Freedom Captured: Film Adaptations of Maria Gripe’s Children’s Books

Ever since the early novels about Hugo and Josephine in the 1960s, Maria Gripe’s works have enjoyed a special status in Swedish children’s culture. The critically acclaimed film versions of her work have indeed contributed to this, from Hugo and Josephine (1967) and Elvis Elvis (1977) to Agnes Cecilia (1991) and The Glassblower’s Children (1998). These films are also displays of a distinctive feature of Gripe’s stories, namely the way children act in a spirit of freedom and independence, based partly on the existential issues that affect them and partly on the conditions in which they live. This is captured in all the films, as well as in the television series Julia’s House (1971) and Pappa Pellerin’s Daughter (1974), both based on Maria Gripe’s novels. This chapter studies the dual sense of the concept of freedom—displayed in themes as well as form—in the film adaptations of Gripe’s work. In terms of theory, the study primarily draws on adaptation studies. Because in a congenial way, the thematic freedom is also manifested in the adaptations of the novels. Maria Gripe herself was involved in the scriptwriting processes, and together with the directors she usually took great freedom in adapting the original. This might be read as an awareness of what the new medium adds: something that cannot be captured on the printed page. The ways in which this is manifested are not seldom quite unique, resembling what the adaptation theorist Linda Hutcheon refers to as a ‘repetition without replication’. This trait also clearly distinguishes the Gripe adaptations from the more renowned adaptations of Astrid Lindgren for children.