2. “To Familiarise the Lowly”: The Cultural Politics of Adaptation

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great examples of leading dramatists”, as one reviewer put it), while for others it was a fuddy-duddy gesture to an outdated model of culture (“full of old-fashioned frocks and old-fashioned methods”, as another opined) (Harrison 1916b; Johnson 1916a).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.

By and large this is not the way the Ibsen “problem” has been discussed. As Eirik Frisvold Hanssen has argued, Ibsen adaptations have tended to “generate essentialist arguments on the differences between cinema and theater”, a tendency dating to the earliest film theorists such as Vachel Lindsay and Hugo Münsterberg, both of whom, writing at the time of Pillars’ release, identified Ibsen as a cinematic no-no (2017, 158; see also Sandberg in this volume). It was Münsterberg’s contention, for instance, that film’s specific “dramatic qualities” as a medium of action made it unsuited to the “subtler shades of motives” of Ibsen’s work (1916, 219), while Lindsay declared Ibsen an artist of “the spoken word” and thus an impossibility for the silent screen: “At the close of every act of the dramas of this Norwegian one might inscribe on the curtain ‘This the magnificent motion picture cannot achieve’” (1915, 152). More recent scholarship on Ibsen adaptations has tended to draw similar conclusions, albeit for different reasons – as, for instance, in the case of Ibsen historian Asbjørn Aarseth, who pitches his argument on the “irreducible distinction” between theatrical and cinematic constructions of narrative space (2000, 43). Yet behind these surface variations, what unites these essentialist comparisons is a common tendency to bracket off any consideration of the actual motives driving Ibsen adaptations and to beg the question of whether a formal comparison is the only valid framework of evaluation in the first place. What risks getting occluded is an entirely separate dimension of Ibsen’s impossibility that this chapter seeks to recover – an impossibility located not primarily in the aesthetics of Ibsen’s stagecraft, which cinema supposedly could not approximate, but rather within then-current endeavours to put cinematic mass culture in the service of “high” art, which Ibsen’s work risked derailing. The better to see this, though, it will be important to begin by clarifying the motivations and investments that led to the Triangle release in the first place.

“Made for the masses with an appeal to the classes”: The Triangle Film Corporation and Arnoldian Cultural Politics The Triangle Film Corporation had been formed by Harry Aitken in the summer of 1915 from a merger between the production companies and personnel that sided with Aitken when he was ousted as president of the Mutual Film Corporation that June: Aitken’s own Majestic Motion Picture Company, where D. W. Griffith had been employed as director and supervisor since 1913, and Adam Kessel and Charles Baumann’s New York Motion Picture organisation, a holding firm for both Thomas Ince’s Kay-Bee studios and Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company. Hence, Triangle: Griffith, Ince, and Sennett, a roster of producing talent through which Aitken sought to produce motion pictures that would articulate exclusive “highbrow” cultural values for genteel middle-class patrons without sacrificing the industry’s established working- and lower-middle-class audience base. As Adam Kessel, appointed Triangle’s vice president, put it: “The pictures will be high class enough to play in two-dollar houses … [but] will also be suitable to play in houses catering to the masses.” In sum, “They will be made for the masses with an appeal to the classes” (Motion Picture News, 1915a). Following a precedent already established by W. W. Hodkinson’s Famous Players company, the Triangle venture drew in particular on the cultural authority of the legitimate stage and literary fiction as entertainment for respectable middle-class audiences. As another of Kessel’s early announcements explained: “The Ince and Griffith[-supervised] pictures will be picturizations of the better plays and novels … [for which] we have already engaged some of the most famous theatrical stars, and are signing up more,” including such stage worthies as Frank Keenan and Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree (Motion Picture News, 1915b). The corporate mandate here was an Arnoldian one, in keeping with the broader influence of Matthew Arnold’s 1869 Culture and Anarchy on genteel cultural politics during this era. It had been Arnold’s celebrated recommendation that culture “seeks … to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere”; and it was this injunction that Triangle sought to accommodate to the commercial dynamics of cinematic mass culture, with

