Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema

4. Garbo Talks! - Scandinavians, the Talkie Revolution, and the Crisis of Foreign Voice

90 four Garbo Talks! Scandinavians, the Talkie Revolution, and the Crisis of Foreign Voice  O ne crisis of the American film industry’s talkie revolution pitted the fantasmatic, mute bodies and faces of Scandinavian émigré actors against the foreignaccented aurality of their recorded voices. Hollywood’s steady conversion to sound between 1927 and 1931 ended the antediluvian period when Scandinavian performers could remain unmarked as foreign others on the American screen. By speaking in their own voices instead of through the textual mediation of intertitles, they became “visible” as exotic at best, and unassimilated, strange, even ridiculous at worst. The talkies foregrounded ethnicity as difference since voice rather than body suddenly made these actors legible in an existing system of ethnic difference. The participation of Scandinavians in silent-era Hollywood and during the talkie transition has not yet been treated as a distinctly ethnic experience, presumably since their whiteness has been considered so blank as to be unworthy of theorization. Yet their relationship to Hollywood classical cinema in this period makes them a fascinating test case for fresh approaches to reading ethnicity, whiteness, and voice in American cinema during this period of technological and cultural upheaval. garbo talks! 91 During the late silent period, Scandinavian actors could connote the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Nordic white body on screen without their speech signaling something strange, unassimilated, or foreign. In the absence of recorded voice, the quintessential “whiteness” or “blankness” of the Scandinavian ethnic body and face (made blank by American culture’s unspoken norms of whiteness) was also a tabula rasa upon which almost any national, ethnic, or racial impersonation could be projected. During the 1910s and 1920s, Scandinavian immigrant actors from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway (such as Greta Garbo, Lars Hanson , Jean Hersholt, Anna Q. Nilsson, Nils Asther, Greta Nissen, and Einar Hansen) performed these ethnic masquerades on the American screen with amazing success. The Scandinavian performance traditions of both the Ibsenian and Strindbergian theater, as well as the naturalist gestural systems of Scandinavian screen acting (especially in the Swedish films of Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller from 1912 onward), likely contributed to an imported aesthetic category of subtle and “natural” performance style as well. Moreover, the personal reserve of many of these Scandinavian émigré actors in Hollywood’s public sphere further aligned them with the silence of silent pictures. A June 1927 Photoplay interview with Swedish émigré Lars Hanson, for example, described him as “one of those strong, silent Nordics with blonde hair and eyes like blue ice” and “a discreet, a proud and a shy man who will lapse into glacierlike silence rather than talk of his success, his personal affairs.”1 The frozen landscape imagery of this fan magazine discourse conflates whiteness, silence, self-effacement, and a kind of natural impenetrability . Ice is a smooth, hard, blank surface, and the implication is that Scandinavian actors don’t speak on the screen or off it. With silent film essentially a pantomimic performance mode, English -language intertitles for the American home market and interpolated foreign-language intertitles for export abroad made the visual signage of silent cinema a kind of international language. For foreign actors in Hollywood at the end of the silent period, the easy substitutability of intertitles could successfully mask any linguistic differences of accent or dialect, or even the incomprehensibility of a foreign language itself. Lars Hanson, for example, debuted in Hollywood in 1926 as Reverend Dimmesdale in Victor Sjöström’s The Scarlet Letter (adapted by Frances Marion from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel). Hanson, 92 chapter four who had already played a defrocked minister in Stiller’s Gösta Berlings saga in 1923–24, spoke almost no English when he first arrived at mgm. He therefore performed all his lines on the set in Swedish, while Lillian Gish’s Hester Prynne and the remainder of the cast played their dialogue in English. On his first day of shooting, Hanson’s acting was so effective that, despite the language barrier, the entire cast and crew reputedly broke into spontaneous applause.2 What mattered in the final product was the pantomimic screen chemistry of Hanson’s and Gish’s faces and bodies, since only lipreaders could ever suspect the bilingualism of their respective performances. In Sjöström’s 1928 silent The Wind, which also costarred Hanson and Gish, the Swedish actor plays the grizzled, prototypical Western cowboy, Lige, who meets...