This brilliant film adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author Knut Hamsun’s famous 1894 novel Pan was scripted and directed by Harald Schwenzen, a talented young actor.
It was his directorial debut—a masterpiece—and although he never directed another, Pan is so exquisitely rendered and psychologically astute it has secured Schwenzen’s reputation in cinema history. Schwenzen wrote in the film’s original program, “The task we have given ourselves is to make a beautiful and artistic pictorialization of Hamsun’s strangest story. Outwardly, there is no strong plot in Pan which could possibly tempt us, but the book is, with its powerful beauty and lyricism, so rich in atmosphere, so characteristic and strong in its human descriptions, that it offers both the director and the actors a very special artistic task. If we have succeeded, through our images, together with excerpts of Hamsun’s text, to give life to these people and this atmosphere, as in the book, then we have fulfilled the great task we set for ourselves.”
Restored at Arri Film and TV Production in Munich.
Live musical accompaniment by Guenter Buchwald
Introduced by Bent Kvalvik of the National Library of Norway
Sponsored by Fandor
Co-presented by the Film Noir Foundation, the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in San Francisco, and MiDNiTES for MANiACS