the medium’s top director-producers recruited as tastemakers in this project of high cultural dissemination (1971, 56). The decision to adapt Ibsen’s Pillars of Society, first published in 1877, did not, however, originate with the Triangle idea. The film was initially produced in the summer of 1915 as part of an earlier scheme of Aitken’s along similar lines, the Mutual Masterpictures series of four- and five-reel prestige features launched that March. Prepared as a follow-up to a Masterpicture version of Ghosts – the film that claims the title of American cinema’s first feature-length Ibsen adaptation (see Sandberg in this volume) – Pillars of Society was eventually shelved for over a year as a result of the corporate reorganisation from which Triangle emerged. Yet the delay in the film’s release might, on first blush, be seen as propitious, so well suited was Ibsen’s work to the cultural project Triangle claimed for itself. The decade or so following Ibsen’s death in 1906 had marked a significant re-evaluation of the playwright’s work in America: the charges of moral repulsiveness with which his prose dramas were first greeted in the late 1880s and 1890s – when his work was disparaged for its appeal to “wild-eyed, long-haired” intellectuals – were giving way to regret that the extraordinary social purposiveness of his work, in consequence, remained too little understood (Schanke 1988, 21). “Ibsen can no longer be denied,” thundered critic J. G. Huneker, writing on the occasion of the playwright’s death. “He is too big a man to be locked up in a library as if he were full of vague forbidden wickedness” (as cited in Schanke 1988, 44). Many of Ibsen’s most prolific interpreters in America – actors Mary Shaw, Mrs Minnie Maddern Fiske, and Alla Nazimova – routinely echoed that sentiment, defending the Norwegian’s work as an articulation of a reformist social agenda that cried out for a mass audience. By the mid-1910s, a number of film critics began to take up a complementary refrain, seeing in Ibsen a corollary possibility for transforming the mass medium of cinema into a medium of artistic “purpose” – none more so than Moving Picture World critic Louis Reeves Harrison, who, in a series of articles begun the year before Pillars’ production, repeatedly cited Ibsen as a model for what he variously called “plays of purpose”, “problem plays”, and a cinema of

Fig. 1. The opening title card to Triangle’s Pillars of Society (1916). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“social criticism” (1914a; 1914b; 1916a). Nor was Aitken alone in answering that call, which presaged a short-lived spate of US Ibsen adaptations in the mid-to-late 1910s that included a Morosco version of Peer Gynt (1915) (see Rees in this volume), a Bluebird adaptation of A Doll’s House (1917), and Hedda Gabler (1917) produced by Frank Powell Producing Corp. and distributed by Mutual (see the filmography in this volume for a complete overview). Triangle’s release of Pillars of Society nonetheless stands out in this context as a seemingly ideal confluence of a company whose explicit corporate mandate was the mass dissemination of high culture and the work of a playwright whose recent, albeit still contested, admission to those portals had been accompanied by calls for greater public awareness. “He is considered by many the greatest modern playwright,” the film’s opening title card affirmed, appropriating Ibsen’s hard-won cultural pedigree for Triangle’s mission of highbrow cultural dissemination (Fig. 1). Ten years after the playwright’s death, the time, it would seem, was ripe for Ibsen on film. What light, though, might Triangle’s Pillars of Society shed on how this endeavour went wrong?

“Then the curtains shall be drawn back”:

Ibsen’s Dramaturgy and the Narrative Feature Film

As an opening sally, I want first to frame this issue within the essentialising terms by which Ibsen adaptations have usually been assessed, examining Triangle’s film in view of Ibsen’s supposed intractability for cinematic translation. Here, I return to Aarseth (2000), who, in an aforementioned essay in which Pillars of Society – the play, not the film – figures prominently, argues for a “constitutional difference” separating the dramaturgical innovations of Ibsen’s prose cycle, a twelve-play series of which Pillars was the first, from the storytelling conventions of cinema. Again, some context: Pillars of Society, we know, was the play on which Ibsen worked the longest (over two years, between 1875 and 1877) in his endeavour to achieve a scenography suited to his investigation of the ethical conflicts of bourgeois life. That scenography, moreover, came to be centred on the confines of a single room (what Aarseth calls the scenography of the “narrow room”). Ibsen’s drafts and revisions for Pillars of Society reveal his eventual decision to use the Bernicks’ living-room set for all four acts, and his two subsequent prose plays, A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881), show Ibsen winding the scope of the action tighter still, as the dramatis personae shrinks from nineteen (in Pillars) to seven to five, and the length of the action from five days to two to a single night (Cardullo 2011, 369). What makes Pillars’ scenography unique in this trajectory, however, is the importance retained for exterior space, courtesy of a plateglass wall at the back of the Bernicks’ drawing room. The overall scenic design is painstakingly described in the play’s opening pages:

