 1990, 118), it can be hard to verify the participation of off-screen crew members even in the case of extant films. In addition, some of the extant titles listed in this filmography have survived only as fragments, without credits. Some bear markings of their production and distribution histories, such as Giovanni Pastrone’s Italian adaptation of Hedda Gabler (1920), which survives only with Spanish intertitles, and the German adaptation of Peer Gynt, which survives with Dutch intertitles (Victor Barnowsky 1919).

Identifying on-screen actors a hundred years after the fact can also be a challenging task. In filling in the gaps, the Media History Digital Library (mediahistoryproject.org) hosted by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research has proved to be an invaluable resource. It allows free access to international trade journals and newspapers, which makes it possible to find reviews, ads, and publicity material that includes more – and newly surfaced – information about cast and crew members, synopses, film characters, release dates, and more. At the same time, these sources can introduce further inconsistencies. One such example is the digitised German trade journal Der Kinematograph, which identifies Louise Kolm and J. Fleck as the directors of the film Gespenster (1918) in an advert (1918, n.p.), although no other source refers to the director-producer-screenwriter couple as being involved in the production. In this filmography, Otto Kreisler is named as the film’s director, as all other available sources identify him as such.

As regards assembling filmographic information on German film titles, a plethora of resources are available, most importantly the online filmportal.de, hosted by the Deutsches Filminstitut und Filmmuseum (www.filmportal.de), and the German Early Cinema Database (earlycinema.dch.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de), hosted by the Data 223

Center for the Humanities at the University of Cologne. Another important reference has been the 1970 publication by the German film director then historian Gerhard Lamprecht, Deutsche Stummfilme.

Gesamtregister which builds on information from the German censorship records and lists all titles included in his ten-volume resource Katalogisierung der deutschen Stummfilme aus den Jahren 1903–1931.

Regarding the Italian films in this filmography, Vittorio Martinelli’s multi-volume publication Il cinema muto italiano has been consulted, as well as Silvio Alovisio’s Giovanni Pastrone. I sogni della ragione from 2015. Further information has been found on Museo Nazionale del Cinema’s online collections search (http://www2.museocinema.it/­ collezioni/Default.aspx). The Swedish Film Database hosted by the Swedish Film Institute is a rich resource for Swedish film heritage (www.svenskfilmdatabas.se) and serves here as the source for the entry on Terje Vigen (Victor Sjöström 1918), and the names of cast and crew members appear in the original Swedish spelling; i.e. the Norwegian actress Bergliot Husberg, who plays the part of Terje Vigen’s wife, is listed in the filmography as “Terjes maka”, “maka” being the Swedish word for “spouse”2. The British Film Institute’s BFI Filmography ­(filmography.bfi.org.uk/) is the source of the metadata on the one UK production in this filmography, Pillars of Society (1920). In the case of the film Gespenster, produced before the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Austrian filmography compiled by Anton Thaller in Österreichische Filmografie. Band 1. Spielfilme 1906–1918 has been consulted. The language barrier somewhat complicated the efforts to locate information on the Russian titles in this filmography, all considered lost. But an internationally based network of Russian film scholars and archivists has provided and verified the information

2

T his is however not limited to the Swedish-language entry on Terje Vigen. All entries in this filmography are based on their film’s native language contexts. Hence, the Italian adaptation of Hedda Gabler (Giovanni Pastrone, 1920) uses Italian spellings of character names, i.e. the character Judge Brack (In Norwegian: assessor Brack) is listed as “L’Assessore Brack”, while the filmographic entry on the German adaptation Hedda Gabler from 1925 (Franz Eckstein), correspondingly lists the same character as “Gerichtsrat Brack”.

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included in this publication, as well as the conversion from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet.3 Admittedly, this filmography is slanted towards the American productions it lists and which may appear more complete, as Anglo-American resources are plentiful and easily accessible online.

The primary resource for metadata on the US productions in this filmography is the AFI catalogue hosted by the American Film Institute (aficatalog.afi.com). Other online databases have supplied additional information, such as the website www.thanhouser.org, which includes updated filmographies on the films of the Thanhouser Company, which produced three of the earliest Ibsen adaptations, all from 1911.

Again, the numerous digitised English-language trade journals available in the Media History Digital Library have also been an important resource for this work. The International Federation of Film Archives’ (FIAF) database – Treasures from the Film Archives (www.fiafnet. org/pages/E-Resources/TreasuresDB.html) – has been the primary resource for locating information about extant films.

The National Library of Norway’s website (www.nb.no) has been an additional key resource for this project and has supplied information to the above-mentioned databases and publications, as a large proportion of the newspapers published in Norway have been digitised. Many journalists in Norway scrutinised over the concept of “filming” Ibsen and reported on topics ranging from illegitimate adaptations to international productions that filmed scenes in Norway, which was the case in both Pavel Orlenev’s Russian adaptation of Brand from 1915 and Rex Wilson’s UK production Pillars of Society from 1920. These newspaper reports provide insight into the films’ production contexts and also indicate what shaped the initial results. In this sense, an interesting example is Pavel Orlenev’s production of Brand,

3

I n this filmography, Russian titles are presented in their original Cyrillic titles followed by an oblique and then using the Latin alphabet, and, finally, translated titles are in brackets, i.e. the 1917 adaptation of A Doll’s House directed by Cheslav Sabinski is listed as follows: Ее Жертва /Ee Zertva [Her Sacrifice] = Original title using the Cyrillic alphabet / Title converted to the Latin alphabet [Title translated into English].

