Laila

One of the glories of Scandinavian silent cinema, setting it apart from the rest of fledgling European production, was its use of natural landscape settings – some of the most spectacular in the world – which, coupled with a literary tradition based on the Nordic sagas, lent itself to epic filmmaking of the purest kind. Norwegian cinema more or less bowed out of the silent period in 1929 with Laila, a splendidly sprawling adventure of the frozen Far North, replete with reindeer, wolves, Lapps and ice-melting passions. Ranged across several generations, the story begins with a wealthy merchant, Lind, and his wife travelling in the coldest depths of winter to christen their baby daughter. Attacked by wolves, they lose the baby, which is found by the Lapp Jaampa (a dominating performance by Tryggve Larssen) and subsequently raised by a rich reindeer herder, Aslag Laagje. Thus the saga begins… George Schnéevoigt, a noted Danish-German cinematographer who had shot four of Carl Dreyer’s films, was hired to direct his own script, on the strength of his camerawork a year earlier on Ragnar Westfelt’s Viddenes folk (People of the Tundra), a similar tale. A successful director of talkies, he helmed a sound remake of Laila in 1937. The re-emergence of the silent Laila, for decades treated risibly through being shown at the wrong speed, is the result of expert restoration work by the Norwegian Film Institute at the Norwegian National Library, producing a speed-adjusted print to give the film a long and flexible new life. —bfi