SCENE. – A spacious garden-room in the BERNICKS’ house. In the foreground on the left is a door leading to BERNICK’S business room; farther back in the same wall, a similar door. In the middle of the opposite wall is a large entrance-door, which leads to the street. The wall in the background is almost wholly composed of plate-glass; a door in it opens upon a broad flight of steps which lead down to the garden; a sun-awning is stretched over the steps. Below the steps a part of the garden is visible, bordered by a fence with a small gate in it. On the other side of the fence

runs a street, the opposite side of which is occupied by small wooden houses painted in bright colours. It is summer, and the sun is shining warmly. People are seen, every now and then, passing along the street and stopping to talk to one another; others going in and out of a shop at the corner, etc.1 (Ibsen 1913, 127)

Ibsen’s new scenography thus initially involved what Aarseth nicely calls a “Janus-headed stage”, in which the drawing room functions as spectacle in a double sense, both for the theatre audience looking on through a virtual fourth wall and, potentially, for characters on the other side of the diegetic glass wall – a potential actualised in the play’s finale when Merchant Rummel organises a gathering of townspeople in the garden to pay tribute to Consul Bernick (2000, 42). “When the garden is filled with a surging crowd,” Rummel earlier explains, “then the curtains shall be drawn back, and they will be able to look in upon a surprised and happy family. Citizens’ lives should be such that they can live in glass houses!” (Ibsen 1913, 205).2 (By way of a somewhat imperfect illustration of the effect, Figure 2 shows two set photos from Mrs Fiske’s 1910 staging of the play, the first with curtains closed, the second with them opened.) This, as has been noted, is a dramaturgy well suited to Ibsen’s exposure of the contradictions of bourgeois class formation. One way to read Ibsen’s prose cycle, it has been suggested, is as a series of allegories of a class that, in its very commitment to ideals of order and consensus, is ultimately forced to “draw back the curtains” on the lawlessness and violence on which that order is founded – here, in Bernick’s culminating confession of past misdeeds (Eagleton 2008).

1 In Norwegian: “En rummelig havesal i konsul Bernicks hus. I forgrunden tilvenstre fører en dør ind til konsulens værelse; længere tilbage, på samme væg, er en lignende dør. Midt på den modsatte væg er en større indgangsdør. Væggen i baggrunden er næsten helt af spejlglas med en åben dør ud til en bred havetrappe, hvorover er spændt et solsejl. Nedenfor trappen ses en del af haven, der indhegnes af et gitter med en liden indgangsport. Udenfor og langsmed gitteret løber en gade, der på den modsatte side er bebygget med små lysmalte træhuse. Det er sommer og varmt solskin. Enkelte mennesker går nu og da forbi henne i gaden; man standser og samtaler; der handles i en på hjørnet liggende krambod o. s. v.” (Ibsen 2008, 11) 2 “Når haven er fyldt af den bølgende mængde, går forhængene op, og man skuer indenfor en overrasket og glad familje; – en borgers hjem bør være som et glasskab.” (Ibsen 2008, 167)

Figs. 2a–b. Two set photos from Mrs. Fiske’s 1910 production of Pillars of Society at the New York Lyceum Theatre. Mrs. Fiske (as Lona Hessel) is second from right in (a), third from left in (b). Published in Theatre Magazine May and June 1910. Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

