Ibsen Studies and Adaptation

Twenty-five years after a seminal event titled “Ibsen on Screen,” which was hosted by the Centre for Ibsen Studies and the Norwegian Film Institute in Oslo in 1998, I believe it is time to take stock of this subfield of Ibsen studies and sketch out possible avenues for the next quarter century. This article sums up all systematic investigations of Ibsen adaptations and seeks to rewrite the story of Ibsen on screen in the process. Old narratives die hard, and Rob King was certainly right when he asserted that “the impossibility of filming Ibsen is a commonplace in Ibsen studies” (King 2022, 43). I argue that traditional adaptation studies have enriched but also, paradoxically, clouded our view of Ibsen in popular culture in general and film history in particular. To support my admittedly polemical attempt at adjusting the coordinates for research in this field, I draw on Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, whose concept of dialogism can help Ibsen adaptation studies develop in two productive directions: first, his textual understanding implies that we must overcome the notion that a film must be announced as a bona fide adaptation in order to be worthy of study; secondly, his writing suggests ways that we might extend the analysis of any adaptation by asking how it inevitably partakes in the unfolding of the historicity of Ibsen’s plays and poems over time. In this light, the study of adaptations in different arts and media is anything but peripheral to Ibsen studies, but is instead an integral part of how we understand the Norwegian dramatist today—both when it comes to individual texts and Ibsen in context.

The article should ideally be read as a companion piece to Ellen Rees’ “Mass Media and Popular Reception” (2021) and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen’s “Silent Ibsen: Introduction” (2022). In an attempt at supplementing these otherwise excellent introductions, I have tried to look both to the past and the future, traversing existing literature on Ibsen adaptations for “forgotten” avenues and moving on to share some ideas that may inspire future research.¹ It is my hope that the article can serve as an introduction for students and scholars alike.

IBSEN ADAPTATIONS REVISITED

Ibsen scholars have been told that Victor Sjöström’s Terje Vigen (1917) might be the sole exception among a string of filmic failures based on Ibsen’s works.² Credited for initiating the “Golden Age” of Swedish cinema, Sjöström’s classic has garnered the most thorough investigations, with scholars focusing on paradoxes of fidelity, nature, and broader issues of intertextuality and intermediality (Hanssen and Rossholm 2012; Wærp 2018; Florin 2022). Being the rare Ibsen poem to be adapted in film history, Sjöström’s silent film has only added to the confusion of Ibsen scholars lamenting the difficulty of successfully adapting Ibsen’s plays. As pointed out by Rees, “a number of scholars have cited Ibsen’s dramatic innovation as an important source for cinema as an art form. Yet, paradoxically, there are few if any great Ibsen films” (Rees 2021, 264–265). To undo this paradox, I will sketch out a brief history of Ibsen adaptation studies, which comes more sharply into view thanks to the work of leading scholars in the field: Egil Törnqvist, Lisbeth Pettersen Wærp, Ellen Rees, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, and Audun Engelstad have all contri-buted with several important articles and it is important to recognize how this subfield has developed due to collaborative efforts in the form of seminars, conferences, and anthologies.

Adaptation studies as a methodology and field of study can arguably be traced back to George Bluestone’s (1957) seminal anthology Novels into Film. Even though critics in the first decades of the twentieth century had heated debates about the fidelity and quality of Ibsen films, it took decades for scholars to follow suit. A first wave of research was made possible by Karin Synnøve Hansen’s impressive filmography, first published in 1978 and updated online until 2017. It was on the basis of this work that Karsten Alnæs published the first systematic articles on Ibsen adaptations (Alnæs 1978a; Alnæs 1978b).³ A second important event was the 1998 seminar culminating in the anthology Ibsen on Screen, edited by Jan Erik Holst and Astrid Sæther (2000), which marked a broader and interdisciplinary attempt at producing knowledge on Ibsen in film history. A third significant happening was the XIII International Ibsen Conference at the University of Tromsø in 2012, with important proceedings published in Nordlit 34, 2015, edited by Lisbeth Pettersen Wærp. Lastly, it is striking that we only now see the first two books with original research on Ibsen adaptations since Törnqvist’s Ibsen, Strindberg and the Intimate Theatre (1999): the anthology Silent Ibsen, edited by Frisvold Hanssen and Maria Fosheim Lund (2022), and Rees’ monograph Den populærkulturelle Ibsen (The Popular Cultural Ibsen, 2023). Both studies lead us out of the straightjacket of more traditional adaptation studies in crucial ways, to which I will return.