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in the village of Gudvangen in the Western part of Norway, located at the end of the Nærøyfjord. Orlenev had been to Norway in earlier years and was known as an “Ibsen actor”. As for his plans to adapt Brand, Yuri Tsivian’s book Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception cites a theatre critic who wrote that Orlenev was planning to “produce Ibsen’s Brand in such a way that some of the scenes would be played by live actors, and some presented cinematographically” (1994, 159). In contrasting with this claim, the Norwegian national newspaper Aftenposten reports that Orlenev had to stop the production suddenly because of the outbreak of World War One. The report continues as follows: “The filming had to stop a few days ago, abruptly, when the war broke out, and the company has departed for Russia. It is the company’s plan to release ‘Brand’ unabridged […] the plan is to play out the first half of the play, while the second half is immediately thereafter shown cinematographically” (1914).4 Thus it remains unclear whether the decision to combine live performance with a projection of the film was the result of premeditation or an attempt to rescue what was left of a project that had come to an abrupt end. Nevertheless, its 1,250 metres make it comparable in length to another (fully realised) Russian production from the same year, Prividenija (an adaptation of Ghosts), directed by Vladimir Gardin and comprising of 1,200 metres. The Prividenija poster describes the film as having four acts and featuring Pavel Orlenev in the role of Osvald Alving. Both films were distributed as part of the Russian Golden Series.

While all the films included in this filmography lists a male director where the director is known, the question of women’s uncredited involvement is valid to reflect upon. In this sense, the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) website hosted by Columbia University (wfpp.columbia.edu/) has been of importance, for instance in finding women who wrote under male pseudonyms, such as Alla Nazimova,

4

“ Filmingen maatte for nogle dage siden braat afbrydes, da krigen brød ud, og selskabet er reist til Russland. Det er selskabets plan at give «Brand» helt uafkortet (…), planen [er] at spille første halvdel af stykket, mens anden halvdel umiddelbart derefter forevises kinematografisk.”

226

who as a screenwriter used the pen name Peter M. Winters, including for her adaptation of A Doll’s House (1922). Jennifer Horne, the author of the WFPP profile for Alla Nazimova, even raises the possibility of Nazimova having directed the adaptation of A Doll’s House: “[M]any film scholars acknowledge her [Alla Nazimova] as the director of pictures that gave on-screen credit to Charles Bryant” (2013). Indeed, this filmography lists Charles Bryant as the film’s director, as all other official sources continue to do, but it remains possible that Nazimova was, in fact, the film’s director.

The question Who did what? also occurs in relation to husbandand-wife teams such as Gertrude and Edwin Thanhouser, who often worked in tandem. Ned Thanhouser’s WFPP profile for his grandmother Gertrude nevertheless specifies Gertrude’s work as “executive producer” for all three 1911 Thanhouser Ibsen adaptations, sometimes together with Edwin, sometimes alone (Thanhouser 2013). According to Mark Garrett Cooper, who wrote the WFPP profile on screenwriter Ida May Park, “Park’s husband Joseph De Grasse, directed almost all of the films she wrote” between 1914 and 1917 (Cooper 2013). While Park is not credited as the scenario writer of A Doll’s House (1917) in other filmographies, she is listed here as the screenwriter, as contemporary trade journals confirm her involvement, including Wid’s, where Ida May Park is listed as the scenario writer (1917, 363), and The Moving Picture World, which reports that “Joseph De Grasse made the production from Ida May Park’s scenario” (1917, 648).

The name Henrik Ibsen regularly occurs in the trade journals of the silent era, where reviewers sometimes suggested that he inspired various film stories and journalists commented on similarities between film plots and Ibsen plays. Several film titles are similar or identical to those of Ibsen plays without being adaptations, such as the US production The Lady from the Sea (Big U, USA 1916) with Claire MacDowell in the lead as a shipwrecked girl. In most of these instances, however, it is hard to ascertain whether the films discussed are uncredited adaptations or simply films inspired by Ibsen’s works or films that coincidentally have plot lines similar to those of some Ibsen works.

These films have not been included in this filmography, but they do 227

point the way towards further silent Ibsen adaptations that may be found in the future. Of course, there is no rule without an exception, as is the case here: the 1911 film Sins of the Father. Very little information is available about this Lubin production, which is included in Hansen’s filmography but not listed in the AFI catalogue or other sources. The trade journal Moving Picture World is nevertheless insistent on a connection between a film called The Sins of the Father and Ibsen’s 1881 play Ghosts, in a review where Ibsen’s play and the act of literary piracy is scrutinised in equal measures: “Duty to exhibitors compels us to say a word about the recent filming by a licensed company of Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ re-labeled as ‘The Sins of the Father.’ (…) Why did the makers of this film take this sickening subject and make no mention of the author’s name?” (1911a, 1052).5 A summary of the film’s synopsis in the same journal supports the thesis that the plotline of the film story is very similar to that of Ibsen’s play (1911b, 746). Conversely, omitted from this filmography due to its unverifiable status is what some Italian film publications have discussed may be a possible German adaptation of Hedda Gabler featuring the Italian actress Maria Carmi and made around 1916. Many different avenues have been followed in an effort to verify that such a film has been made, but, unfortunately, at the time of publication, such verification has yet to be achieved. A number of other titles appearing in Hansen’s filmography have been omitted from this one following thorough research: Das Blut der Ahnen (Germany, 1920), The Pretenders (USA, 1915), A Doll’s House (USA, 1915), Gespenster (Germany, 1922), The Wild Duck (USA, 1915 and USA, 1918), The Lady from the Sea (USA, 1916), and John Gabriel Beckmann (Germany, 1923).

