4. Pantomime, Paratext, and Expressivity Ghosts (George Nicholls, Majestic, 1915) Mark Sandberg
This chapter concerns a “failed” silent-film adaptation of Ibsen that might not have been a failure after all, or at the very least, not in the way that is usually assumed. The version of Ghosts produced by the Majestic Motion Picture Company in 1915 shows, no doubt, the difficulties of transposing a densely verbal naturalist drama to the visual regime of silent film, but the usual conclusion – that Ibsen’s plays are essentially untranslatable to the screen – does not do justice to the more complex contemporary promotion and reception of this film at the time of its release. It is possible to appreciate Ibsen’s dramatic texts, as I do, for his mastery of the analytic dramatic form, his evocation of the unsaid underneath all that is said, and the subtle psychology of his characters without weaponising the excellence of his stage works as an easy criticism of any filmic adaptation. Such aesthetic hierarchies, anchored in ideas of medium specificity, obscure the peculiar characteristics of this 1915 film and the ways that it does something more than fall short of Ibsen’s theatrical standard. By examining the 1915 film of Ghosts within the assumptions and expectations of its own media environment, it is possible to recover historical perspectives that evade the aesthetic hierarchies that have since then become the de facto and somewhat facile explanations for why there are relatively few “Ibsen films”. This larger historical contextualisation beyond a simple adaptation of drama into film follows the lead of Eirik Frisvold Hanssen’s 95