Such a summing up of almost fifty years of research shows how Ibsen adaptation studies is not a linear story in line with broader developments in adaptation theory exclusively. A short history of studies of Ibsen on screen goes something like this: a first wave of scholars confronted this film legacy with strong evaluative claims and employed Ibsen as the dominant and sometimes exclusive intertext for readings of individual films. The rejection of most Ibsen adaptations except Terje Vigen can be traced back to Karsten Alnæs, who concluded that “Ibsen will never be a major name in film. Most of the versions must be regarded as insignificant, and the glimpses of something interesting here and there are largely due to the involvement of some famous star or director. The majority of outstanding film directors have wisely ignored Henrik Ibsen” (Alnæs 1978b, 71). A first polemic against Alnæs’ dismissive stance was Birgitta Steene’s intriguing analysis of Hans W. Geißendörfer’s Die Wildente (The Wild Duck, 1976). Steeped in film studies, Steene discussed how the play was transposed to a new medium with a high degree of fidelity and artistic quality despite what Alnæs saw as misguided deviations from the play (Steene 1981). Ibsen is also the dominant intertext for Lilia Popova and Knut Brynhildsvoll in their article on the German 1934 adaptation of Peer Gynt, although here the analysis points at some important interconnections between the film and the extreme historical moment in which it was conceived and circulated (Popova and Brynhildsvoll 1991). Still, the first wave of research was for the most part embedded within the realms of the textual vis-à-vis the audiovisual medium, arguably reaching its apotheosis in Törnqvist’s work, which further taught us to pay close attention to the medium into which Ibsen is adapted (Törnqvist 1994; Törnqvist 1999). Most contributions in Ibsen on Screen also stay within related issues of fidelity and medium-specificity (Aarseth 2000; Törnqvist 2000; Steene 2000).

A clear paradigm shift came with Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006), which soon served as an established reference point in Ibsen studies, enabling scholars to discuss adaptations within wider intertextual and contextual coordinates of transculturation—an approach that sees adaptations as historically situated cultural artifacts (Rees 2015; Thresher 2015; Wærp 2015; Wærp 2018; Holt 2020; Rees 2021; Isaksen 2021; Larsen 2022; Rees 2023). An important contribution with use of Hutcheon is Frisvold Hanssen’s 2017 analysis of all extant silent Ibsen adaptations in the US, framing them within a significant transitional period in film history. Other studies dealt with related issues of “transculturation” or “domestication” informed by theories in performance and adaptation studies (Rees 2022); for instance, several interesting articles have explored Ibsen on screen in Asia (Wright 2006; Helland 2015; Tam 2015; Isaksen 2021; Nilu 2021). Looking beyond Ibsen as the dominant intertext, one sees how his plays were turned into cautionary tales (Hanssen 2017), star vehicles (Sandberg 2022), intermedial composites (Florin 2022), and a number of other constellations.

After a decade of Hutcheon-inspired research, it is time to ask fresh questions and seek new answers. Are any productive claims in previous research overseen? Have scholars continued to build on the directions opened up in the shift from a first to a second wave of Ibsen adaptation studies or has something been lost in the process? As we see an increase in articles and books on Ibsen adaptations, what is truly new? And what remains unexplored?

