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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25.3 (2003) 51-63



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Time and Place Do Exist
Strindberg and Visual Media

Vreni Hockenjos

[Figures]

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 Lumière 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. [End Page 51]

In his A New Blue Book (1908), another reference may be found, as Strindberg draws a parallel between the poet's impotence to describe the human soul and the cinema's insufficient means to depict movement:

Observe how in cinematography many pictures need to be taken in succession to create movement, and nonetheless does the image proceed unsteadily. In each vibration an intermediary link is missing. While a thousand instantaneous photographs were needed for a movement of the arm, what a countless multitude would not be required to depict a movement of the soul. The poet's descriptions of humans are therefore only abbreviations, sketchy outlines, all imperfect, all half-false. 4

Stefan Michael Schröder has pointed out that the analogy in fact builds on a misconception. 5 It takes no more than around twenty images per second to trick the eye into seeing a smooth motion, so that when films at this stage were experienced as jerky it was not a matter of having recorded too few images. Rather, it was the result of a number of factors such as: the black pauses between the images were slightly too long; a non-transparent shutter was being used; or both camera and projector were operated manually, this creating slight variations in speed.

What the quotation nonetheless illustrates is that the medium still struggled with quite some disturbing technical defects and Strindberg never came to develop his interest further. Considering that the dramatist was known for his ambitions to always be well-informed about everything that was new, several scholars have noted this rather reserved position towards the cinema and sought to explain it through the medium...

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