Although it was written before Undset’s open entry into the Roman Catholic Church
in 1924, the trilogy has often been read as an expression of her commitment of Roman
Catholic religious values, values that she frequently espoused in print in the years
following. A number of critics of the trilogy have found the expression of religious
values in the novels compelling. For example, Andrew Lytle believes that Kristin and
Erlend (and even Brother Edvin) are all compounds of Christian and heathen, and that
insofar as they are heathen they are confused about sin. Erlend and Kristin confuse
sin with the desire for love (Lytle 20). A similarly confessional approach to the
novel is taken by A. H. Wisnes, who feels
that it is only in the third volume, when Kristin becomes a widow, that she can turn
from her egocentric self to God (131). Wisnes sees God working behind the scenes
throughout the action. God “had held her fast in His service, and a secret mark had
been set on her” (132).
On the other hand, there has also been some criticism of Undset’s depiction of medieval
Norwegian Catholicism. As long ago as 1927, just as Undset finished her tetralogy Olav Audunsson (and the year before she received the Nobel Prize), Edvard Bull had written that
Kristin is much more of a contemporary Protestant girl than a medieval Catholic one.
Olav Solberg quotes Bull as saying that despite Undset’s strong Catholic position,
Kristin is driven by a puritanical view of life (105). Bull indeed claims that Undset’s
emphasis on self-analysis is “u-middelalderske” [unmedieval] and thus a flaw in her
character descriptions (Rieber-Mohn 37). Certain critics—for example, Helge Rønning—follow
Edvard Bull, insisting that Undset’s
historical novels are “i bunn og grunn ahistorisk” [ahistorical through and through]
(55), and he claims that Undset subscribes to an unchanging view of human nature.
However,
such a view only puts to the side the possibility that the 1320s and 1920s—or 1990s—might
have something in common due to specific parallel historical events, events that lead
to an era of self-reflection or of decadence, however one is inclined to see it .
Whether she achieved her goals or not, Undset’s desire was to recapture a time period
more than to make the past serve as a disguised backdrop for current issues. For example,
in “Kristendom og kjønnsmoral II” [Christianity and Sexual Morality II], an essay
from her American exile, Undset maintains that one of the beneficial social
revolutions brought to Norway through conversion to Christianity was consensual marriage
(51). Often in her essays, such as “Hedenskap og kristendom i islandsk middelalder”
[Heathendom and Christianity in the Icelandic Middle Ages] she states that the Catholic
Middle Ages in Norway were preferable to the earlier
Viking Age (135-37). Similarly, in such essays as “The Coming of Christianity to
Norway” in Saga of Saints (1934), she praises the Catholic Middle Ages in Norway in contrast to the Viking
past and
the Lutheran future. She states that it is a misconception to think that paganism
is more accepting of the joy of life than is Christianity, since we “easily forget
that real pagan joy in life was almost always strongly tinged with pessimism.” In
contrast, Christianity is anti-pessimistic and will “make no concessions to man’s
longing for the rapture of death and the frenzy of ruin” (1934 33). As she states
pithily in her untranslated 1921 essay, Om folkeviser [Concerning Folksongs], “Intet land blev hårdere herjet av reformationen end Norge”
(175). That is, no country was more hurt by the Reformation than Norway.
Undset considered the Nazi period as a return to the worst barbarism of the pagan
Viking Age, a position she expresses in the autobiographical entry she wrote for Twentieth-Century Authors. Undset states, “As children we were taught to be proud of our Viking forefathers.
Of course nobody
then dreamed that Europe was ever to see a resurrection of the Vikings’ way, conquering
weaker peoples and ruling by terror, violence, and rapacity” (1942 1433). In this
essay, as elsewhere, Catholicism is seen as the remedy for contemporary
ills.
Undset’s writings dealing with Catholicism in the fourteenth century also treat some
of the formidable women of the period. In her essay on Margery Kempe’s autobiography
from Men, Women, and Places, written shortly after Kempe’s life story was found and edited in the mid-1930s,
Undset states that although she herself feels that Kempe was an hysteric, she admires
Kempe’s resistance to her male confessors’ interpretation of her life. She feels that
Kempe “fought bravely against her sins and frailties as far as she was aware of them
herself” (1969 85). Although Undset stressed the importance of women in history, with
her dogmatic version
of Roman Catholicism, she cannot be considered to be in the mainstream of feminism.