IBSEN ADAPTATIONS REORIENTED

For fifty years, Ibsen adaptation studies have been haunted by an inferiority complex compared to Shakespeare. Referring to features such as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985), Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight (1966), and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), scholars have lamented the lack of successful Ibsen films compared with the Bard of Avon. In “The (Im)possibility of Filming Ibsen,” Melvin Chen advocated more daring adaptations of the plays—films “both faithful in the nature of their intertextual referentiality and bold in their departure from the source text” (Chen 2015, 363). This is only the last among several scholarly articles that advise filmmakers on how to overcome the alleged paradox of Shakespeare faring well in cinema and Ibsen not (see also Raymond 1952; Törnqvist 2000; Engelstad 2006). In response to this divide, Chen launched “the Shakespeare premise” as an attempt to tease out the cinematic potential in Ibsen’s plays by taking inspiration from Shakespeare adaptations and calling for what film theoretician André Bazin called “mixed cinema”—films that merge different art forms governed by medium-specificity rather than fidelity to the adapted text.

There are reasons to reject the premise that such Ibsen adaptations have not already been made. We can trace this misunderstanding to a continuity between first and second wave Ibsen adaptation studies, which have focused almost exclusively on adaptations announced and marketed as such. Revisiting the existing literature on Ibsen adaptations, one is struck by how Stanley Cavell’s and Helge Rønning’s work from the late 1990s reject the theoretical insistence that adaptations have to be “announced” and “extended,” to use Linda Hutcheon’s definition, and point toward what we may identify as a third wave in the process. It was Cavell’s strikingly original thesis that Nora served as a blueprint for numerous female leads in the “comedy of remarriage” and the “melodrama of the unknown woman” in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s (see Cavell 1981, 20–22; Cavell 1996). In “From Snorre to Dante’s Peak,” Rønning identifies and explores broader interconnections between Ibsen and films that build “loosely on” the works of the dramatist (Rønning 2000, 73). Consequently, Rønning points us in the direction of several films and TV-series—from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) to the US soap series Dynasty (1981–89)—that were not announced as adaptations but still came with significant textual, dramaturgical, thematic, or other similarities to Ibsen’s works. Another original idea in Rønning’s article is how he employs Peter Brooks’ influential study to bridge Ibsen’s plays and Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood melodramas in ways that highlight broader interconnections between the dramatist and film historical genre processes.

Variations of Cavell’s thesis reappear in articles by scholars who read female leads as sisters of Ibsen’s most famous heroines, Nora and Hedda. This textual strategy may be discussed as “character displacement,” meaning that filmmakers develop narratives that incorporate versions of Ibsen’s dramatic characters rather than bona fide adaptations. Astrid Sæther has suggested that Ibsen’s women are formative for Woody Allen’s female protagonists and both Elisabeth Oxfeldt and Dag Skarstein have explored intertextual echoes of Nora in the widely popular TV series SKAM (2015–17) (Sæther 2015; Oxfeldt 2017; Skarstein 2017). Another example is German film scholar Thomas Elsaesser’s remark about R.W. Fassbinder’s women toward the end of his monograph on the director:

Inspiration for the strong female characters in [Fassbinder’s] work seems to have partly come from the same sources as Ingmar Bergman’s: the Nordic dramatists. In Fassbinder’s case Henryk [sic] Ibsen, whose Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House he produced, the first for the theatre (Bremen, 1973), the second for television (Nora Helmer, 1973). The ideal incarnation for the Ibsen woman was Margit Carstensen, for whom he wrote two plays during his stay in Bremen, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and Bremer Freiheit (both 1971). (Elsaesser 1996, 278)

The ways in which Fassbinder and Carstensen created new versions of the Ibsenian heroine exemplify how traditional adaptation studies fail to consider important developments at the intersections of literature and film (on Nora Helmer, see Ng 2015). It is symptomatic that Linda Haverty Rugg sidesteps adaptation theory altogether in her impressive article on how “the motif of the sacrificial woman marks a discernible line of inheritance from Ibsen and especially Strindberg to Dreyer, Bergman, and von Trier” (Rugg 2016, 352). It is also worth noting that Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) links the sexual activity of the parents to the death of the child in ways that bring Ibsen’s Little Eyolf (1894) to mind.