Finally, this filmography fails to acknowledge the close ties between the legitimate stage and the silver screen and the way many actors and directors were involved with Ibsen stage productions prior

5

T he review continues: “[The film company] is evidently not haunted by a fear that Ibsen’s ghost may come back and demand the princely price of five and twenty simoleons for scenario rights”.

228

to working on Ibsen film adaptations, or that many actors and creative personnel worked in both worlds, which is discussed in other parts of this anthology (see Rees and Holt in this volume). In this sense, the filmography also fails to make clear the transnational and transmedial connections between film and theatre, and the individuals who crossed one another’s path in the Ibsen sphere, such as, for example, the Russian actor and director Pavel Orlenev (sometimes spelled Orleneff), who acted the part of Osvald Alving opposite Alla Nazimova as Regine Engstrand in a stage version of Ghosts on Broadway in 1906 (IbsenStage). The IbsenStage Database, hosted by the University of Oslo (ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/) and continually updated by the Centre for Ibsen Studies, is a fascinating rabbit hole in which many hours can be spent fruitfully mapping the transmedial careers of Ibsen actors and directors.

229

Bibliography

Aftenposten. 1914. “Filmoptagelse af “Brand” paa Gudvangen.” 16 August:5.

Alovisio, Silvio. 2015. Giovanni Pastrone. I sogni della ragione.

Roma: Edizioni Fondazione ente dello spettacolo.

Bowser, Eileen. 1990. The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915. History of the American Cinema. Vol 2. New York: Charles Scribner’s Son. Cooper, Mark Garrett. 2013. “Ida May Park.” In Women Film Pioneers Project, edited by Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta. New York: Columbia University Libraries. Accessed 27 June 2022. doi.org/10.7916/d8-ynfq-gj50.

Der Kinematograph. 1918. “W-K-F durch National.” 24 July: n.p.

Hansen, Karin Synnøve. 1978. Henrik Ibsen, 1828–1978. En filmografi.

Oslo: Norwegian Film Institute.

———. 1992. Henrik Ibsen, 1828–1992. En filmografi. Oslo: Norwegian Film Institute.

Horne, Jennifer. 2013. “Alla Nazimova.” In Women Film Pioneers Project, edited

by Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta. Accessed 22 June 2022.

New York: Columbia University Libraries. doi.org/10.7916/d8-ws0b-qz98.

IbsenStage. Ghosts. Accessed 22 June 2022. ibsenstage.hf.uio.no/pages/ event/80491.

Lamprecht, Gerhardt. 1970. Deutsche Stummfilme. Gesamtregister.

Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek.

Martinelli, Vittorio. 1991. Il cinema muto italiano 1917. Turin: Nuova Eri. ———. 1991. Il cinema muto italiano 1918. Turin: Nuova Eri. ———. 1995. Il cinema muto italiano 1919. Turin: Nuova Eri. Moving Picture World. 1911a. “Facts and Comments.” 30 December:1042.

———. 1911b. “Lubin.” 2 December:746.

———. 1917. “Summer Bluebirds.” 28 April:648.

Thaller, Anton. 2010. Österreichische Filmografie. Band 1. Spielfilme 1906–1918.

Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria.

230

Bibliography

Thanhouser, Ned. 2013.“Gertrude Homan Thanhouser.” In Women Film P ­ ioneers Project, edited by Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta.

New York: Columbia University Libraries. Accessed 27 June 2022. doi.org/10.7916/d8-24qe-7d47.

Tsivian, Yuri. 1994. Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception.

London: Routledge.

Wid’s. 1917. “Ibsen Drama Interesting, But Not Altogether Entertaining.”

7 June:363.

Silent Ibsen: Filmography Organised by date of theatrical release * Indicates title is extant

2 May 1911 The Pillars of Society* Thanhouser Film Company, USA, 1911 Executive producers: Gertrude Thanhouser and Edwin Thanhouser

28 July 1911 A Doll’s House* Thanhouser Film Company, USA, 1911 Director: Theodore Marston Executive producer: Gertrude Thanhouser

Cast: Bernick �������������������������������������������������������������������� Bernick’s wife ��������������������������������� Julia M. Taylor Married woman ������������������������������������������������������ Married woman’s husband ��������� William Russell Johan Tonnesen ������������������������������ Martin Faust The rector �������������������������������David H. Thompson Young orphan girl ������������������������������� Marie Eline (The Thanhouser Kid)

Cast: Nora Helmer ����������������������������������� Julia M. Taylor Nils Krogstad, the loan clerk ������ William Russell Torvald Helmer ����������������������������Edward Genung Nora’s father ������������������������������Justus D. Barnes The doctor �����������������������������David H. Thompson Helmer girl ������������������������������������������� Marie Eline (The Thanhouser Kid)

Length: 1,000 feet Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Pillars of Society (Samfundets støtter, 1877)

Length: 1,000 feet Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879)

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11 November 1911 Terje Vigen Deutsche Bioscop-Gesellschaft, Germany, 1911

12 December 1911 The Lady from the Sea Thanhouser Film Company, USA, 1911 Director: Lucius J. Henderson Executive producer: Gertrude Thanhouser Scenario: Theodore Marston Camera: Carl Louis Gregory

Length: 480 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s poem “Terje Vigen” (1862)

6 December 1911 Sins of the Father Lubin Manufacturing Company, USA, 1911 Cast: George Williams ���������������������������������������������������� Rupert Williams ������������������������������������������������������ Mrs. Williams ���������������������������������������������������������� The doctor ��������������������������������������������������������������

Cast: Ellida, the lady from the Sea ���Marguerite Snow Alfred, the strange sailor ������������ William Russell ���������������������������������������������������William Garwood �������������������������������������������������������� Harry Benham ��������������������������������������������������������������Irma Taylor Length: 950 feet Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra havet, 1888)

Length: 1,000 feet An uncredited adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881)

Fig 1. Marguerite Snow as Ellida, the Lady from the Sea (1911), in an ad in The Moving Picture World (December 9, 1911). Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

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Silent Bibliography Ibsen: Filmography

Fig. 2. Poster for the Russian adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts, Prividenija (1915).