In her adaptation Ullmann has chosen to present Kristin less as an embodiment of the
Catholic values that saints’ lives are meant to teach than as the kind of heroine
who appeals to a wider Christian and humanist audience for whom sexual guilt is probably
less important than are the problems between parents and children. Predictably she
makes changes to both the background she evokes and the characterizations in the film.
In terms of the liturgical background, Ullmann deletes almost all the long references
to the saints found in the novel. We do not even know that the big festivities where
Erlend dances with Kristin are for Saint Margaret’s Day. Saints Didymus, Nikolaus,
Olaf, and Thomas, who are all mentioned significantly in the novel, are gone. In addition,
whereas Undset had grounded the novel’s chronology in the feast days of the Church
to indicate the passing of time, Ullmann does not. But these changes are minor in
comparison to those to which I will now turn.
Despite its widespread popularity in Norway, where it was seen by a large proportion
of the population, Liv Ullmann’s Kristin Lavransdatter (1995) has provoked relatively little analysis. Although the production of the film
was the subject of much interest and controversy, once released it met mixed reviews. Perhaps many commentators have been left too unmoved by the film to find it worth
analysis. Even Ullmann’s biographers have shown little interest in the film, confining
their discussions of it to a few sketchy production details. Perhaps film scholars have felt that there is little to say about the film that
has not already been said in the debate about the depiction of the Middle Ages in
Undset’s historical novels themselves. Not surprisingly, the only two scholarly articles partially devoted to analyzing
the film are ones that address the difficulty of presenting the Middle Ages on film.
Gunnar Iversen (2000) and Ellen Rees (2003) both discuss Kristin Lavransdatter in conjunction with Anja Breien and Ola Solum’s film Trollsyn [Second Sight] (1994). They refer back to two earlier theoretical discussions of historical accuracy,
Umberto
Eco’s “The Return of the Middle Ages” in Travels in Hyperreality (1986) and Arthur Lindley’s article, “The Ahistoricism of Medieval Film” (1998).
Whereas Eco finds all views of the Middle Ages a projection of our present concerns
and does not bemoan this process, Lindley states, “Where films of the more recent
past habitually construct their subjects as existing
in linear and causative relationship to the present, films of the medieval period
present their matere in an analogical relationship: as type or anti-type of the current
circumstances” (4). Iversen is more sympathetic to Eco than he is to Lindley and he
feels that the two
recent Norwegian films are “historical romances” that can help us think about “our
relationship to the past” (21). Rees postulates specific parallels between the Norway
of Kristin Lavransdatter and Liv Ullmann’s world, pointing out Norwegian fears of being swallowed up in a
European Union (cf. earlier loss of Norwegian freedom to Denmark), concern about alleged
satanists burning churches (as in Fantoft on 6 June 1992), and a revival of veneration
for Saint Olav (399, 413, 404). Though these studies are valuable, they do not, from
my point of view, get to the
heart of the film; it is time for a new analysis, one that pays more attention to
how Ullmann approached her source novel.
Before turning to the film itself, however, it is important to note that it exists
in multiple versions of different lengths. Kristin Lavransdatter exists in three versions: the 1995 international commercial release at 144 minutes
(on videotape in 1998), the director’s-cut version at 180 minutes (on videotape in 1999), and a 189-minute
version which is the same length as the Swedish-release print (on DVD in 2004). The
existence of different versions complicates discussion of the film. The Wreath, the first novel of the trilogy, is itself divided into three parts of approximately
equal length. Though the film is divided similarly, the two sections of the film
that correspond to the first two parts of the novel—“Jørundgård” and “The Wreath”—are
shortened in the commercially released version whereas the third part (“Lavrans Bjørgulfssøn”)
is substantially the same length in the 144 and 180-minute versions of the film
(i.e. 72 minutes).
In the shorter, commercial version, through the excision of all of King Håkon’s Christmas
party we lose the one background scene with an obvious historical marker. This version
contains no reference to a monarch, and in this film version it is never established
(as in the director’s cut) that the action of the film takes place in the first quarter
of the fourteenth century (1309-1321). For Undset such determinations were important
since the Black Death later in the fourteenth century provided an impetus for the
revival of pagan practices.