But, in its revocation of an older logic of theatrical action, Ibsen’s scenography could hardly be countenanced within the formal terms of transitional-era feature filmmaking. Pillars of Society may well represent Ibsen’s first step towards what Jacques Rancière has called “immobile drama”, in which the Aristotelian logic of a causal, character-driven chain of actions is displaced by the “sensible reality” of the setting itself (2013, 117). (For Rancière, The Master Builder is the culmination of that curve.) But, as countless film historians have shown, it was in the image of those same classical principles that Ibsen’s drama worked to revoke that cinematic storytelling in America took shape. The “immobile drama” of a bourgeoisie whose guilt-ridden history closes around it in wave upon wave of revelation is, in consequence, rejected in Triangle’s adaptation (“re-mobilised”, we might say) in favour of a more direct telling that folds out the backstory into the linearity of a Bildungsroman: we first track the Consul’s youthful misdeeds – his trip to France and affair with an actress for which he convinces his fiancée’s brother, Johan, to take the blame, his financially motivated betrayal of his fiancée, Lona, to marry her sister – and only then, more than halfway in, do we pick up where the play begins, fifteen years later. The dramaturgical primacy of the drawing room as a fishbowl-like space for the exposure of past wrongdoing is meanwhile dissolved into the haptic patterning of early continuity editing, which subordinates space to character interaction (Fig. 3). (Walsh, one should recall, was a former assistant to D. W. Griffith, one of the major architects of the continuity style.) Aarseth, it would seem, is exactly right: the chronotope of the “narrow room” as the framework of Ibsen’s prose cycle simply does not carry through into the framework of transitional-era cinematic narrative.

(a) (b)

(e) (f)

(i)

(c) (d)

(g) (h)

Figs. 3a–i. The opening scene of Triangle’s Pillars of Society (1916) exemplifies continuity style by orchestrating the space of the Bernicks’ drawing room in terms of protagonist action and sightlines. The sequence is bookended by point-of-view structures in which Bernick first leafs through a titillating volume on Parisian nightlife (a–e), then reads the spine of the Bible that his mother gives him instead (g–i). The full space of the drawing room set is only visible briefly in (f) – lasting all of two seconds – which functions as a delayed establishing shot. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“Extremely hard to understand”: Thanhouser’s 1911 Adaptation of Pillars of Society

We can get a better handle on that incompatibility if we take an extended parenthesis at this point to compare Triangle’s Pillars of Society with the earliest film adaptation of the play, a one-reel version produced by the Thanhouser Company in 1911. Anticipating Aitken’s organisation by a few years, Thanhouser had been launched in 1909 with similarly gentrifying intent and had likewise turned to Ibsen to that end. “We are after uplift,” founder Edwin Thanhouser had explained in a 1911 interview shortly before the film’s release, describing his goal as to “place the moving picture on a higher plane and gain for our particular brand a world-wide respect” (Moving Picture News, 1911a). Just as Majestic/Triangle would oversee the production of two feature-length Ibsen adaptations in 1915–1916 – Ghosts and Pillars – so had Thanhouser similarly invested in a brief run of three Ibsen one-reelers back in 1911, of which Pillars was the first, followed by A Doll’s House and The Lady from the Sea (see also Yalgın in this volume). (The primacy accorded to Pillars of Society seems to have been personally motivated: Edwin Thanhouser had been one of the few people to stage Pillars in America, at the tail end of his previous career as a theatrical producer, at Chicago’s Bush Temple Theatre in January 1909.) Yet in belonging to a slightly earlier phase in the development of film style, Thanhouser’s version of Pillars paradoxically has the effect of more nearly replicating Ibsen’s modernising innovations in stagecraft. Formally, the Thanhouser film follows the paradigm of other one- or two-reel “quality” literary adaptations of this period: a digest of narrative highlights, each presented in a single-shot scene – here, just twelve3 – with each scene preceded by an explanatory intertitle. Hearkening back to the tableau construction of early film adaptations like Edwin S. Porter’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903), this storytelling

3 Two of these scenes have brief inserts: the fifth, punctuated by a newspaper insert, and the last, by a letter. If we then count these two scenes as consisting of three shots – the master shot, the insert, and the return to the master – the total number of shots in the film is sixteen.