Courtesy of the Russian State Library.

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Silent Bibliography Ibsen: Filmography

13 January 1915 Привидения / Prividenija [Ghosts] Russia, 1915 Writer/Director: Vladimir Gardin Camera: Aleksandr Levitzkij

tor’s Film Exchange, the film was re-issued in 1919 under the title The Curse. According to Pictures and the Picturegoer, the film was released in Great Britain under the title The Inherited Burden.

Cast: Osvald Alving ���������������������������������� Pavel Orlenev 16 September 1915 Peer Gynt* The Oliver Morosco Photoplay Co., USA, 1915 Writer/Director: Oscar Apfel

Length: 1,200 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881) Note: The film was also distributed with the additional title За грехи отцов страдают дети / Za grekhi ottzov stradajut [Children suffer for the sins of their fathers] as part of the Russian Golden Series, which also included Brand (1915).

Cast: Peer Gynt �������������������������������������������Cyril Maude Solveig �����������������������������������������Myrtle Stedman Ingrid ��������������������������������������������������� Mary Ruby Ase ����������������������������������������Fanny Y. Stockbridge Notanah �������������������������������������������� Kitty Stevens Anitra ��������������������������������������������� Mary Reubens Annabel Lee �������������������������������� Winifred Bryson Virginia Thorne ���������������������������� Evelyn Duncan Robert �������������������������������������������Juan de la Cruz St Peter �������������������������������������� Herbert Standing The Button Moulder �������������������� Charlie Ruggles The Parson ��������������������������������William Desmond

24 May 1915 Ghosts* Majestic Motion Picture Co., USA, 1915 Director: George Nicholls Producer: D. W. Griffith Scenario: Russell E. Smith Assistant director: George Seigmann

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1867) Cast: Captain Alving/Oswald ���������� Henry B. Walthall Helen Alving ���������������������������������������� Mary Alden Pastor Manders ��������������������������� Nigel De Brulier Johanna �����������������������������������������Juanita Archer Johanna’s husband ��������������� Thomas Jefferson Regina ����������������������������������������������Loretta Blake The Family Doctor �������������������������������Al W. Filson Oswald as a child ���������������������� Chandler House A Bohemian in Paris ��������������������������� Monte Blue The School Clerk ���������������������� Eric von Stroheim Henrik Ibsen ����������������������������������������Karl Formes

Yermoliev, Sarkhin & Segel Company, Russia, 1915 Writer/Director: Pavel Orlenev Consultant-Director: Kai Hansen Consultant: P. Hansen Camera: Zhorzh Mejer Editor: Vladimir Gardin

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881) Note: According to the AFI catalogue, Erich von Stroheim was also the wardrobe assistant to director George Nicholls. According to Exhibi-

Cast: Brand ���������������������������������������������� Pavel Orlenev Agnes �������������������������������������������Varvara Popova Einar �������������������������������������������������������G. Gnesin ������������������������������������������������������������������������Orlov

19 November 1915 Брандт / Brand

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Silent Bibliography Ibsen: Filmography

Length: 1,250 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Brand (1866) Notes: According to Gosfilmofond, the probable editor of the film was Vladimir Gardin, who had directed the Russian adaptation of Ghosts – Prividenija, also from 1915. Brand was shot on location in Gudvangen, Norway and distributed as part of the Russian Golden Series, which also included Prividenija (1915).

John Hudson ���������������������������John Webb Dillon Richard Russell ������������������������������ Warren Cook Old Peter ��������������������������������������� Tom Burrough Housekeeper �����������������������������������Lillian Devere Hudson’s children �� Jane Lee and Katherine Lee Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra havet, 1888) Note: Contemporary sources disagree as to whether the name of the character played by John Webb Dillon is John Hudson or George Hamilton.

27 August 1916 Pillars of Society* Triangle Film Corporation, USA, 1916 Director: Raoul Walsh Script: Mary H. O’Connor and D. W. Griffith Producer: D. W. Griffith Cast: Karsten Bernick ����������������������� Henry B. Walthall Bernick’s mother ������������������� Josephine Crowell Lona Tonnesen ������������������������������������Mary Alden Betty ����������������������������������������������Juanita Archer Johan Tonnesen ��������������������� George Beranger Madame Linda Dorf ��������������������������� Olga Grey ���������������������������������������������������������� Loretta Blake Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Pillars of Society (Samfundets støtter, 1877)

3 September 1916 The Unwelcome Mother Fox Film Corp., USA, 1916 Director: James Vincent Script: Mary Murillo Camera: René Guissart

29 January 1917 Terje Vigen* AB Svenska Biografteatern, Sweden, 1917 Director: Victor Sjöström Script: Victor Sjöström and Gustaf Molander​ Producer: Charles Magnusson Camera: Julius Jaenzon Designer: Axel Esbensen Studio manager: Nils Elffors Cast: Terje Vigen ����������������������������������� Victor Sjöström Den engelske lorden ����������������������� August Falck Terjes maka �������������������������������Bergliot Husberg Den engelska ladyn ���������������������� Edith Erastoff Den nya mannen i Terjes stuga/officer på den engelska korvetten �������������������� William Larsson Den nya hustrun i Terjes stuga ������������������������ Gucken Cederborg Length: 1,129 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s poem “Terje Vigen” (1862) Note: The film was distributed in the USA under the international title A Man There Was.