In the film Kristin appears less involved in religion than she is in the novel, as
when we see her at mass on Saint Margaret’s Day at Aker Church. She has little interest
in the service, looking around and happening to see Erlend. For Undset, she has indeed
a reason to be distracted enough to look for him and to be drawn to him, which the
film never establishes—Erlend has just rescued her from German robbers/sexual harassers.
She feels both gratitude toward this knight and curiosity about him. The shorter
version of the film also deemphasizes the symbolic crucifix which Kristin drops when
she goes off with Erlend on Saint Margaret’s Day, and which he returns to her at the
seashore, since Ullmann presents the scene in long shot and we cannot actually see
the crucifix.
In terms of characterization, even the director’s cut deemphasizes some of the religious
elements in the novel relating both to false accusations against Kristin and to her
actual sins. For example, the scene at the indoor funeral service of her girlhood
boyfriend Arne stops when Kristin faints, and we do not see her accused of being a
slut by Arne’s mother. Thus we do not get a glimpse of the psychic pain that drives
her to get away from home, causing her to enter a convent. Later, in the novel, but
not in the film, Kristin has fears about pregnancy. First, she feared that she was
pregnant, and it turned out that she was mistaken. Later when she really is pregnant
by Erlend at the time of her marriage, she wonders how her father will feel about
this sin. Although the first volume of the trilogy, The Wreath, ends with Kristin’s wedding to Erlend, the fact that she has not revealed to her
father Lavrans that she has had sexual intimacy with Erlend and is expecting a child
leaves the reader with the sense that the story is not yet complete, as Kristin must
continue her search for God. Ullmann omits Kristin’s fears of the exposure of her
pregnancy to give a greater sense of closure to Kristin’s story. Furthermore in the
film, as compared to the novel, she is not overcome with guilt for her part in provoking
the death of Eline, Erlend’s former lover, when she said that either Eline must drink
her own poison or she herself would drink it, since she would brook no rival for Erlend’s
love.
The shorter film also deletes Brynhild Fluga as a named character, and as a consequence
further emphasis on sin is lost. In the shorter version, we see Erlend’s servant Ulv
laugh at Kristin for some mysterious reason when he takes her through the snow to
Erlend. However, in the longer version, he has just laughed at Kristin for innocently
offering money to Brynhild, as she does not realize that Brynhild runs a bawdy tavern
used for assignations.
The presentation of Brother Edvin in the film does not reveal his distance from the
secular clergy and his status as a wandering Franciscan. Nor do we see that he is
persona non grata in Nonnesæter. The first scene in which Kristin meets Brother Edvin is changed from
the town of Hamar in her local bishopric to Nidaros (Trondheim), presumably to call
attention to the splendid architecture of the world’s northernmost Gothic cathedral
and to create a graphic match to the later scene when Erlend goes there in penitence.
The second of Kristin’s four meetings with Edvin takes place in the film at Christiania
(Oslo) rather than at her home, as in the novel. Thus the film locates Brother Edvin
in Nidaros and the capital, and it gives no sense of the friar’s forced wanderings
because of his outsider status.
Ullmann’s convent scenes with Kristin and her friends stress more than do Undset’s
the perils of arranged marriage and the problems of sexual repression. Kristin and
Ingeborg fantasize with their mutual friend Helga about being married, but then they
realize that they must stop the game so as not to upset Helga, who will be forced
to become a nun instead. We sympathize with Ingeborg when we see that her future husband,
who rides up to take her away, is a frighteningly decrepit old man. To develop Helga
as a repressed character whose emotional problems are worse than those of the unrepressed
Kristin, Ullmann transfers the episode of hysteria in the convent at Nonnesæter from
a girl peripheral to the plot to Helga. Ullmann also beefs up Helga’s part by giving
us outdoor scenes of her praying. When Ullmann moves the first scene of sexual intercourse
from a barn on Kristin’s uncle’s property to the seashore, where Erlend and his friend
Ulf are playing chess while waiting for her, she has Helga accompany Kristin along
the seashore. Helga is upset by Kristin’s romantic dalliance on their trip to see
Brother Edvin, and she is repelled by Ulf’s rough advances to her.
Figuring prominently in the film is the troubled relationship between Kristin and
her mother Ragnhild, who has difficulty in showing love for her. Only when Kristin
gets married herself and feels she has made her own life can she forgive her mother
for her joyless approach to life. Conversely, only when Kristin marries Erlend can
Ragnhild let go of the trouble that her daughter has caused. The film dramatizes the need for parents to recognize the unanticipated directions
their children’s lives have taken and the need for children to accept the strangeness
of their parents’ marriage and the problems that parents face in being good role models
for them. Like many parents, Ragnhild and Lavrans appear mismatched emotionally, yet
they have raised a family and remained together.
