During the silent era, around 30 silent film adaptations of works by Henrik Ibsen were produced in several countries. To our knowledge only nine of these films have been preserved, in varying degrees of integrity. In this paper I will describe the work carried out by the National Library of Norway in terms of mapping film adaptations of Ibsen during the silent era, of collecting analogue and digital screening elements of the nine silent Ibsen films known to still be extant (in collaboration with a number of international film archives), and of providing a scholarly context for them through the recent edited volume, Silent Ibsen: Transnational Film Adaptation in the 1910s and 1920s. A guiding principle to this publication 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 as transcultural adaptations, made and shown within specific production and reception contexts. 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, changing hegemonies in international film markets, and Ibsen’s various and shifting positions within different national and cultural contexts. Finally, I will attempt to identify and address some under-researched and unresolved issues regarding the silent Ibsen film as well as broader questions concerning Ibsen’s influence on film history in general.
Screening: A Doll’s House (Theodore Marston, Thanhouser Co., 1911). 14 min. Courtesy of Thanhouser Company Film Preservation.
Please note that this seminar will be live-streamed. Please register here before 13 February and a Zoom link will be sent on the day of the seminar.
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 (Stockholm University, 2006, diss. Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema: Origins, Functions, Meanings). He worked as associate professor of cinema studies at NTNU 2008-2014 and has published extensively on film history and theory, and co-edited the books Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions (2013), with Anne Gjelsvik and Jørgen Bruhn, Small Country, Long Journeys: Norwegian Expedition Films (2017) and Silent Ibsen: Transnational Film Adaptation in the 1910s and 1920s (2022), the two latter with Maria Fosheim Lund.