approach survived in the post-attractions era primarily in films tied to theatre – as here – even through the resulting narrative compression often came at the risk of incomprehensibility. Ibsen’s relative unfamiliarity on American soil seems, in consequence, to have made the Thanhouser film a frustrating viewing experience – at least to judge from the Moving Picture World critic who described the film as “extremely hard to understand” (1911a). Yet for viewers who may have been flummoxed by the story, the Thanhouser version nonetheless offered a kind of ersatz fidelity to Ibsen’s double stage: fully half of the film’s scenes are set in the Bernicks’ drawing room, whose windows and doors permit a staging of action that – as per the play and unlike Triangle’s version – extends into the depth of exterior space (Fig. 4). What makes this set of some interest is the way it thereby bridges two principles of staging derived from early film. As David Bordwell has noted, one of the most striking features of early cinema is the divide between flat interior spaces – for which action would typically be framed in straight-on views and actors arranged on a kind of “clothesline” principle – and deep exteriors, with action staged recessively into the background of the shot (1997, 169). In emulating Ibsen’s dramaturgy, the Bernicks’ drawing room set enables an alternation between both principles: when open, the doorway and window allow for an interplay in depth between foreground and background planes of action (e.g. Fig. 4a, showing the return of Johan to the home of the unsuspecting Bernick, seated foreground left), while doorway closed produces a more planimetric staging (e.g. Fig. 4b, showing Bernick’s discovery of his son Olaf’s disappearance). Still, there remains a paradox. If, in the Ibsen original, the space of the double stage gives material form to the public exposure that ends the play, there is no such conclusion in the Thanhouser adaptation. In place of Bernick’s confession before a mass gathering of citizens outside his drawing room windows, the Thanhouser version has Bernick acknowledge his misdeeds before a small group of just five or six people within the room, whose windows furthermore remain dark. The film evokes the pictorial effect of the double stage but does not ultimately link it to the final situation of mass public exposure. The

Figs. 4a–b. The drawing room set of Thanhouser’s Pillars of Society (1911), with window and doorway open (a) and closed (b). Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum and Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc.

Triangle version meanwhile reverses this. The film retains the culminating scene of exposure but separates it from the space of the drawing room: instead, in Walsh’s version, Bernick addresses the crowds from an exterior balcony that is accessed through – but cannot be seen from – the drawing room set. A comparison of the Thanhouser and Triangle adaptations of Ibsen’s play thus yields a curious chiasmus of missed connections vis-à-vis the original play’s dramaturgy: on the one hand, a 1911 version that retains the fishbowl set but does not really activate it in relation to Ibsen’s drama of public exposure; on the other, a 1915/1916 version that keeps that drama but doesn’t bother to replicate the material setting of the double stage. It is as though, in each case, the spatial terms of Ibsen’s dramaturgy have been filtered solely in terms of their capacity to accommodate available norms of film style: to the extent – but only to the extent – to which Ibsen’s double stage aligned with the tableau-like storytelling of the “quality” film, as in the Thanhouser version, then a kind of fidelity was possible; but when tendencies in film style pointed away from Ibsen’s dramaturgy, as was decisively so by the time of the Triangle film, then formal fidelity simply ceased to register.

“A medium which should not be sneered at”: Film Adaptation as Cultural Democratisation But here’s the rub: nobody at the time seems to have cared about any of this, at least not those writing in the trade press. Actually, nobody there really noticed – or rather, only one did, Moving Picture World’s Louis Reeves Harrison, who observed obliquely of the Triangle version that “no attempt has been made to profit from the methods [Ibsen] used” and that the conventions of screen storytelling would require “radical modification” to accommodate those methods (1916c, 1804). This is not to say that there was no acknowledgment of the formal challenges that Ibsen represented; we have seen that there was, in the writings of Lindsay and Münsterberg, both of whom presumed that cinema’s silence mitigated against the “subtler shades of motives” of Ibsenian drama. There was also a critical commonplace differentiating cinema as a medium of action from Ibsen’s “plays of thought” (Eng-

lund 1913, 14; see also Sandberg in this volume).4 What remains odd, however, is how little these medium-specific concerns – silence vs speech, action vs thought, even cinematic vs theatrical space – were addressed in the industry’s trade discourse on individual Ibsen adaptations, which mobilised very different standards of evaluation. If we want to ascertain the full measure of the Ibsen “problem” for transitional-era American cinema, we will need to attend to the investments shaping those discussions, too. To return to the film at hand: Triangle’s investment, in this respect, was clear. Aitken’s company sought to appropriate cinematic mass culture to an Arnoldian agenda that would transmit genteel aesthetic standards across class divisions. But this, it should be noted, entailed complications whenever adaptation was concerned, generating an ambiguity over the exact criteria by which any adaptation was to be evaluated. Granted the Arnoldian formula (“to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere”), should, then, an adaptation be assessed with respect to its fidelity to the aesthetic virtues that made the original “the best” in the first place? Or with a view to cultural accessibility and democratisation (to the goal of making it “current everywhere”)? In the case of Ibsen, the general perception that the playwright’s dramaturgy lay outside cinema’s reach – that formal fidelity was, in a strict sense, not really possible – seems to have provoked the industry’s defenders to favour adaptation techniques that instead stressed the latter goal of familiarisation of a straightforwardly authorial and narrative kind (that is, acquainting audiences with the name of Ibsen and the stories of his plays).