Cast: Ellinor �������������������������������������������Valda Valkyrien Ann ����������������������������������������������Violet de Biccari Mason �������������������������������������������������� Walter Law Captain of ship ���������������������������������Frank Evans

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8 April 1917 Ее Жертва / Ee Zertva [Her Sacrifice] Iosif Yermoliev Company, Russia, 1917 Director: Cheslav Sabinski

Dr Rank �������������������������������������������� Sidney Deane Christina Linden ��������������������������� Miriam Shelby Anna ��������������������������������������������������Helen Wright

Cast: Anelja �������������������������������������������Olga Gzovskaja Leon Runich, her husband �����Vladimir Gajdarov Markovskij ��������������������������������������� Nikolai Panov Doctor Frank ������������������������������������������������Lipskij Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879)

7 May 1917 Hedda Gabler Frank Powell Producing Corp., USA, 1917 Director: Frank Powell Cast: Hedda Gabler ��������������������������������� Nance O’Neil George Tesman �����������������������������Aubrey Beattie Aunt Julia ������������������������������������������� Lillian Paige Mrs Thea Elvsted ��������������������������������� Ruth Byron Judge Brack ����������������������������������Alfred Hickman Ejlert Lovberg �������������������������������������Einar Linden Mlle Diana ���������������������� Edith Campbell Walker ���������������������������������������������������������������Frank Ford

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879)

13 March 1918 Gespenster Wiener Kunstfilm Ges. mbH., Austria-Hungary, 1918 Writer/Director: Otto Kreisler Cast: Frau Helene Alving ������������������Erika von Wagner Oswald ������������������������������������������ Anton Edthofer Pastor Manders �������������������������������� Karl Ehmann Tischler Engstrand ����������������� Karl Baumgartner Regine, deren uneheliche Tochter �������� Grit Haid Johanna, Magd bei Engstrand � Eugenie Bernay Leutnant Alving ��������������������������������Josef Viktora ������������������������������������������������������������ Erwin Báron Length: 1,800 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881)

2 June 1918 A Doll’s House Famous Players-Lasky, USA, 1918 Presenter: Adolph Zukor Writer/Director: Maurice Tourneur Camera: John van den Broek Art director: Ben Carré

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler (1890)

11 June 1917 A Doll’s House Bluebird Photoplays, USA, 1917 Director: Joseph De Grasse Scenario: Ida May Park Camera: King D. Gray Cast: Nora Helmer ���������������������������������Dorothy Phillips Torvald Helmer ������������������������������William Stowell Nils Krogstad ������������������������������������� Lon Chaney

Cast: Nora Helmar ����������������������������������� Elsie Ferguson Thorvald Helmar ��������������������� Holmes E. Herbert Krogstadt �������������������������������������Alex K. Shannon Mrs Linden ���������������������������������� Ethel Grey Terry Dr Rank ��������������������������������������������� Warren Cook Ellen, maid ���������������������������������������Zelda Crosby

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Fig.3. A selection of images to be used in ads for A Doll’s House (1918), as featured in the Paramount Press Book (vol.5, June-August 1918). Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.

2 37

Silent Bibliography Ibsen: Filmography

Anna, nurse ����������������������������� Mrs R.S. Anderson The Helmar children ����������� Iwy Ward, Tula Belle The Krogstadt children ��������� Douglas Redmond, �������������������������������������������������Charles Crompton Length: 4,576 feet.

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879) Note: The film was distributed in Norway under the title Nora.

1918 Когда мы, мертвые, воскреснем? /

Kogda my, mertvye, voskrensnem?

[When will we the dead be resurrected?]

Literfilm, Russia, 1918 Director: Jakov Poselskij Scenography: K. Kostina and I. Mendelevic Camera: Grigorij Giber Cast: Irena ���������������������������������������� Sofia Volkhovskaja Rubek, a sculptor ���������������������� Mikhaik Doronin Ulfheim, a landowner ��������������������� Leonid Zhikov ��������������������������������������������������������������� M. Dunaev

17 October 1918 Gli spettri Milano-film, Italy, 1918 Script: Guglielmo Zorzi Camera: F. Antonio Martini Scenography: A.G. Caldiera

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken (Naar vi døde vaagner, 1899)

Cast: La vedova Alving ������������� Ines Christina Zacconi Osvaldo Alving ����������������������������� Ermete Zacconi Pastore Manders ��������������������Gioacchino Grassi ����������������������������������������������������������������Luigi Duse ���������������������������������������������������������� Emilia Grassi ������������������������������������������������������������ Elisa Finazzi ���������������������������������������������������Margherita Bagni ������������������������������������������������ Felicita Prosdocimi ���������������������������������������������������� Peppino Zacconi �������������������������������������������������������� Cesare Moltini ����������������������������������������������������������sig. Sbarbaro Length: 1,461 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881) Note: The name of the camera operator is sometimes listed as Franco Antonio Martini and sometimes as Ferdinando Antonio Martini.