Another attempt of going beyond announced adaptations to explore the status of Ibsen in film history is presented in an article I co-wrote with Rees on Steven Spielberg’s New Hollywood blockbuster Jaws. We argue that Spielberg and scriptwriter Peter Benchley had the underlying political allegory of the play in mind when they referred to Jaws as a mixture of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) (Rees and Holt 2022). A related textual strategy can be seen in how Fritz Lang adapted the political allegory of the “In the Hall of the Mountain King” scene from Peer Gynt (1867) in M (1931), a masterpiece of crime and paranoia which sees the murderer Beckert whistling Grieg’s tune each time he is overcome by an irresistible urge to kill children. And in line with Rønning’s attention to genre, I argue elsewhere that the popularity and reception of Ibsen’s plays in Germany shaped the influential Kammerspielfilm (Holt 2022). This was a genre that drew on the claustrophobic settings, limited characters, and short time spans known from Ibsen’s social dramas. Whereas several scholars have argued that the “canned theater” of Ibsen does not fare well in the movies, a case could be made for how the Ibsenian drama, via legendary theater directors such as Otto Brahm and Max Reinhardt, spawned a genre that went on to influence filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman.

Taken together, the German Kammerspielfilm, Lang’s M, Sirk’s La Habanera (1937), Spielberg’s Jaws, and von Trier’s Antichrist suggest that a number of films that draw on Ibsen in more subtle ways are more artistically successful and culturally significant than announced adaptations. In this light, “the Shakespeare premise” dissolves into the Shakespeare myth.

THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS

Let me pause to tell an anecdote from working on my doctoral thesis on Ibsen adaptations in the Third Reich. Eager to find as much Ibsen related materials in Nazi cinema as possible, I noticed several similarities between Hans Hinrich’s Das Meer ruft (1933), an unannounced adaptation of Ibsen’s poem “Terje Vigen” (1862), and Franz Seitz’ S.A.-Mann Brand (1933), a possible adaptation based on Brand (1866): neither openly announce Ibsen’s poem or play as a source, both films contain protagonists with names that closely resemble Ibsen characters (Terje Wiggen and Fritz Brand), both films are set in a different space and time than Ibsen’s texts, and both incorporate real historical conflicts—Operation Albion, which was the German forces’ occupation of parts of Estonia in World War I, and Hitler’s seizure of power respectively. Motifs and topoi recognizable from Ibsen abound. In Das Meer ruft, Terje Wiggen works as a pilot on the Baltic island Moon during the outbreak of World War I. In S.A.-Mann Brand, Fritz Brand works to Nazify a communist neighborhood in Berlin. In Das Meer ruft, Terje’s wife dies while he is taken captive; in S.A.-Mann Brand, the son that Fritz cares for dies surrounded by a doctor, the child’s mother, and a white cloth, resembling the (martyr) death of the child Alf in Brand. Whereas Ibsen buries both Terje Vigen and Brand, these two films provide happy endings. Terje Wiggen stands elevated on a cliff looking down on the German officer who took him captive; Fritz Brand marches not into a fatal exodus in the Norwegian mountains, but in a Nazi parade in the streets of Berlin upon Hitler’s emergence as chancellor. Only viewers familiar with Ibsen’s works would have been able to recognize Ibsen as a possible source for either of these films. Those who were, may even have noted that S.A-Mann Brand echoes Ibsen’s stage direction in Brand on how the “action takes place in our own time” in its subtitle: “a story from our times” (Ein Lebensbild aus unseren Tagen).

I could find no reviews that linked Ibsen to S.A.-Mann Brand, whereas a few critics were able to identify “Terje Vigen” as the textual source of Das Meer ruft. Still eager to present my claims about S.A.-Mann Brand as an Ibsen adaptation in the early phase of my dissertation work, I brought a draft to a seminar at the University of Oslo under the supervision of German film scholar Thomas Elsaesser. He shook his head and said that “not even Linda [Hutcheon] will take you there,” asking me to revise my theoretical framework or reject the film as an Ibsen adaptation altogether, as the claim was purely based on intertextual cues and no extratextual evidence. My heart sunk as I realized that an authority in film studies rejected my paper, for good reasons. Refusing this impasse in adaptation studies, I have been anticipating theoretical models that might transcend such conceptual dead ends ever since submitting the dissertation—without any discussion of S.A.-Mann Brand—two years later.

