Unrivaled among silent-film adaptations of Charles Dickens novels are the four epic Danish features for Nordisk Films by its leading director, A.W. Sandberg: Our Mutual Friend (1921), Great Expectations (1922), David Copperfield (1922), and Little Dorrit (1923). The most visually spectacular is Our Mutual Friend, from Dickens’s last completed novel (1864-65), combining a comic satire about greed with a dark mystery that opens as a corpse floats in the Thames. Shot in 1918—the delayed release apparently due to disputes between Sandberg and Nordisk over the film’s ambition and length—its two parts survive only with significant missing footage in the second half, but it still runs almost two-and-a-half hours. Available for the first time with English subtitles that draw on Dickens’s phrasing and with new text screens to fill in missing story information, the forgotten film proves to be one of the great silent literary adaptations.
Tag: DENMARK
Combining documentary authenticity with subtle fantasy, Danish directors Stefan Fjeldmark and Karsten Kiilerich explore children’s attitudes and vague conceptions about death.
Doctor Glas is told in the form of a journal. The main character is Dr. Glas, a physician. The antagonist is Reverend Gregorius, a morally corrupt clergyman. Gregorius’ beautiful young wife confides in Dr. Glas that her sex life is making her miserable and asks for his help. Glas, in love with her, agrees to help even though she already has another adulterous lover. He attempts to intervene, but the Reverend refuses to give up his “marital rights”- she must have sex with him whether she likes it or not (at the time, a wife was legally the property of her husband, and subsequently had no right to say no). So, in order to make his love happy, he begins to plot her husband’s murder.
Based on Nobel Prize-winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel, this is the story of life as a political prisoner behind the walls of a Stalinist labor camp.
In his fourth feature, Århus loyalist Nils Malmros continues his reminiscing fiction portryals of school days in the 1950s. You follow a class during its final years of grade school. The kids are teenagers, clannish, clownish, sweet and vicious, struggling to make sense of their physical and mental growing pains. The film was shot over two years: the cast literally grew up along with the action.
Experimental ballet film with choreography by Eske Holm. Lighting and trick shots emphasize and expand body movements.
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Stig is 15 years old and lives in neutral Sweden while the rest of the world is swept up in World War II. Like many other boys in his school, he’s in love with biology teacher Viola, but, unlike other boys, he secretly starts seeing her. Viola confesses to Stig that he provides her with much-needed comfort since her marriage to Kjell, a drunk, is falling apart. Their relationship grows complicated when Kjell discovers their affair.