Hedda Gabler Assignment 1 – Armand Caguete

While reading Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, I tried to play the film and listen to the audio. Because of this, I ended up stopping the film from time to time and confusingly looked for where in the script of the play was the scene the actors in the film were portraying.

This is because, compared to the written one, the film version removed some parts and dialogues between the characters. The part in the original text where Aunt Julie subtly attacks Hedda by holding her head and kisser her hair, as a reaction to the latter’s disgust against the former’s hat for being old and ugly, would have been great to see on film, but it wasn’t adapted. However, I found the alterations of some words in the play to give a more natural vibe and flow to the conversations was a great change by the filmmaker and made it appealing and easy to watch. Ingrid Bergman’s Hedda Gabler was an accurate depiction of the egoistic and, in my opinion, narcissistic nature of Ibsen’s protagonist. Her facial expression and subtle movements were a great interpretation of the bossy and kind of passive-aggressive attitude that Ibsen probably wanted to portray in the opening scene when Hedda ‘mistakes’ Aunt Julie’s hat for Berta’s. The written text, however, does not seem to give cues to tell its readers and make them feel about Hedda’s displease and uneasiness toward Aunt Julie.

In my opinion, the written version of the play is still superior to the film adaptation. Not only does it give a much fuller and better version of Ibsen’s masterpiece, but the written text also leaves its readers with a wider imagination of how they want the characters, such as Hedda Gabler and George Tessman, to be in their own interpretation of the play. The film, however, does great justice and adaptation to one of the great works of literature.