In “Rewriting Ibsen for the Big Screen” (2021), film scholar Audun Engelstad advocates a broadening of adaptation categories in order to explore films that draw on Ibsen without being publicly announced as such. Engelstad introduces three modes of adaptation—theatrical adaptation, adaptation by springboard, and adaptation as reimagining—in ways that would invite rather than reject my early thoughts on S.A.-Mann Brand. The first category consists of announced adaptations of Ibsen’s plays, whereas the other two return to issues of intertextual dialogism as developed by Robert Stam (2000) on the basis of Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality. Engelstad makes strong claims for films like Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Spielberg’s Jaws to be discussed with Ibsen as “springboard for the ensuing conflict,” that is a strong intertextual reference in the development of the conflict, albeit less extended in its engagement with the source text than traditional adaptations (Engelstad 2021, 179). These films are interesting examples in that both are announced adaptations of novels by other authors, Avery Corman’s Kramer vs. Kramer (1977) and Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1974) respectively. Consequently, they lead our attention to the broader intertextual processes of film adaptations. Proceeding from New Hollywood to world cinema, Engelstad also argues that Asghar Farhadi’s Le Passé (The Past, 2013) and Simon Stone’s The Daughter (2015) are more fully reimagined adaptations. Engelstad executes his analyses in ways that enrich our understanding of both the films in question and the source texts, thus adding to the historicity of Ibsen’s plays in the process by demonstrating how these filmmakers interpret and reimagine Ibsen in ways that resonate with burning issues of our own times, on both local and global levels.

Engelstad’s article can be further discussed within a recent turn in adaptation studies that stresses the constitutive role of audiences in deciding what is an adaptation or not. Both Nico Dicecco’s “reception model of adaptation” and the “reception-based definition of adaptation” suggested by Dennis Cutchins and Kathryn Meeks give the spectator agency in place of traditional paratexts like “based on” (Dicecco 2017, 607; Cutchins and Meeks 2018, 303). In fact, the way Cutchins develops Bakhtin into a theory of “intertextual dialogism” comes with the advantage for Ibsen adaptation studies that it both sidesteps the requirement of an adaptation having to be announced and asks us to consider how an adaptation influences the adapted text in the process (Cutchins 2017; see also Bruhn 2013). Bakhtin long ago debunked the notion of any “fixed” or “stable” meaning inherent in a text, arguing that “every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries, and it derives its seriousness and significance from this fact. Separated by abstraction from these boundaries, it loses the ground of its being and becomes vacuous, arrogant; it degenerates and dies” (Bakhtin 1990, 274). Ibsen’s dramas are full of complexities and ambiguities that partly explain how a writer from the periphery developed into world literature and a popular source in film history; this room for interpretation, however, is also integral to how the Norwegian dramatist could be misused in a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany (Holt 2020). Thriving at the boundaries of different cultural expressions and sociopolitical discourses, the borders between Ibsen, adaptations, and historical contexts are porous, each informing the other.

It is a truism that many students encounter An Enemy of the People after having watched Spielberg’s Jaws. How do adaptations—whether announced or not—reflexively influence Ibsen’s plays and poems? That is the question being asked by a number of Bakhtin-inspired adaptation scholars. It is a topic, I believe, that comes with significant potential for future Ibsen studies: how are our readings of Ibsen and the reception more broadly shaped by the numerous adaptations of his plays and poems? To answer this vexed question, Cutchins discusses reflexive influence as a “question of gravity or mass,” an intriguing metaphor that nevertheless seems too slippery to produce knowledge on the problem at hand. “The ‘mass’ of any given text is not absolute,” writes Cutchins, “but rather determined by personal experience, by priority, and likely by the text’s cultural pervasiveness” (2017, 75). In our study on Jaws, we acknowledge this influence but conclude in a more general way “that Spielberg’s Jaws is arguably the hypertext that more than any other has reactivated, influenced, and amplified Ibsen’s play” (Rees and Holt 2022, 11).

