Fante-Anne is the first Norwegian feature film set in a distinctly Norwegian milieu, and the first Norwegian film adapted from a literary work. The story is an archetypal instance of Norwegian peasant tales, which often deal with love across boundaries of class and wealth. It follows a foundling, Anne, who grows up on a wealthy farmstead with Haldor, the son and heir of the owner, but is cast out when she and Haldor as adults fall in love and wish to marry. Haldor’s strict mother has found a more suitable match for her son. But Anne, with her vagabond blood and fiery temper, takes revenge by setting fire to the farm’s new building, a house built for Haldor and his new bride. The farmhand Jon, who loves Anne, takes the blame for the arson. After he serves his prison sentence, Anne and Jon are united, and the couple emigrate to America. The story presents a clear religious allegory of sin expiated by a loving saviour, with the saviour bringing the sinner to paradise. But in spite of the superstructure of Christian morality, it is also a story about a woman who rebels against her fate, makes dangerous choices, and remains undaunted by tradition and authority.
As the first Norwegian romantic national film, Fante-Anne became the starting point for an important genre tradition in Norwegian film history, dominant in the silent period but also important for the sound cinema of the 1930s and 40s, long after contemporary and more urban stories had found their place in the repertoire. The turning point that came with Fante-Anne was openly inspired by two Swedish film adaptations of works by the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian novelist Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson from the previous year, 1919: Synnöve Solbakken and Ett farligt frieri (A Dangerous Wooing). During its uncertain infancy before 1919, Norwegian film had mostly produced catchpenny melodramas without any specific national colour; but now people realized that they could get a much larger and more dedicated audience by giving Norwegian moviegoers pictures and stories that confirmed their own national identity. Following these two Swedish successes, filmed in Norway and in Norwegian nature, Fante-Anne came as a worthy and natural sequel. The film’s authenticity in its treatment of environment and character remains striking, as does its beautiful cinematography, and is all the more impressive considering that the vast majority of those involved in the production were making films for the first time. But the director, the cinematographer, and the actors all had a solid knowledge base in Norwegian music, literature, and peasant culture.
The director Rasmus Breistein (1890-1976), the son of a peasant, had a theatre background as an actor and folk musician. After watching the Swedish Bjørnson films, he presented his own film plans to the production company Kommunernes Filmscentral. He received their support and was teamed with the already experienced cinematographer Gunnar Nilsen-Vig. The collaboration between these two would be fruitful; Nilsen-Vig would shoot 9 of Breistein’s 14 feature films, and the director often praised his cinematographer for his valuable knowledge and efforts. The success of Fante-Anne paved the way for further film projects in the same genre, and Breistein actually made three more films from works by Fante-Anne’s author Kristofer Janson: Brudeferden i Hardanger (1926), Kristine Valdresdatter (1930), and the sound film Liv (1934), all great successes. A writer popular for his portrayals of rural life, Kristofer Janson was also a minister who worked  for many years among Norwegian-Americans in the United States. This gave Breistein’s movies a large audience there as well when Breistein himself went on tour in the U.S. with them, accompanying them on the fiddle. With a 30-year career that encompassed the transition from silent to sound, and on to colour film, Rasmus Breistein stands out as one of the real pioneers of Norwegian film history.
Aasta Nielsen (1897-1975) was a Norwegian stage actress and singer, mainly active in operettas. (She was a first cousin of the legendary Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad.) Her film career was very brief, with only three titles. After Fante-Anne she also starred in Jomfru Trofast/The Maiden Faithful (1921) and Felix (1921), both also directed by Rasmus Breistein.
The restoration  The original negative of Fante-Anne is lost; all surviving copies are based on a duplicate negative from an old release print with Swedish intertitles. The National Library of Norway embarked on a new restoration in 2011, when the reconstructed film was printed in its original silent film format (1:1.33) for the first time, and the images were coloured according to tinting notations in the duplicate negative. New title cards were made based on those in a previous Norwegian version which had been translated from Swedish. Scanning and printing of the newly restored viewing copy was performed at New Digital Filmlab in Copenhagen.

Bent Kvalvik