Had Ibsen lived today, he would have been a film man, said Liv Ullmann in an interview in 1978, in connection with the television production of The Lady from the Sea (directed by Per Bronken). The then theatre critic Erik Pierstoff put it in somewhat more general terms in the same year (Film & Kino, No. 1, 1978): "Ibsen could well have been a film man (...). He was of course also a man of great talent when it comes to the visual element ... Obviously Ibsen as a film man is a hypothetical construct, but it cannot be denied that a great deal in his texts - or, to put it more precisely, the thematics of his later plays - calls out, as it were, for visualisation. And that makes it tempting to wonder how he might perhaps have worked as a film-maker".
In the same issue the writer Karsten Alnæs said: "But Ibsen is far from being a film man. The majority of Ibsen films are bad or lacking in interest, and only of one Ibsen film can we say with certainty that it has made film history" - with reference to Victor Sjöström`s film version of "Terje Vigen" (1916), which heralded the golden age of the Swedish silent film (Elisabeth Liljendahl: Stumfilmen i Sverige, Proprius 1975).
Twenty years later, during the seminar "Ibsen on Screen", under the auspices of among others the Centre for Ibsen Studies and the Norwegian Film Institute (September 1998) the Director of the Ibsen Centre, Astrid Sæther, made the same observation: "Few of the screen adaptations of Ibsen`s works have won a place in the history of the cinema (with the exception of Terje Vigen) (...). Ibsen`s works are full of good stories. Why has nobody succeeded in creating artistically good films out of these in the same way as people have succeeded with the works of Shakespeare?"
With the above as a back-cloth, the Norwegian Film Institute has revised the third edition of the Film Institute`s filmography of screen adaptations of Ibsen`s works, and this is the first web version, produced in close co-operation with the ibsen.net project at the Centre for Ibsen Studies.
As the quotation above confirms, only a limited number of filmed works are in existence. Whether this is because, as Alnæs also claims in his article - "Most important film directors have sensibly enough steered clear of Henrik Ibsen. They have understood that his imaginary and symbolic world belonged to the stage and theatre to a far higher degree than most other works of fiction" - or whether there are other reasons why so few works have been filmed, is something about which we shall not speculate. We have not undertaken any evaluation of existing films, that is something we leave to history.
So far 56 titles have been registered. It is worth noting that A Doll`s House has been filmed 12 times, over a time span from 1911 (USA) to 1993 (Iran). The international importance of A Doll`s House is also reflected in the fact that this drama has now been registered in UNESCO`s list of the world`s cultural heritage (Memory of the World) following nomination by the Norwegian UNESCO Commission.
Three continents are covered, Ibsen has been filmed in Europe, Asia and North and South America. Only Africa has no registered production in this filmography. It is possible that things will change as we approach the jubilee edition in 2006; we shall keep hunting in the international film archives!
We have not included television productions. Had these been included, this filmography would have been of a totally different size; not least we should have had a solid contribution from our own television producers.
This filmography is a reference work, not a catalogue of existing films. A number of the films have probably been lost for ever, not all of them are available in complete editions, and others will not be obtainable. The information about the different titles will also be more or less complete, depending on the amount of information we have been able to obtain ourselves. Our intention has been to produce as complete a survey as possible of screen versions of Ibsen`s works, and as such we hope that it may be both enjoyable and useful.
Enquiries about the individual films should be addressed to museum@nfi.no.
Filmography on ibsen.net
Vigdis Lian, Director of the Norwegian Film Institute, Oslo, January 2002 (updated July 2005)