Instead of broadening the approach by applying concepts like “gravity” or “mass,” could we perhaps ask how an adaptation shapes our understanding of the source text in more tangible ways by inverting the palimpsest? It was Egil Törnqvist who in 1994 asserted that “for most people today an Ibsen play is neither a book nor stage performance but screen adaptation. Also, for this reason Ibsen scholars should pay due attention to what is happening in the post-Ibsen media” (Törnqvist 1994, 216). The implications of this claim only intensify in our era of digital media—which sees new readers encountering Ibsen with previous knowledge from audiovisual expressions that far exceed what Törnqvist could have imagined. Unannounced adaptations, political allegories, latent melodrama, character displacements, genre formations, mashups, and reflexive influence: only by broadening our understanding of adaptation processes does Ibsen’s position in film history come more sharply into view; we also learn more about how adaptations inflect Ibsen’s works in the process.⁴

FURTHER METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

“I see Ibsen everywhere!” a student at the Centre for Ibsen Studies proclaimed in a seminar on adaptation theory. Being trained as hyper-active readers of Ibsen we naturally invest his dramas in a plethora of texts, which raises the question of how to avoid spinning off into subjective relativism? As noted by several scholars, a comparative analysis between source text and adaptation is the essential first step for all such studies, as formal comparisons make for a privileged bridge to larger cultural and sociopolitical issues (Hutcheon 2006; Bruhn 2013). I might add that it is often in the major deviations from Ibsen’s plays that we find salient clues to an adaptation’s social criticism. If the turn from fidelity to infidelity has given much-needed insight into how Ibsen adaptations respond to burning issues at the time and place of their production and initial circulation, there may yet be essential lessons to learn by revisiting first wave studies. In an otherwise panegyric review of the Silent Ibsen anthology, Engelstad recently expressed some concern regarding whether the pendulum has swung too far away from Ibsen’s works. “One could, perhaps, wish for more pointed discussions of the actual plays,” Engelstad ponders, “which sometimes seem pushed to the margins” (Engelstad 2021, 176–77). While I doubt that he is advocating a return to fidelity studies, the remark may be developed into a call for Ibsen scholars to not lose sight of how the adaptation works on the relevant text in the process. One way of bringing fidelity back in vogue would be to stress how the adapted text always already changes, if ever so slightly, in the historical moment in which an adaptation takes place. One example is how the environmental implications of the stance of the mayor and the majority in An Enemy of the People are likely to be highlighted for readers with knowledge of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s adaptation En folkefiende (2005), which can be read as a radical critique of Norwegian oil history and national identity. In this light, there is no clear divide between Ibsen’s works and Ibsen adaptations, as both are embedded in wider textual processes that inevitably link them with each other.

If a possible new wave in Ibsen studies comes into view by stressing how adaptations influence source texts, another line of departure is encouraged by Rees in her panoramic book on Ibsen and popular culture in Norway, which expands the field beyond film and television to include new materials, such as radio theater, comics, and tourist attractions (Rees 2023). It is also encouraging to register scholars who work on adaptations of various sorts: in 2021, Lianna Elizabeth Stewart submitted a master’s thesis on the Norwegian National Ballet’s successful Ghosts production from 2014 (Stewart 2021); Lisbeth Pettersen Wærp has published a recent article on a Peer Gynt musical with the lead transferred to Solveig (Wærp 2022); and in the last issue of Ibsen Studies, Magnus Henrik Sandberg brought computer games to the attention of Ibsen scholars with “Peer Gynt – From Play to Game” (Sandberg 2022), hopefully initiating research that extend to the massive presence of Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite in the video game industry as well. Building on these and other studies, a number of possibilities open up for proliferating Ibsen adaptation studies in the years to come: unrealized or lost film adaptations,⁵ animations, other performative arts (Risi 2010; He 2016; Xia 2016; Tam 2019; Wærp 2022); TV (Longum 1979; Goméz-Baggethun 2021); radio (Smidt 1987), music both popular and classical (Glass 1978; Grinde 2008; Grimley 2021); visual arts (Langslet 2002; Templeton 2008); literary adaptations (Krouk 2014; Gunn 2015); social media, digital media, and new platforms where Ibsen will flourish in the future.