6 April 1919 1. Teil: Peer Gynts Jugend* Richard Oswald-Film GmbH, Germany, 1918 Writer/Director: Victor Barnowsky Creative supervisor: Richard Oswald Camera: Max Fassbender Cast: Peer Gynt ����������������������������������������� Heinz Salfner Aase ���������������������������������������������������Ilka Grüning Solveig �������������������������������������������������Lina Lossen Ingrid ����������������������������������� Irmgard von Hansen Anitra ����������������������������������������������� Hanna Lierke Trollkönigs Tochter ������������������������� Maria Forescu Knopfgiesser ����������������������������������� Conrad Veidt Matz Mön ������������������������������������������� Georg John Vater Gynt ����������������������������������� Hans Sternberg Trollkönig ���������������������������������������� John Gottowt Kind ��������������������������������������Gertrud von Hoschek ������������������������������������������������������� Richard Sebius ������������������������������������������������������������Anita Berber Length: 1,864 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1867)

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Figs. 4a–b. Film stills from the Casa di bambola printed in the film programme released in 1920 by Mari Films. Courtesy of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Torino.

239

Silent Ibsen: Filmography

6 April 1919 2. Teil: Peer Gynts Wanderjahre und Tod* Richard Oswald-Film GmbH, Germany, 1918 Writer/Director: Victor Barnowsky Creative supervisor: Richard Oswald Camera: Max Fassbender

1920 Hedda Gabler* Itala Film, Italy, 1920 Writer/Director: Giovanni Pastrone Cinematography: Giovanni Tomatis Special effects: Segundo de Chomón

Cast: Peer Gynt �����������������������������������������Heinz Salfner Aase �������������������������������������������������� Ilka Grüning Solveig ������������������������������������������������Lina Lossen Jon Gynt ������������������������������������ Hans Sternberg Prof. Dr Begriffenfeldt �����������������������Georg John Der Dovre-Alte ������������������������������� John Gottowt Ingrid ���������������������������������� Irmgard von Hansen Die Grüngekleidete �����������������������Maria Forescu Ein fremder Passagier ������������������ Conrad Veidt Anitra ����������������������������������������������� Hanna Lierke Kind �������������������������������������Gertrud von Hoschek ������������������������������������������������������ Richard Sebius ����������������������������������������������������������� Anita Berber

Cast: Hedda Gabler ������������������Italia Almirante Manzini Ernesto Lovborg ������������������������Ettore Piergiovanni Giorgio Tesmann ���������������������������� Oreste Bilancia Thea Elvsted Rising �������������������������Diana D’Amore L’Assessore Brack �����������������Vittorio Rossi Pianelli Diana Ragnhild ����������������������������Letizia Quaranta Il generale Gabler ������������������������� Gabriel Moreau Giulietta Tesmann ����������������������������Léonie Laporte Length: 2,893 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler (1890) Note: Giovanni Pastrone directed this film under the pseudonym Piero Fosco.

Length: 1,425 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (1867)

1 June 1920 Casa di bambola Mari Films, Italy, 1920 Writer/Director: Febo Mari Camera: Massimo Terzano and Cesare Rifaldi Cast: Torvald Helmer �������������������������������������� Febo Mari Nora Helmer ������������������������������ Nietta Mordeglia Krogstad �����������������������������������������Oreste Grandi Dr Rank ������������������������������������������ Vittorio Tettoni ������������������������������������������������������Eugenia Tettoni ��������������������������������������������������������� Elena Sangro Fig. 5. A scene from the UK production The Pillars of Society (1920) filmed in the streets of Grimstad, Norway. From the collections of the National Library of Norway.

Length: 1,539 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879)

240

Silent Bibliography Ibsen: Filmography

1920 The Pillars of Society R.W. Syndicate Ltd for Moss’ Empires Ltd., England, 1920 Director: Rex Wilson Screenwriter: Walter Courtney Rowden Producers: Rex Wilson, Frank E. Spring, Harry Lorraine

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879) Note: Alla Nazimova wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Peter M. Winters.

2 February 1923 Nora Projections AG-Union, Germany, 1923 Director: Berthold Viertel Script: Georg Froeschel and Berthold Viertel Camera: Frederik Fuglsang Production design: Walter Reimann

Cast: Widow Bernick/Mrs Halligan Sr �Dame Ellen Terry John Halligan �������������������������Norman McKinnel Mrs Halligan ����������������������������������������Mary Rorke Martha Karsten ��������������������������������� Irene Rooke Dina Dorf ���������������������������������������� Joan Lockton Lena Hessel ��������������������������������� Lydia Hayward Dick Alward ��������������������������������� Charles Ashton Parson Rogers ��������������������������������������� John Kelt Olaf �������������������������������������������Lovat Cave Chinn Shipwright Aune ��������������������������George Bishop Florence ���������������������������������������� Pamela Neville

Cast: Nora �����������������������������������������Olga Tschechowa Torwald Helmer, Noras Vater ��������������Carl Ebert Krogstadt, Rechtsanwalt ���������������� Fritz Kortner Dr Rank ������������������������������������������Anton Edthofer Krogstadts Tochter �����������������������Helga Thomas Krogstadts Sohn ���������������������������� Paul Günther Frau Linden ������������������������������������� Lucie Höflich Marianne, Noras frühere Amme ���� Ilka Grüning

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Pillars of Society (Samfundets støtter, 1877) Note: The film was shot on location in ­Grimstad, Norway.

Length: 2,045 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879) Note: This film was made with an alternative, happy ending.

