Skinless
What was Henrik Ibsen really like? Was he a desk jockey with ink pumping through his veins, or was he a man of passion?
Directed by Ruth Tellefsen
Ibsen was rumoured to be such a buttoned-up, unavailable man, like a sphinx. But was he always that way? Or was he a sphinx because he really was skinless?
These are the questions forming the basis for Rut Tellefsen’s intimate portrait of the Sphinx, beautifully soundtracked by Grieg and Brahms.
Like Hedda, he was terrified of scandal, and he had his reasons. So it was quite the scandal when Georg Brandes briefly after Ibsen’s death published a letter he had received by a Viennese lady named Emilie Bardach.
At the age of 62, the prim and proper Ibsen had been writing infatuated letters to an 18-year-old girl in Vienna! They had met one summer in Tyrol! And although the letters are not scandalous, they have clearly been written by a man in possession of all his passions!
From there, we excitedly trace his footsteps back through his youthful indiscretions in lyrical form, to end up in his hometown Skien, where people still have stories to tell! What, for example, was the reason for him being kicked out of the family home during the Christmas of 1842, never to see his parents again? The boy was only 15. And why is Ibsen’s “super-devil” and chief whip a violin-playing, foot-stomping bear? So many questions on this voyage of discovery, so many notions and veiled answers, and finally a burning urge to experience it all with an audience.