ABSTRACT
One of the authors most frequently adapted to the screen in the early years of this century (whose popularity continues largely undiminished in contemporary film and television) was Charles Dickens, and an examination of the way in which Dickens's novels were transferred to film may help to clarify and test Gunning's argument. Many of the pre-1920 films are now lost, but enough survive to give a sense of the various strategies employed to make some sense of books that are often 800-900 pages in length, employ multiple, intersecting plot lines, and rarely present fewer than a dozen major characters and several dozen minor ones - all of which had to be conveyed in a framework that (in the decade from 1910-1920) rarely exceeded 60-70 minutes in length. While referring to some of the pre-1920 films in order to establish a background, I wish to concentrate here on one of the more sustained attempts at Dickens adaptations: four films made by the Nordisk Company in Denmark between 1921 and 1924, at a time when the 'narrator system' had certainly triumphed and a complex, specifically filmic language had evolved, not just in the United States, but in France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Russia, and was beginning to emerge in Japan.
