THE NEW silent-film DVD from Flicker Alley, Laila tells of how a Norse merchant’s daughter fell off a sled during a flight from a wolf pack. She was raised, not by wolves, but by a pack of the nomadic herdsmen of the area formerly known as Lapland: the people now known as the Sami. When Laila grows, she’s played by the beauteous Mona Martenson, a co-star and rival of Greta Garbo. She is a Scandinavian tragic mulatto torn between her herdsman foster brother (Henry Gleditsch) and a “daro”—a European outsider who is also her cousin.
This first Norwegian cinematic epic, made in 1929, was shot in the wildest part of the country’s fjords and mountains. Grazing the reindeer in the summer, the herdsman live in tipis, and get around being drawn like water skiers behind a charging deer. The local color combines nicely with the Copenhagen shot interiors. It all leads to a ripping climax, augmented by a last-minute race to the altar complicated by the return of the wolf pack. It’s a bracing mix of the melodramatic and the ethnographic.
Regarding the Sami, Laila has more or less the same POV as American frontier dramas have for the Indians during the same time. The film demonstrates all sympathy to the bravery and endurance of the Laplanders, but it spells doom for a people caught in progress’s way. Certainly, the leads here aren’t Sami; they’re Scandinavian actors made up with Vulcan eyebrows. But the drastic change in this culture is clear if you have a look at something like last year’s comedy Rare Exports: Chernobyl radiation, mining, Russian border guards and Westernization are just some of the factors that wore away traditional Sami life.
The Norse movie industry in 1929 had no permanent studios. Yet Norway is next door to Sweden and Denmark, nations making some of the world’s most sophisticated films. Laila was a collaboration of talents from Stockholm and Copenhagen; the director George Schneevoigt had been the photographer on four Carl Dreyer films as well as the 1921 version of Norse writer Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil.
The DVD includes a booklet telling the film’s story. The Emil Jannings-like Tryggve Larssen, who played the burly Jampa, kept a diary; republished here it notes the problems of frozen cameras, cramped sets and animal actors. One day, “Only the reindeers had a good time.”
Flicker Alley
$29.95
