1. Silent Ibsen: Introduction

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

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.

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 An important foundation of this project was the Ibsen filmography mapping the breadth 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 In 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.

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.

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).

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 sim-

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”,

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

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

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 In 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).

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).

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 The 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 An analogue restoration was carried out by the Library of Congress at L’Immagine Ritrovata 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.

7 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.

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 The 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.

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 A 35mm safety print (3,852 feet) is held at the Library of Congress; two of the original 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. 10 A tinted 35mm nitrate print of an edited, shortened version with Dutch intertitles is held at 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 The 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 A 16mm print (199 metres, about a quarter of the film’s original length) with Spanish-language 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).

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 A 35mm nitrate print (2,227 metres) with flash titles is held at the Deutsche Kinemathek 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.

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).

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.

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 If 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).

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 Though 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).

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

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

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.

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

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 The 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.

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 There 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).

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.

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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