Gatas Gynt is 2008 film adaptation of the fifth and final act of Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem, Peer Gynt, directed by Hallvard Bræin and featuring a cast is comprised entirely of homeless people from around the Oslo metropolitan area. The film’s content is divided between filmizations of scenes from Ibsen’s text and interviews with the actors. Both sections take place predominantly in exterior locations and amongst crumbling, urban mise-en-scene, an environment which Ellen Rees, in her 2014 book, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and the Production of Meaning, argues “associations with the transitory nature of homelessness” (Rees 2014, 128). Bræin’s use of transitory settings draw upon the larger theme of transition observed in and around the text of Peer Gynt. Rees argues that Peer Gynt speaks to the experience of living in times of cultural transition through its challenging of fixed, stable identity, and Martin Puchner, in his 2013 essay, suggests travel as a possible frame for understanding Ibsen as a literary figure due to its prevalence in the author’s life and work (Rees 2014,9, Puchner 2013, 6-7).
Bræin further explores this notion of transition and instability through the visual language of Gatas Gynt, in particular, through the motif of transit. One of the most widespread examples of this motif is the bicycle, which appears repeatedly throughout both the film’s adapted and interview sequences. This project focuses on the presentation of the bike across these appearances. Using the writings of filmmaker and scholar Lev Kuleshov as a base, I examine how Bræin frames and guides audience understanding of movement in connection to the body of the bike. In the film’s adapted scenes, where the bike appears directly, I argue that Bræin introduces the bicycle as a bearer of unproductive or negative movement. I further argue that this meaning is carried over to the bike’s indirect appearances – in conversation, in pieces, and in pictographic form – during the film’s interview sections, where it accompanies the cast’s voicing of anxieties on Norway’s transition into modernity. In this way, Bræin uses the motif of the bicycle and its relationship to movement to explore Peer Gynt’s larger theme of transition, further explicate the transitory experience of homelessness, and challenge the notion of Norway as a fixed place capable of being accessed or returned to.
Elizabeth Stang is PhD candidate at the University of Washington in the Department of Scandinavian Studies. She holds a M.A. in Scandinavian Languages and Literature from that institution, as well as a B.A. in Norwegian from St. Olaf College.
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