CONCLUSION

When Engelstad in 2006 sought to explain the alleged failure of Ibsen in Hollywood compared to Shakespeare, he argued that “it is primarily because the dramatic form of Shakespeare is much closer to the narrative form of film than Ibsen” (det er først og fremst at Shakespeares dramatiske form ligger mye nærmere filmens fortellerform enn det Ibsens skuespill gjør) (Engelstad 2006, 39). Fifteeen years later, Engelstad reached a strikingly different conclusion: “The upswing of independent and world cinema over the past two decades, with their enhanced realism and downplaying of the mechanics of plot, has brought film narrative closer to that of Ibsen” (Engelstad 2021, 187). If Engelstad is right, this filmic era should be especially interesting for Ibsen scholars. We eagerly await Marvel director Nia DaCosta’s adaptation of Hedda Gabler, and Ruben Östlund explained that the ending of his Palme d’Or-winning Triangle of Sadness (2022) only fell into place upon watching German theater director Thomas Ostermeier’s Ein Volksfeind at Schaubühne in Berlin (McGovern 2023). Ibsen’s works continue to spur the imagination of filmmakers and audiences in ways that will continue to challenge scholars for years to come.

As Shakespeare adaptation studies gather pace with the book series Shakespeare on Screen, published by Cambridge University Press, there are few reasons why a similar series could not be launched from the perspective of Ibsen studies, both on film and other adaptations. In order to produce knowledge on texts based on Ibsen with theoretical implications for the development of adaptation studies, however, Timothy Corrigan warns us that “because its activities and perspectives continue to evolve rapidly, there cannot be any single or stable definition of adaptation. Within this climate, scholars and practitioners accordingly need to change and refocus regularly, or risk being lost in an alligator-infested past” (Corrigan 2017, 34). For Ibsen studies to be at the forefront of adaptation studies, scholars have to keep a keen eye on how a rapidly changing media landscape will continue to transform and influence Ibsen in new ways. A fourth and a fifth wave is fast approaching and Ibsen scholars are privileged to work with texts that continuously spawn new interpretations and adaptations. Only now do we start to glimpse Ibsen’s position in film history and only by adjusting to and developing new approaches will we be able to reach a fuller understanding of how adaptation is a missing link in order to understand Ibsen as world literature.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thor Holt

Thor Holt is associate professor at the Centre for Ibsen Studies, University of Oslo. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Any notable omissions are the sole responsibility of the author.

2 Most studies on Ibsen adaptations focus on how his plays have been transposed to film. The article will therefore discuss Ibsen and cinema for the most part, but attempt to broaden this subfield toward the end. Theater performances are beyond the scope of this article.

3 The issue of Scandinavian Review that published an English version of Karsten Alnæs’ article on adaptations presents several contributions that focused on intermedial exchanges within and in extension of Ibsen’s plays.

4 The artistic need to go beyond traditional adaptations when drawing on Ibsen is strong among filmmakers, as indicated by interviews of several directors in the Norwegian journal Rushprint (Bråten 2006).

5 Studying Ibsen adaptations, one comes across lost films and intriguing projects that never materialized. Lost and unrealized film adaptations, however, are still possible to reconstruct to some degree based on archival research. An intriguing example would be Andrey Tarkovsky’s planned adaptation of Peer Gynt. On September 18, 1974, the Russian director wrote as follows in his diaries: “Read Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. Stupendous. One of the screenplays I should like to suggest to them in Tallinn is Peer Gynt” (Tarkovsky 1994, 78).