The film makes the reconciliation of father and daughter a lyrical moment. Ullmann
makes Lavrans’ previously withheld acceptance of Kristin’s desire to marry the notorious
Erlend a very joyful moment—one far richer emotionally than logically. In an outdoor
winter scene, Lavrans, who has been criticizing Kristin, finally asks her what he
can do to help her. Suddenly it is spring, and she is romping through the woods with
Erlend while joyful music is heard in the background. Ullmann suggests that children
must be allowed to make their own choices and take the consequences.
Unlike Undset who shows Kristin and Erlend together, and then presents Ragnhild and
Lavrans, to end the novel, Ullmann joins the two pairs, to remind us that each new
generation of spouses will face the same familial problems. She has Kristin and Erlend
get up out of bed the next morning after her parents’ conversation and watch the older
couple disappear down the country road together. We hear non-diagetically the words
reprised from the parents’ conversation that they are not strangers to each other.
The film closes on Kristin’s face as she looks resigned and accepting of her parents.
The novel in contrast ends with Kristin waiting to face the fury of her father when
it becomes clear that she is already going to have a child.
Just as no issue is made of Kristin’s shame at the beginning of the released film,
there is no shame depicted at the end. However, in the director’s cut, a drunken Lavrans
on the wedding night reveals to Ragnhild that he has been able to tell from the lack
of modesty in Kristin’s eyes that she has already slept with Erlend. He is extremely
angry. In the director’s cut we have just seen the men and women get the bride and
groom ready for the wedding bed. After Kristin and Lavrans are left alone in their
chamber, the last scenes are similar. However, it is in part Lavrans’s realization
that prompts his climactic, reconciliatory discussion with his wife of their life
together. They must put an end to mutual recrimination and move forward.
Ullmann’s blending of the reconciliations scenes is an effective way to bring closure
to the plot, given the problem of filming The Wreath, a book without a strong dramatic ending because the story is to be continued. Ullmann
turns most of the film into a long flashback, with the first sequence occurring on
the morning of the day that eventually arrives at the end of the film. The most significant
difference in the editing of the two versions involves the beginning and ending of
the film on Kristin’s wedding day, and is related to what sin(s) Kristin does or does
not remember as she prepares for the wedding. Whereas in the novel, Undset suggests
that it is Kristin’s part in the death of Eline, the film attenuates her guilt; in
the commercial version images of misplaced guilt focus rather on her role in her little
sister’s crippling accident or her own seduction by Erlend. The director’s cut opens
with a close-up of Kristin, whose hair is being combed by Lady Aashild on the day
before her wedding to Erlend. Kristin expresses her sense of having betrayed her father,
who has been so good to her. Then she goes out and takes part with Erlend in the dance
before her wedding. She comes back inside to stand before a bucket full of water placed
beneath shelves of candles. Then in a beautiful shot in which the camera moves back
and tilts, we understand better what we have just seen. Kristin and Lady Aashild are
looking in the water where the candles are reflected.
At this point the director’s cut transitions into flashback mode, and the voice-over,
spoken by Frøydis Armand (see Haddal 74), tells us that it is in the 1300s before
the coming of the Black Death. We see seven-year-old
Kristin on the floor of her house on the day that she is going to go with her father
for the first time into the mountains to visit their summer dairy. The scene by the
large water basin is the key moment of the return of the repressed in the film, but
in strong contrast, in the novel, Kristin, who almost faints, never identifies what
is being repressed.
Hun skimtet sitt eget ansikt hvitt op fra vannet, det kom så nær hun så gullkronen
over det. Rundt om rørte sig så mange lyse og mørke skygger i speilet—det var noget
hun var like ved å minnes—så var det som hun skulde dåne bort--hun tok for sig om
karets rand. Da la fru Åshild sin hand på hennes og grov sine negler ned i holdet
så vondt at hun kom til seg ved det. (1995 231)
[She saw her own face rise up, white, from the water; it came so close that she could
see the golden crown above. So many light and dark shadows played all around her reflection—there
was something she was just about to remember—and suddenly she felt as if she would
faint away. She gripped the edge of the basin. Then Fru Aashild placed her hand on
top of hers and dug her nails so hard that Kristin came to her senses.] (2000 281)
Since the longer film does not suggest that there is something to be remembered,
it is closer in spirit to the novel. In contrast, the shorter version makes a whole
series of connections, a less successful strategy.
