John Gabriel Borkman's Avant-Garde Continuity

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?

Perhaps it is worth musing a bit even so about the meaning of a quirky historical coincidence: Ibsen began writing his penultimate play John Gabriel Borkman in April of 1896, the same month that the cinematograph made its Norwegian debut as a temporary attraction at Christiania's Cirkus Varieté,² about four blocks from Ibsen's final apartment on Arbinsgate (see Iversen 484). For some, this geographic proximity might be enough to prompt an investigation of the play's "cinematic" qualities (even if one would have to use the term quite loosely to do so), as if cinema were "in the air" as Ibsen took his daily walk in that direction down to the Grand Café. As tempting as it might be to claim that cinematic impressions somehow made their way into the play he was working on in the spring and summer of 1896, temptation would be exactly the right word to describe this particular kind of historical speculation. The style of cinema that dominated the early screens offers little resonance with this play. If the play does share with later cinema an impulse to explore issues of space, time, and visual mobility, as I will claim in this essay, we must therefore seek an explanation beyond that provided by a writer's casual visit to a cinema - a visit that in this case almost certainly did not take place anyway.

Freed from a contact model of artistic influence, we can pose a different series of questions concerning more fundamental shifts in the representation of time and space in the late nineteenth century. There is more to hang onto here as far as Ibsen is concerned, especially if we take the broader parameters of visual culture as the frame of investigation. Although there is no evidence of a direct connection to the cinema, we do know something of Ibsen's interest in photography from the dominant role that medium plays in The Wild Duck. Furthermore, his interest in the visual arts was both personal (he tried painting as a young man) and literary (think of his dramatic portrayals of the architect in The Master Builder or the modern sculptor in When We Dead Awaken). It is also worth considering his experience with the popular stage at the time of his early directing experience in Norway and the consistent attention he later devoted to the scenographic aspects of his plays in performance. My point in broadening the frame of reference here is not to identify a "truer" influence on Ibsen's play but instead to emphasize that, though working in a high cultural mode, he was steeped in the general visual-cultural issues of the late nineteenth century from which classical cinema would eventually emerge.

A key development in many late nineteenth-century media and artistic practices, both low and high, as Stephen Kern has argued, was the period's "vast, shared experience of simultaneity" (314...