Time and Place Do Exist: Strindberg and Visual Media

Abstract

August Strindberg’s talents as painter and photographer have received broad recognition in recent years. Several major exhibitions held in Sweden and abroad cast new light on these other sides of the famous playwright. What deserves attention in this context is that Strindberg never kept his writing separate from his interest in visual arts but established a symbiotic relationship between the two fields with manifold ramifications. Ideas freely flow back and forth and the visual came to manifest a key aspect in his literary output. As Evert Sprinchorn noted, “No other major dramatist offers such a rich feast for the eye of the spectator. To see his plays is to walk through a gallery of memorable pictures.” 1 Strindberg’s preoccupation with visual means also frequently coincided with his fascination for cutting-edge technologies. The field of photography is perhaps the most prominent example for this overlapping of interests which resulted not only in a number of photographic experiments and snapshots but also in various literary themes and metaphors. In 1895, a new optical technology emerged with the cinema and Strindberg was quick to incorporate the Lumiere brothers’ invention into his fictional writing. Less than three years later, he captured in his autobiographical novel Legends (1898) an episode in which the first-person narrator is gazing at the twirling street life of Paris through the window of a restaurant, comparing it with watching “the liveliest cinematographic image.” 2 Strindberg returned to the medium on two more occasions. By that time, film had undergone some major transformations. Around 1904, for example, the first permanent movie theatres started to be built in Stockholm. When Strindberg sought to renew the stage through the Intimate Theatre, he would mention these “modern institutions” as a model to be emulated. 3 Two ideas in particular he found worth adopting for his own theatre concept: that all seats should be equally good and that the performances ought to be given “at a suitable hour not too close to bed-time” so that even people who needed to get up for work early the next morning would be able to attend. It is in this context that Strindberg also spoke of the cinema as a “democratic” form of entertainment.