12 February 1922 A Doll’s House Nazimova Productions, USA, 1922 Director: Charles Bryant Script: Alla Nazimova Camera: Charles van Enger

10 March 1923 La donna del mare Milano-Film, Italy, 1922 Director: Nino Valentini Script: Nino Valentini and Carlo Zangarini Camera: Alberto Chentrens and Silvio Cavazzoni

Cast: Torvald Helmer ��������������������������������������� Alan Hale Nora, his wife ��������������������������������� Alla Nazimova Dr Rank �����������������������������������������Nigel De Brulier Anna, the nurse �������������������������������� Elinor Oliver Nils Krogstad ����������������������� Wedgewood Nowell Ellen, the maid ����������������������������������������Cara Lee Mrs Linden ����������������������������������� Florence Fisher Ivar ���������������������������������������������Philippe De Lacy Emmy �������������������������������������������� Barbara Maier

Cast: Ellida Wangel ������������������������������������� Renée Pelar Wangel ������������������������������������������ Roberto Villani La figlia di Wangel ��������������������� Maria Tedeschi La figlia di Wangel �����������������������Ines Fogazzari

241

Silent Bibliography Ibsen: Filmography

Il marinaio ������������������������������������������ Sergio Mari ������������������������������������������������ Lina Santambrogio ����������������������������������������������������������� Silvio Furlani ������������������������������������������������������������Luigi Chicco ���������������������������������������������������������� Giulia Falcini �����������������������������������������������������������Paolo Ravigli Length: 1,747 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Lady from the Sea (Fruen fra havet, 1888)

22 January 1926 Das Haus der Lüge – Arme, Kleine Hedvig* Rex-Film AG, Germany, 1926 Director: Lupu Pick Script: Fanny Carlsen and Lupu Pick Producer: Lupu Pick Camera: Carl Drews Production design: Albin Grau Cast: Hjalmar Ekdal �������������������������������Werner Krauss Gina Ekdal ���������������������������������������� Lucie Höflich Tochter Hedwig Ekdal ������������������� Mary Johnson Jan Werle �������������������������������������Albert Steinrück Sohn Gregers Werle ������������������� Walter Janssen Grossvater Harald Ekdal �������������� Paul Henckels Dr Relling ������������������������Eduard von Winterstein Kandidat Molwik ����������������������������������� Fritz Rasp Frau Sörby ��������������������������������������� Agnes Straub

30 March 1925 Hedda Gabler National-Film AG., Germany, 1925 Director: Franz Eckstein Script: Rosa Porten and Franz Eckstein Camera: Franz Stein Production design: Max Frick Make-up: Arnold Jenssen Costume design: Werner Boehm Cast: Hedda Gabler, Ehefrau von Tesman ���Asta Nielsen Dr Jürgen Tesman ���������������������������� Paul Morgan Tante Juliane Tesman �������������������Frieda Richard Gerichtsrat Brack �����������������������Albert Steinrück Eilert Lövborg ����������������������������� Gregori Chmara Frau Thea Elvsted ���������������������������� Käthe Haack Die Rote Diana ���������������������������������Olga Limburg Dienstmädchen Berte ����������������Jeanette Bethge ���������������������������������������������������������������� Karl Balta

Length: 3,037 metres / 2,077 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck (Vildanden, 1884) Note: The film passed German censorship twice. First, on 30 November 1925, when the length was registered as 3,037 metres. When the film passed censorship for a second time on 18 May 1926, the length was registered as 2,077 metres.

Length: 2,577 metres Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler (1890)

242

Silent Ibsen: Filmography

Fig. 6. Asta Nielsen in the title role in Hedda Gabler (1925). Courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.

243

Contributors

Angela Dalle Vacche is Professor Emerita at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her areas of inquiry are the historiography of classical film theory, history in film, cinema and painting, colour in film, the museum film, film and science, and early cinema and women. She has published numerous articles and written several books, including The Body in The Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (1992); Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film (1996); Diva: Defiance and Passion: Italian Women and Early Cinema (2008). Her latest book is Andre Bazin’s Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion (2020).

Bo Florin is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department for Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Publications include: Moderna motiv, Mauritz Stiller i retrospektiv (ed, 2001); Regi: Victor Sjöström/Directed by Victor Seastrom (2003); Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood 1924-1930 (2013) and (together with Patrick Vonderau) A Tale from Constantinople. The History of a Film that Never Was (2019).

Eirik Frisvold Hanssen is a research librarian in the Department of Collections and Research at the National Library of Norway. He has a PhD in Cinema Studies from Stockholm University (2006) and is the co-editor of Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions (2013, with Jørgen Bruhn and Anne Gjelsvik) and Small Country, Long Journeys: Norwegian Expedition Films (2017, with Maria Fosheim Lund).

Thor Holt is a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo, and was a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley in 2021–22 with a research project on Ibsen in Weimar cinema. Holt earned his PhD in 2020 with a dissertation on Ibsen adaptations in Nazi cinema. He is currently revising the dissertation and working on the interconnections between Ibsen and German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Rob King is a professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He is the author of Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (2017) and the award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009). He is currently working on a monograph on adult filmmaker Radley Metzger and an edited collection on mystery writer Cornell Woolrich.

244

Contributors

Maria Fosheim Lund is a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo in the Department for Media and Communication. She is currently on leave from her position as a research librarian in the Section for Visual Media and Conservation at the National Library of Norway. She is the editor, together with Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, of the anthology Small Country, Long Journeys: Norwegian Expedition Films (2017).

Ellen Rees is professor of Scandinavian Literature at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Ibsen Studies. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1995. In addition to broader questions concerning the intersection between literary and cultural history, she has published widely on film adaptation, most recently in an article in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture co-written with Thor Holt on Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (2022). Her latest book, Den populærkulturelle Ibsen: Studier i nyere norsk resepsjon (The Pop-Cultural Ibsen: Studies in Recent Norwegian Reception), is forthcoming with Scandinavian Academic Press.

