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On Wed 7th February our second half feature will be Carl Theodor Dreyer’s "The Bride of Glomdal" (1926).
The Bride of Glomdal immediately followed Dreyer’s 'Master of the House' (1925) and preceded his move to France, where his international reputation was made with 'The Passion of Joan of Arc' (1928).'
The feature is preceded by a collection of newly restored suffragette shorts & news reel items courtesy of Bob Geoghehan and a fiction short courtesy of David Wyatt.
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'The Bride of Glomdal' (1926)
'Tore takes over the rundown family farm. Applying his youthful energy, he intends to make it into a big farm like Glomgården on the other side of the river, where beautiful Berit loves. Tore falls in love with her, but her father has promised her to rich Gjermund. As her wedding to Gjermund draws near, Berit runs away and seeks refuge with Tore and his parents. She soon falls deathly ill but recovers, asking for, and getting, her father’s permission to marry Tore. Jealous Gjermund is determined to prevent their wedding, however, in a dramatic climactic scene playing out around the rushing river.' BIRGIT GRANHØJ
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'Among the highlights of the recent Pordenone Silent Film Festival were the examples of Norwegian cinema, perhaps most notably Carl Theodor Dreyer’s adaptation of a novel by Jacob Breda Bull, The Bride of Glomdal (Glomdalsbruden).
To accommodate the theatre schedules of his actors, and to embellish what he believed to be the relatively slender plot threads of the original, Dreyer uncharacteristically shot more or less off-the-cuff, albeit with a prepared list of scenes, throughout the summer of 1925. The rural locations provide a beautiful setting for this story of Tore, a young farmer, who is determined to build up his family’s dilapidated farm and win the hand of lovely neighbour Berit, who is promised in marriage to another.' GM
Accompanied on the piano by John Sweeney
A programme of silent shorts precedes the main film.
Anyone interested in silent film should visit the website for more info.
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NOTES FROM THE 36TH PORDENONE FILM FESTIVAL:
Just before Dreyer went to France to become famous in world film
history with La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc he made
The Bride of Glomdal for the Norwegian-Swedish company Victoria-Film in
Norway in the summer of 1925. The film is based on a novel of
the same title by Norwegian author Jacob Breda Bull (1853-1930),
and is a classic example of the Norwegian Village film, in which
contemporary love stories take place in sunny Norwegian villages.
Since the actors only had the summer off from their respective theatre contracts, Dreyer for the first and last time in his career
decided to be looser in the preparations for a film – the shooting
was virtually improvised from day to day, without a script. A list
of individual scenes was made, though, including some narrative
elements from Bull’s novel 'Eline Vangen', since Dreyer felt that the
novel Glomdalsbruden didn’t contain enough story elements.
Dreyer is loyal to Bull’s novels in terms of narrative elements and
thematic content. Thematically both novels contain a central social
criticism of parents arranging the marriage of their children, and
in both plots the clergy steps in and restores moral justice.
Dreyer adopts this view of the basic conflict in Bull’s novels – thus it is the
only time where the clergy becomes the moral voice in a Dreyer
film. Dreyer’s representation of the characters to some extent
departs from Bull, especially in his depiction of Berit and Gjermund.
In the film, Berit is more rebellious against her father’s decision to
marry her to Gjermund. In the scene in which the marriage is being
arranged, she declares: “They are in there negotiating as if I were a
piece of cattle!” This line is not in Bull’s original novel. The depiction
of Gjermund is perhaps the best example showing that Dreyer’s
humanism is more inclusive than Bull’s. In Bull’s story, Gjermund is
described in an unequivocally negative manner, while in Dreyer’s film
he too is seen as a victim of the old men’s bargaining.
In many descriptions of The Bride of Glomdal it is assumed that
the film is relatively complete, but at the premiere in Oslo the film’s
length was 2525 metres, whereas the surviving material is only 1250
metres. The surviving version, though coherent and logical, differs
considerably from what appears in the original Norwegian title list
Probably a re-editing took place around the time of the Danish
premiere on 15 April 1926. By comparing some production stills
from an illustrated version of the novel with the Norwegian title list,
and the Norwegian and Danish printed film programmes, it becomes
clear that much footage is missing, especially the sequences from
'Eline Vangen' giving a more nuanced depiction of Thore and his
family. The most important loss is a longer sequence, in which Berit
stays with Thore’s family after falling from a horse. During her stay
we witness several erotic flirtations and Thore’s desperate drinking
binges, which lead to confrontations with his father. In addition,
several scenes seem to have been longer, with more dialogue (the
Norwegian title list contains 30% more intertitles than the Danish).
A number of lyrical nature sequences were probably also cut. Dreyer
himself stated, “I have realized that the poor peasant’s son in the
film is depicted in rough surroundings, whereas the rich farmer’s
daughter is surrounded by a gentler nature.”
This use of nature as a social contrast (a motif that also appears in
Synnöve Solbakken) is not very obvious in the existing film, possibly because of its shortening after the premiere.
It is impossible to get a complete picture of the film as it looked at
the premiere in Oslo. However, the surviving version of
The Bride of Glomdal does not change the overall impression, that the film
is an interesting and charming parenthesis in Dreyer’s
oeuvre. In which, true to his nature, he criticizes the oppression of women and
promotes a classical conciliatory humanism.
The restoration of
The Bride of Glomdal was conducted by the Danish Film Institute in 2009, supervised by Thomas Christensen. The digital
transfer was done from a new preservation master struck from a
negative held at the Norwegian National Library. New combined Danish/ English intertitles were produced to replace the German flash-titles in
the preservation materials. The DCP has been transferred at 17 frames
per second, giving the restored version a running time of just under 75
minutes. – Morten Egholm
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'The Bride of Glomdal'
CAST
Einar Sissener Tore Braaten
Tove Tellback Berit Glomgaarden
Stub Wiberg Ola Glomgaarden
Harald Stormoen Jakob Braaten
Alfhild Stormoen Kari Braaten, hans hustru
Oscar Larsen Berger Haugsett
Einar Tveito Gjermund Haugsett, hans sønn
Rasmus Rasmussen Presten
Sofie Reimers Prestefruen
Julie Lampe Gammel-Guri
Henny Skjønberg Hushjelp i prestegården
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Doors open - 6.30pm.
Films start - 7.30pm.
Intermission - 8.30pm
Main feature - 8.45pm
We aim to finish our events by 10.15pm.
Admission £5 on the door.
THESE TIMES ARE VERY APPROXIMATE AND VARY DEPENDING ON FILM SPEEDS AND PROGRAMMING FROM WEEK TO WEEK.
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