John Gabriel Borkman’s Avant-Garde Continuity

Abstract

Henrik Ibsen, filmmaker. A pause is necessary after that particular juxtaposition, if only to sort out the immediate clash of impressions: Ibsen, the culminating nineteenth-century dramatist, on the one hand; film, the nascent twentieth-century popular visual medium, on the other. Ibsen’s plays, among the most renowned dramas of entrapment, interiority, and inertia, do not resonate easily with the spatial–temporal mobility of the cinema. The fact that Ibsen was no Eisenstein evokes little surprise; other writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had a much more visible interest in the new medium (Maxim Gorky and Franz Kafka come to mind).1 Ibsen, sixty-eight years old at the time of the cinematograph’s debut in Paris, lived out most of his creative life before regular public cinematic projection became a truly viable possibility in the early twentieth century and before film could possibly have a significant cultural impact. Given that Ibsen was incapacitated by the series of strokes in 1900–03 that put an end to his writing and led to his death in 1906, he simply did not have the historical opportunity to explore the formal possibilities of the new medium directly. Case closed?