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Ghosts |
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WMP Video Clip # 01 from this Film
WMP Video Clip # 02 from this Film
Screen Captures from Video Clip # 02
Thanks to Emma L, USA, for sharing this
IMDb Information Directed by: Elijah Moshinsky Writing credits (in alphabetical order): Henrik Ibsen play Gengangere / Michael Meyer translation Cast (in credits order):
Spark Notes Online Study Guide Act 1, Part 3 of 5 (Video Clip # 01) Summary Oswald enters, wearing a light overcoat and smoking a pipe. Pastor Manders is pleasantly shocked at how closely he resembles his famously upstanding father. Mrs. Alving glows with pride at the maturity her son shows in dealing with the Pastor's muddled apologies for having formerly disapproved of his way of life. The Pastor describes the way the outlines of Oswald's mouth resemble the late Captain Alving's, but Mrs. Alving insists that Oswald does not favor his father in the least. She asks him not to smoke in the garden room, and Oswald complies, saying that he was only smoking because it was his father's pipe; he had smoked it only once before, as a small child, at his father's urging, and remembers having been sick. Mrs. Alving insists that this must have been a dream. The conversation turns to Oswald's life abroad. The Pastor emphasizes the importance of the ancestral home and of living with a family. Oswald mentions that he has lived with families, albeit not families officially married by the church. The Pastor is appalled, but Mrs. Alving supports her son. Oswald becomes emotional in his arguments, complaining about the hypocrisy of many Norwegian men who declaim the bohemian lifestyles he loves. Commentary When Oswald enters, he is wearing a light overcoat. This contrasts with the Pastor's entrance; the Pastor was wearing a heavy overcoat and carrying an umbrella, heavily shielding himself from the dark weather. These details are highly symbolic: while Oswald, as we will see later in the play, is practically driven crazy by the gloom—both literal and symbolic—of the community and its natural setting, the Pastor is well adjusted to it. This is also reflected in Oswald's speech. It is impassioned; he speaks in bursts of adjectives, whereas the Pastor's speech is ponderous, highly rhetorical, and full of stock phrases. The Pastor lives his life according to a concrete set of ideals, whereas Oswald acts from the heart. Mrs. Alving reacts oddly to the Pastor's belief that Oswald resembles his father. She doesn't like the idea at all. As we will learn by the end of the first act, this is because she very much dislikes her former husband but idealizes her son and imagines that she has saved him from his father. Yet despite her internal rejection of her former husband's ways, Mrs. Alving is careful to preserve his public reputation. Thus, she rejects as untrue the anecdote her son tells about his father forcing him to smoke: she doesn't want either of the men to know of her late husband's weaknesses. In Oswald and the Pastor's argument over marriage, we see further exposition of their differing worldviews. Oswald declares that Norwegians who condemn Italian artists living together unmarried are hypocrites because they themselves are not free from their own forms of corruption. Little does he know that his father was prone to such moral decay. Later in the play, Oswald will complain about the lack of sun in Norway, compared to sunny Italy where he has been living. Clearly, Oswald takes issue with more than the lack of natural light in his hometown—he takes issue with the prevailing lack of intellectual and moral enlightenment. Act 1, Part 4 of 5 (Video Clip # 02) Summary Oswald leaves, and the Pastor begins to sermonize to Mrs. Alving. He reminds her of the time that she fled from her husband and refused to return, attempting to take refuge with him instead. She asks the Pastor to remember how miserable she was, but he denounces her rebellious spirit and emphasizes that it is a not a woman's place to judge the husband she has chosen. He chastises her for endangering his own reputation by coming to him when she fled. He then compares this earlier failure of hers to her decision to send her son abroad while he was still so young. He sears her with guilt. She responds with measured, deliberate speech. She tells him that, contrary to public belief, her husband did not turn over a new leaf after she returned to him. She reminds the Pastor that he never once visited her after she returned to her husband and they moved to the country to the house she presently lives in. She says that her husband did not reform; rather, she simply learned to accept his faults and hide them from the world. When she bore him a son, he only became worse. She spent nights coaxing him to drink himself to sleep so that he would not go carousing. She only survived because of the public works that she coordinated the same works that gained Captain Alvin his reputation. Commentary Just before the Pastor begins to lecture Mrs. Alving, he says that he must speak to her not as her friend but as her priest. Yet his language is full of the same stock phrases as usual. He refers to the wife's duty to her husband just as he referred to the sanctity of marriage to Oswald, or as he spoke to Regina about her duties to Engstrand Also as usual, he is always concerned about public opinion. It angers him that Mrs. Alving endangered his reputation by fleeing to him when she was in need. (Of course, to his credit, one must remember that Mrs. Alving was attracted to him sexually, and, thus, her approach toward him could have been seen as improper). The Pastor also invoked public opinion when discussing insurance for the orphan asylum, when condemning Mrs. Alving's reading selections, and when wondering how to avoid scandal with his speech at the opening of the memorial asylum. Mrs. Alving's speech is a watershed. She has apparently never told anyone else about her husband's failings. Like the Pastor, she inflates her speech with repetition�the rhetorical pretensions of the educated. Her attitude toward the Pastor here is complex. First, she is angered that he accused her of betraying a worthy husband and of treating her son just as badly. But she also thinks of him as a friend, or at least as someone for whom she previously had romantic feelings. Also, she is probably concerned to give her speech an air of importance; after all, her mission for more than ten years has been to maintain her husband's good reputation. Now she is destroying that reputation, at least in the Pastor's mind. In a sense, she is making a confession, even though the aim of her speech is to absolve herself of guilt. To understand the rest of the play, it is important to consider how Mrs. Alving must have felt after returning to her husband. The couple moved out of town and she lost contact with the Pastor, who she was fond of then, despite how she feels about him now. She suppressed her "rebellious spirit" and put up with a husband who was unfaithful and lazy. Her need to busy herself with projects is indicative of her psychological state. She began to think of her husband as an object to be hidden. In the final parts of the first act, we will see how this pressurized situation led her to deal with her son in the ways she did.
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