Klassekampen.no | Shadows in the dark

Depth: The biography of Merete Morken Andersen uses the life of Amalie Skram as a prism to create the spirit of the whole time.

EXAMINATION

"Dear Amalie … (…) It's the way you live that binds me to you …" Merete wrote Morken Andersen in the last chapter of the film collage "The Blood of the Years". In the difference of Amalie Skram, she recognizes herself and meets the time of the author with intense empathy. She uses herself as a sound box to experiment "from the inside" what it was Amalie. She works concretely, cooking after her recipes, imitates the photo of Amalie with her daughter Johanne while photographing herself with her daughter in the same situation. To understand Amalie's experience with admission to psychiatric hospitals, she interviews people with the same experiences. She asks how a collapse can affect the artistic process. This strong experience creates intensity, presence and linguistic profit, but can be at the expense of explanations and analyzes.

Is it possible to understand a person you do not know, who has lived another life somewhere, several generations before you? The question does not have a final answer. Andersen combines a chronological and thematic approach. She has created an unprecedented site with an impressive amount of information on people, places, events and important topics of the date.

The chronology is supported through the chronology of the site. This gives the cinema a legitimacy and the freedom to move in time. For example, the film begins in 1889, five years after Amalie married the Danish writer and journalist Erik Skram, with Amalie on the pod in the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. The photo is unexpected and surprising. Here, the reader meets the living, stimulating and loving woman of life that everyone is turning now, as when she was a girl in Bergen; she is so beautiful, so beautiful!

But the dark forces, who, like her two heads out of two during the earthquake with the first husband August Müller, have recovered Amalie Skram several times later in life; In 1877 he led to the asylum of Gaustad, in 1894 to be admitted to the Municipal Hospital of Copenhagen and from there to the asylum of Roskilde. These dark forces are pursuing Andersen, not only throughout the history of Amalie, but also through a series of lives of other contemporary artists: Oda Krohg, August Strindberg, Victoria Benedictsson, van Gogh and many others. Experiences of despair, jealousy, madness, but also liberation and happiness are common to many of them.

Through five thematic areas; freedom, family, love, madness and death are gradually developing a model. It is in relations between peoples that "the answers lie on the question of who Amalie Skram was and what forces ruled his life," writes Andersen. Amalie's life is used as a prism to get a whole time spirit! In this last, very complex part, Andersen tackles a deep psychological field characterized by Freud's thought and the psychology of recent development. There are shaded areas in Amalie's life that stand out, and they produce the "trembling feeling of black truth". Shadows include motifs, in Amalie's family and in her own life. They present traces of trauma – recurrent failures of caregivers – that create unstable and vulnerable attachment patterns, as well as destructive relationships.

Undoubtedly, this way of understanding is behind the selection of lifebuoys described by Andersen, which is what they have in common. At least, this is how I understand the connection between this exercise of psychological depth and the cultural history of the struggles of life in the previous sections.

Andersen is looking for after what she calls "change of power". Is this power in the excitement and tensions between people? Or was it when Amalie Skram lived? In the period we call "The Modern Breakthrough", awareness of women's rights and a critique of male sexual morality that can still be perceived as such are growing. The political system was changing, the knowledge of class relations, the bursting of the spirit and the modernist sense of time posed great challenges. Man can no longer be considered a solid personality, it is not one, but many individualities.

Amalie Skram was an important figure during this period. In the years leading up to her debut as an author, she held a strong position as a literary critic. As a novelist, she distinguished herself as one of the first, illuminating the oppression of women, the abuse of power in psychiatry, the great inequality between the poor and the rich . The film moves this aside. With regard to writing, she chose to quote lengthy excerpts from some novels, often to show the link between life and poetry, as often without comment. She points out that Skram defends her circle of ugly, hesitant and brutal people that she wants to awaken compassion and make the reader understand.

The cinema wants to awaken a similar attitude among its readers, but it may be interesting that it has underlined Skram's comments through analyzes and interpretations of certain texts.

The entire image can not give. Other Skram cinemas, such as Liv Køltzow and Janet Garton, have written more in depth about life and poetry. Being human, Amers and her time, Andersen is interested, and the in-depth criticism, the search for obscure and mysterious shadows by the cinema, has become a touching and moving story about Amalie Skram and her time.

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