4 The earliest instance of this commonplace that I am aware of is Clayton Hamilton’s 1911 Motography essay “The Art of the Moving-Picture Play” (50). As Hamilton claims therein, “The only type of drama which is absolutely unavailable for the kinetoscope is that in which the element of action is entirely subordinated to the element of character”, citing “some of the social dramas of Ibsen” as examples. Other essays in the trade press posit the same distinction – the representation of action vs that of thought or character – but are more optimistic about cinema’s capacities to encompass the latter. See, for example, Englund 1913, as well as critic Louis Reeves Harrison’s numerous references to Ibsen discussed earlier.

We see this move occurring in real time in a fascinating 1915 essay “Don’t Sneer at the Screen” by critic W. Stephen Bush. Taking Morosco’s earlier adaptation of Peer Gynt as his point of departure (see Rees in this volume), Bush begins the essay by chastising a “highbrow wiseacre” whom he recently overheard “pour[ing] the vials of his sarcasms” upon the film (“‘Very little left of Ibsen,’ he says”). What the “haughty eye” of the highbrow custodian fails to see, however, is the value of such films in bringing culture to “the great masses who never had … an academic training”. As Bush explains:

“Peer Gynt,” before it was filmed, reposed on the shelves of the libraries. All of its profound wisdom and philosophy, all its witchery, all its poetic beauty, all its passionate preaching of love and truth was shut up between two covers of pasteboard. […] The treasures of the world’s literature are not merely for the chosen few. Time was when a manuscript was the precious possession of one man or one family or one little group of men. Then came printing and the book was read by thousands where the manuscript never passed out of one narrow circle. The screen makes the feast of knowledge even more general. Everybody is invited, everybody is amused and everybody learns something. A medium which reveals and visualizes for the masses that which otherwise would be merely the scholar’s delight should not be sneered at – least of all by a real scholar. (1915, 231)

Adaptation, in the context of cinematic uplift, thus came to be defended as adaptation in the service of accessibility, with fidelity as an ancillary issue. The same held for critical responses to Walsh’s Pillars of Society the following year. The Triangle film may not have been what cinema’s advocates had hoped for – most acknowledged that the film lost the play’s “biting satire” – but this deficit was secondary to near unanimous approbation of the film as a vehicle of high cultural diffusion (Motion Picture Magazine, 1916). “[A] highly artistic addition to a class of production intended to familiarize the lowly with great examples of leading dramatists” was Louis Reeves Harrison’s previously quoted opinion (1916b). In fact, the very qualities of Triangle’s adaptation that, from a formalist perspective, did most to violate Ibsen’s artistry – e.g. the folding out of the backstory – were exactly those that, from the

viewpoint of accessibility, received plaudits. One critic observed that the film’s success as mass entertainment was “due to its excellent [plot] construction”, praising the film’s narrative clarity for ensuring a “cosmopolitan” – that is, cross-class – appeal (Milne 1916, 944). One needs, in other words, to reckon with a situation in which the specificity problem identified by Münsterberg and others, so far from being a last word, was only one term in a dialectic that negotiated formal fidelity against accessibility as duelling frameworks for the evaluation of cinematic adaptation. But at this point, the Ibsen “problem” creeps in once more, only now on the other side of the dialectic, too, for it is difficult to think of a playwright who was less suited to the kind of democratising agenda that Triangle claimed for itself. As historian Joan Rubin has noted, Matthew Arnold’s prescription of the “best” tended to translate “into a stress on the classics”, familiarity with which, he believed, would extend an atmosphere of “sweetness and light” across the classes (1985, 785). But none of this obviously applied to Ibsen, whose recent admission to the portals of high culture in no way secured consensus on his moral appropriateness for the masses. Thus, alongside those who perceived in Ibsen a prestige from which cinema might prosper, there were those who continued to view him as a “sensational pessimist” whose work was, at best, “problematic to the masses” and, at worst, a “sin against decency” that should “forever be banished from the studio of the filmmaker” (Moving Picture World, 1911b; Moving Picture News, 1911b; Moving Picture World, 1911c). True, some Ibsen opponents found that their antipathy abated as their familiarity grew, the most prominent in film circles being W. Stephen Bush himself, whose aforementioned 1915 defence of filmed Ibsen reversed an earlier essay in which he had registered “emphatic dissent from the philosophy of Ibsen” and vowed to “recoil with the proverbial horror from the thought of trying to film such plays as ‘The Pillars of Society’ and ‘The Ghosts’ [sic]” (1911, 705). But for others, exposure to Ibsen adaptations only intensified their opposition, such as the Illinois Congress of Mothers, who, a few months after the Triangle film’s release, wrote the Chicago Examiner to argue for Ibsen’s exclusion from projects of cinematic uplift,