Mark B. Sandberg is Professor of Scandinavian and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. His research centers on questions of comparative media history and late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century visual cultures, including the intermedial history of literature, recording technologies, museum display, theater, and silent film. He has also developed research specialties in Norwegian literature and cultural history, Scandinavian film history, literary and film historiography, and serial television. He is the author of Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton UP, 2003) and Ibsen’s Houses: Architectural Metaphor and the Modern Uncanny (Cambridge UP, 2015).

Ali Yalgın is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Columbia University. His current research focuses on post-Cold War era theatre and performance, realism, and human rights. Outside academia, Ali works as a freelance theatre director and teaching artist in his hometown Istanbul, Turkey. His first encounter with Ibsen was in 2011, when he was an exchange student at the University of Oslo and volunteered as a production assistant in Visjoner Teater’s production of Hedda Gabler at Sæterhytten.

245

Bibliography Nota bene

Nota bene is the National Library of Norway’s channel for disseminating research findings built on its collections, and research of relevance to these collections. All manuscripts are peer reviewed. Nota bene has a wide thematic profile. In order to mirror the full breadth of our collection, the publications, which include monographs, critical editions and edited collections, may be based on manuscripts, printed material, film, photography, music, broadcasting, and digital media.

Nota bene 1 Det nasjonale i Nasjonalbiblioteket | Marianne Takle | 2009 Nota bene 2 The Archive in Motion. New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices | Eivind Røssaak (ed.) | 2009 Nota bene 3 Axel Charlot Drolsum. Brev 1875–1926 | Bjørg Dale Spørck | 2011 Nota bene 4 Opplysning, vitenskap og nasjon. Bidrag til norsk bibliotekhistorie Ruth Hemstad (ed.) | 2011 Nota bene 5 Latin Manuscripts of Medieval Norway. Studies in Memory of Lilli Gjerløw Espen Karlsen (ed.) | 2013 Nota bene 6 Den engasjerte kosmopolitt. Nye Bjørnson-studier Liv Bliksrud, Giuliano D’Amico, Marius Wulfsberg and Arnfinn Åslund (eds.) | 2013 Nota bene 7 Naturen og eventyret. Dokumentarfilmskaperen Per Høst Gunnar Iversen | 2014 Nota bene 8 Å bli en stemme. Nye studier i Camilla Colletts forfatterskap Trond Haugen (ed.) | 2014 Nota bene 9 Propagandakrig. Kampen om Norge i Norden og Europa 1812–1814 Ruth Hemstad | 2014 Nota bene 10 Small Country, Long Journeys. Norwegian Expedition Films Eirik Frisvold Hanssen and Maria Fosheim Lund (eds.) | 2017

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Nota bene

Nota bene 11 Reformasjonstidens religiøse bokkultur cirka 1400–1700: tekst, visualitet og materialitet | Bente Lavold and John Ødemark (eds.) | 2017 Nota bene 12 I dørtrekken fra Europa. Festskrift til Knut Sprauten. I anledning 70-årsdagen 22. juni 2018 | Ola Alsvik, Hans P. Hosar and Marianne Wiig (eds.) | 2018 Nota bene 13 Litterære verdensborgere. Transnasjonale perspektiver på norsk bokhistorie 1519–1850 | Aasta M.B. Bjørkøy, Ruth Hemstad, Aina Nøding and Anne Birgitte Rønning (eds.) | 2019 Nota bene 14 Lov og lovgivning i middelalderen. Nye studier av Magnus Lagabøtes landslov Anna Catharina Horn and Karen Arup Seip (eds.) | 2020 Nota bene 15 Notated Music in the Digital Sphere: Possibilities and Limitations Margrethe Støkken Bue and Annika Rockenberger (eds.) | 2021 Nota bene 16 Språk i arkivet. Historier om hvordan språk reflekterer samfunnet Johanne Ostad and Elise Kleivane (eds.) | 2021 Nota bene 17 Silent Ibsen. Transnational Film Adaptation in the 1910s and 1920s Eirik Frisvold Hanssen and Maria Fosheim Lund (eds.) | 2022

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© National Library of Norway, Oslo 2022 ISBN 978-82-7965-527-5 (printed) ISBN 978-82-7965-528-2 (e-book) ISSN 1891-4829 (printed) ISSN 2535-4337 (e-book) Design: Superultraplus Designstudio AS, www.superultraplus.com Print: Erik Tanche Nilssen AS This material is protected by copyright law.

Without explicit authorisation, reproduction is only allowed in so far as it is permitted by law or by agreement with a collecting society.

The silent era represents the height of Henrik Ibsen’s popularity as a

N source O T A for BE N adaptations E film and as a reference in debates on cinema.

About thirty known silent film adaptations of Ibsen’s works were made in several countries. In this book, leading international Ibsen scholars and film historians examine the nine silent Ibsen films that are known to be extant, made in the period 1911–1926 in the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Italy. The films are placed in their specific film historical and industrial settings, as well as within broader sociopolitical frameworks and with reference to Ibsen’s various and shifting positions within these different national and cultural contexts.

The book also includes a filmography of silent Ibsen film adaptations.

editions and edited collections, may beogbased on manuscripts, printed tekst, visualitet materialitet material, film, photography, music, broadcasting, and digital media.

Bente Lavold og John Ødemark (red.)

11 I S B N : 9 7 8 - 8 2 -7 9 6 5 - 5 2 7 - 5

9

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NASJONALBIBLIOTEKETS SKRIFTSERIE

Reformasjonstidens religiøse Nota bene is the National Library of Norway’s channel for disseminating research findings built on its collections, and research of bokkultur relevance to these collections. All manuscripts are peer reviewed. Nota bene has a wide thematic profile. In order to mirror the full breadth cirka 1400–1700: of our collection, the publications, which include monographs, critical