Alf Blütecher

Biography

Lårdal, Norway, greeted Alf Blütecher on 7 February 1880, and from that fjord-hemmed village he set out to haunt early cinema screens. Three years before feature-length films had even settled on a standard running time, he slipped into the shadowy intrigue of *Manden med de ni Fingre II* (1915). The following year he stared down apocalyptic comets in *The End of the World* (1916), and in 1918 he traded terrestrial gravity for the red dust of *A Trip to Mars*, cementing his place among the pioneers of Scandinavian science-fiction. Sixty-one birthdays later, on 5 March 1959, Oslo drew the curtain on his story, but the flicker of those first reel-to-reel adventures still carries his name across the decades.