complaining that the various Ibsen films of the period had exposed America’s children to “almost every unconventionality known to society” (as cited in Moving Picture World, 1917). In facilitating Ibsen’s mass accessibility, Triangle’s film evidently did little to assuage ongoing reservations regarding his mass acceptability. As Eirik Frisvold Hanssen has observed, “Ibsen may have been considered high art, but he was also a highly controversial author” (2017, 170). All that remains to be added is that Ibsen thus symptomatised a tension in the very conception of aesthetic value during this period. Writing decades later, in his pathbreaking sociological study, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu would reflect on the split dividing “bourgeois” fractions of the dominant taste culture (“who expect their artists … to provide emblems of distinction”) from “intellectual” fractions (who “expect rather from the artist a symbolic challenging of social reality”) (1984, 293). But that fault line was already there in the context of Ibsen’s turn-of-the-century American reception, which had begun to fracture between an older, genteel conception of art as morally edifying cultural tradition (“the best that has been thought and known”) versus an incipiently modernist conception, of which Ibsen was a vanguard figure, that played havoc with the ethical standards enshrined in that tradition. It was as though Triangle’s filmmakers were trying to claim Ibsen as part of an Arnoldian “best” of which his work was, in a certain sense, the negation.

Our conclusion, then, will be a simple one: the Ibsen paradox originated at the crossroads of two competing definitions of adaptation informed by then-current debates about cinema as both art and mass culture. Ibsen’s “adaptability” was compromised by a two-fold exclusion, both the aesthetic “could not” raised by the earliest medium specificity theorists and also, supervening upon this, an ethical “should not” emerging from debates surrounding the cultural politics of cinema as a mass medium. There was, in the end, precisely nothing fortuitous about the timing of Pillars of Society’s release. But the final

untimeliness for my argument is this: Triangle was, by this point, already tottering on the brink of financial ruin, having attracted neither the “classes” nor the “masses” to its genteel mission (King 2005, 15–19). Indeed, within a few months of Pillars of Society’s release, all three points of the Triangle – Griffith, Ince, Sennett – would jump ship and sign with Paramount, a potent index of the failure of Aitken’s mission. Pillars of Society was thus one of the very last of Triangle’s films to be released under cover of Aitken’s founding agenda, and the brief spurt of Ibsen features of the mid-1910s of which it was part coincides with the very last time that a project of highbrow cultural diffusion like Triangle’s enjoyed any plausibility as a model for cinematic mass culture. As numerous historians have had cause to note, the agenda of American mass culture would be set not by Arnoldian imperatives but by the dynamics of a cross-class leisure economy that outmatched the ethical and aesthetic standards of the genteel classes. Aitken’s vision of film as cultural uplift was soon to give way to a celebrity culture whose standard bearers were fan magazines like Photoplay that promoted film as part of a modern consumer lifestyle. And so, in addition to the critical responses already mentioned, the film would also come to be remembered by some as a fusty monument to an outdated gentility that had set the parameters of Triangle’s failure. Appropriately enough, it was in the pages of Photoplay itself that the film received its most negative assessment, for it was Photoplay’s lead critic, Julian Johnson, who gave the withering dismissal, earlier quoted, of the film’s “old-fashioned frocks and old-fashioned methods”, even going so far as to belittle the film’s production as “an occasion to regret” (1916a; 1916b). By “old-fashioned methods”, we can now plausibly hypothesise, Johnson meant to refer not to the film’s style – which was of a piece with emerging norms of continuity – but to its cultural politics. At least he knew that the future of cinematic mass culture lay elsewhere.

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