Satiation For Scandinavian Film Fans

Late last month, New Yorker Video released a DVD edition of Hunger, Henning Carlsen’s film adaptation of the classic novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. I’ve long been curious about this film because its source material seems so difficult to adapt. Hamsun’s landmark 1890 novel––about a starving writer who wanders the streets of Kristiania (Oslo) in a delirious, ravaged state––is a radically subjective work whose action occurs largely within the mind of its irrational hero. I tracked down a copy of the film and discovered that Carlsen does a serviceable job of tackling the book’s first-person challenges, but it’s the lead performances, set pieces, and photography that make the work exceptional.

From the opening minutes of the film, which capture the late 19th-century Norwegian city of Kristiania in stark, beautifully composed black-and-white, it is difficult not to think of the Ingmar Bergman features lensed by Sven Nykvist. Carlsen tells an amusing anecdote during an interview on the DVD about how Bergman rather cleverly tempted the director’s initial choice for lead actor away from the production, forcing Carlsen to go with the relatively unknown Per Oscarsson. The casting decision was a blessing in disguise––Oscarsson would go on to win the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his performance––but it’s possible that Bergman acted because he felt the Danish director was encroaching on his tortured, existential turf.

Hamsun’s novel is about starvation, but it differs considerably from books by Dickens and Zola because of its indifference to social forces or political remedies. Hunger has been called the first truly “modern” novel because its primary interest is the interior life of its hero––an artist, a man who has willed himself apart from society. Carlsen’s camera is faithful to Hamsun’s vision in this particular sense. He offers glimpses of the divisions between the classes (particularly in one scene late in the film, in which a rooming house family is shown to be debased by poverty), but for the most part he focuses on the individual life of his obsessed protagonist––a man who wanders senselessly in circles, often forgoing food even in those rare instances when it’s given to him.

Where Carlsen’s film flounders, I think, is in translating the protagonist’s point-of-view to the screen. The director utilizes a series of dream sequences––overexposed daylight shots, like exaggerated versions of the famous nightmare in Wild Strawberries––to communicate the hero’s increasingly unreliable consciousness. By creating this division between the subjective world of the dream and the objective world of the film’s action, Carlsen oversimplifies Hamsun’s text, which filters everything we know about the character’s plight through his irrational point-of-view. Perhaps Carlsen was cribbing from the wrong Bergman film; Persona (released, like Hunger, in 1966) is much slyer about the way that it plays with subjectivity and perceptive ambiguity.

Other elements of Carlsen’s film are, however, nearly perfect. Oscarsson, with his gaunt, sallow face, is the perfect embodiment of the emaciated outsider protagonist. As Paul Auster warns in a filmed interview on the DVD, if you watch the film before reading the book, Oscarsson’s image will likely be seared in your mind as you try to picture Hamsun’s hero. Other aspects of the film work beautifully to mimic the circular structure of Hamsun’s masterpiece; reused dialogue, reoccurring visual motifs, and the haunting, repetitious score by the great Krzysztof Komeda all serve to illustrate the hero’s aimless wanderings.

Certainly the film is a must-see for those, like myself, who love the book and have wondered how it could ever be adapted. But I’m similarly confident that Bergman fans with beat-up VHS dubs of the director’s brooding dramas will find much to appreciate.

- Nathan Hogan