2. “To Familiarise the Lowly”: The Cultural Politics of Adaptation The Pillars of Society (Thanhouser, 1911) Pillars of Society (Raoul Walsh, Triangle, 1916) Rob King
The impossibility of filming Ibsen is a commonplace in Ibsen studies (Chen 2015). One of the important things about this collection, then, is that it permits a discursive archaeology of that commonplace. The Raoul Walsh-directed Pillars of Society, released by the Triangle Film Corporation in September 1916, occupies a key place in that archaeology. It was not quite the American cinema’s first feature-length adaptation of Ibsen – that honour belongs to the 1915 five-reeler Ghosts, about which more below – but it was released at a moment when the difficulties of filming Ibsen were very much in the air, with the Triangle film provoking different opinions on this issue (see also Sandberg in this volume). For some, the film was proof of cinema’s capacities for cultural democratisation (“familiariz[ing] the lowly with great examples of leading dramatists”, as one reviewer put it), while for others it was a fuddy-duddy gesture to an outdated model of culture (“full of old-fashioned frocks and old-fashioned methods”, as another opined) (Harrison 1916b; Johnson 1916a). This chapter, accordingly, uses the film to unearth the terms within which Ibsen’s supposed “impossibility” came to be cast in the critical discourse of the era, and it argues that that impossibility, in America at least, cannot really be understood outside of debates about the cultural politics of cinema as a mass medium – that is, debates about how cinema might function in society and, thus, what cinematic mass culture could or should be. 43