The shorter version dispenses with both the hair combing and the dance, before it
opens with the canted shot of the water basin. However, with the deletion of the first
scene we also lose Kristin’s feeling that she has betrayed her father. The voice-over
of the shorter version tells us that Kristin thinks she sees the image of the elf
maiden in the water basin, and then we are taken immediately to her experience of
looking into the water as a seven-year-old to see if she looks like her father. She
seems to see the elf maiden beckoning her. Then the voice-over says that Kristin thought
she heard her sister scream. Eight shots of Ulvhild being crushed by the falling log
are then inserted in the childhood scene by the water before Lavrans comes to Kristin’s
side and gives her the crucifix to put around her neck to calm her fears.
The voice-over in the commercial release tells us that Kristin confused the elderly
Lady Aashild with the elf maiden, when Aashild answered Ragnhild’s request to come
and save little Ulvhild. The elf maiden motif is a figure from the folk ballads which
Unset includes at least in part to stress the conflict in medieval Norway between
paganism and Christianity. Sherrill Harbison discusses the theme of the elf maiden,
who in Norwegian folklore is connected with “abduction and erotic abandonment” (2000b
x), and who is said to take young girls off to the mountains for an orgy with the
mountain
king. She points out that the elf maiden and Kristin’s name are both found in the
ballad about “Liti Kirsti.” Thus Kristin herself—and not just the society around her—is
presented with pagan
and Christian sides.
Ullmann seems to include the ballads less for religious symbolism than for the creation
of fokloric historical detail. She expands the use of the one ballad recited in the
course of the novel, the one at Saint Margaret’s fair. It is the ballad of Herr Oluf,
which is mentioned along with “Liti Kersti” by Undset in her essay, “Om folkeviser”
(1986 236-39). The music from it is used on two other occasions. In addition, another
ballad with
religious symbolism is sung by Aashild at the wedding party at the beginning of the
film, but it is not really possible to identify what the ballad means.
Even more striking than the diagetic adaptation of folk music is Ullmann’s non-diagetic
use of two pieces of Roman Catholic Church music by the contemporary Polish composer
Henryk Górecki, O Domina nostra and Beatus Vir. She fits them into a secular context related to human romantic love. O Domina Nostra: Meditations on Our Lady of Jasna Góra for soprano and organ (1982), in particular is used throughout the film to underline
the meetings of Kristin and her beloved Erlend. Finally, it is extended to the reconciling
conversation between Ragnhild and Lavrans. Given the placement of the music in the
film, it would not seem that Ullmann is using it to bring Marian devotion into the
action—though for those familiar with this piece of music, it may recall the importance
of Marian devotion in the fourteenth century.
The deemphasizing of religion and the attention given to family relations in Ullmann’s
film may at first seem to draw the story closer to the Icelandic family sagas that
captivated Undset from an early age. Undset went on to translate three of them into
modern Norwegian. However, Ullmann’s film does not as much move backward in the direction
of the sagas as forward in the direction of our own day. Ullmann made a film in which
a larger number of Christians both Catholic and Protestant (perhaps Undset would call
them nominal Christians) could see their own family problems reflected. Ullmann’s
diminishment of the importance of Kristin’s sinful act in helping to provoke Eline’s
death, something her parents never learn of in the novel, makes it easier to readjust
the story to one about the need for mutual forgiveness between parents and children.
Thus Ullmann takes the opposite view from Undset and tries to find in the past those
issues that make it most relevant to the present rather than stressing those characteristics
which make it most irretrievably past.
Should we consider Ullmann’s adaptation “faithful” to Undset’s The Wreath, given its shift in emphasis? Furthermore, is it successful on its own terms as a
film? I believe finally that Ullmann is faithful to Undset, as she does not violate
the overall sense of The Wreath. If she were to film the whole trilogy in the same rather secular manner, the adaptation
would not be faithful overall, for the author’s religious themes emerge more fully
in the later novels. Given the problem of filming an open-ended novel, she was successful
in general, although individual parts of the film—especially in its commercial version—seem
to me flawed because of continuity problems and loss of detail caused by editing used
to trim the film down to a marketable length.