The Oxford History of World Cinema (62 page)

of the Nordic landscape. The first sign of the end of a semi-amateur phase in production

came in 1920 with the appearance of two films: Kaksen på Øverland ('The braggarts of

Overland'), directed by G. A. Olsen, and Fante-Anne ('The lady-tramp'), acted by Asta

Nielsen and directed by Rasmus Breistein. The following year saw the first important

adaptation of a work by Knut Hamsun, Markens grode ('The growth of the soil', Gunnar

Sommerfeldt, 1921), but, significantly, the film was directed by a Dane and photographed

by a Finn, George Schnéevoigt, who was resident in Denmark at the time and who had

been the cameraman for Carl Theodor Dreyer's Pränkästan ( The Parson's Widow, 1920),

filmed in Norway for Svenska Biografteater. Another film -- Pan ( Harald Schwenzen,

1922), produced by the newly formed Kommunernes Films-Central -- was also taken

from a work by Hamsun.

After an interval of a year, the first film to be considered at the time as worthy of an

international audience appeared: Till Süters ('In the mountains', 1924), the first film

directed by the journalist Harry Ivarson. Den nye lensmanden ('The new commissar', Leif

Sinding, 1926), produced by a new company, Svalefilm, achieved equal acclaim. The

brief flourishing of Norwegian silent cinema reached its peak with Troll-elgen ('The

magic leap', Walter Fürst, 1927), a grandiose natural fresco whose worth is in part due to

the photography of the Swede Ragnar Westfelt, and with Laila ( 1929), dedicated to the

Lapps in the north of the country. Even here however, it is worth noting the foreign input,

from the Finno-Danish director Schnéevoigt to the acting of the Swedish Mona

Mårtenson and the Danish Peter Malberg.

The somewhat limited extent of Norwegian silent cinema is today represented by about

thirty titles available at the Norsk Filminstitutt, Oslo.

DENMARK

On 17 September 1904 Constantin Philipsen opened the first permanent film exhibition

hall in Copenhagen. Danish fiction film production had already got under way a year

earlier when the photographer to the royal family, Peter Elfelt, had made Henrettelsen

('The execution'), which still survives today. In 1906 an exhibitor, Ole Olsen, set up the

Nordisk Film Kompagni, which was to play a fundamental role in Danish cinema

throughout the silent period, and indeed in international cinema for a good part of the

1910s. By 1910, Nordisk was considered the world's second largest production company

after Pathé; its first studio, built by the company in 1906, is the oldest surviving film

studio in the world. Most of the fiction films of the early period were directed by exstaff

sergeant Viggo Larsen, and shot by Axel Sorensen (renamed Axel Graatkjæer after 1911).

Of the 248 fiction films produced between 1903 and 1910, 242 were made by Nordisk.

Only after 1909 did other companies extend the panorama of Danish cinema: Biorama of

Copenhagen and Fotorama of Aarhus, both founded in 1909; and Kinografen in 1910.

In 1910 a Fotorama film called Den hvide slavehandel ('The white slave trade') marked a

turning-point in the evolution of fiction films not only in Scandinavia but throughout the

world. The film dealt with the theme of prostitution in previously unheard of explicit

terms, and thereby inaugurated a new genre-the 'sensational' film, set in the world of

crime, vice, or the circus. On the basis of the success of the Éclair film Nick Carter, le roi

des détectives ('Nick Carter, King of the detectives', Victorin Jasset, 1908), Nordisk began

a series in 1910 whose protagonist was a brilliant criminal, Dr Gar el Hama: Eduard

SchnedlerSørensen directed both Dødsflugten (UK title: The Flight from Death; US title:

The Nihilist Conspiracy, 1911) and Dr. Gar el Hama II / Dr. Gar el Hama Flugt (Dr. Gar el

Hama: Sequel to A Dead Man's Child, 1912), and to some extent these films inspired the

most famous films of criminal exploits, made in France by Jasset ( Zigomar, 1911) and

later by Louis Feuillade ( Fantõmas, 1913).

One important consequence of the move towards 'sensational' drama was the development

of new techniques in lighting, in camera-positioning and in set design. The case of Den

sorte drøm ('The black dream'), by Urban Gad (Fotorama, 1911), is particularly

noteworthy in this regard. For the high anxiety of the most intense scenes, the reflectors

were taken down from their usual stands and laid on the ground, so that the actors threw

long, dark shadows on to the walls. The use of a hand-held lantern, clutched by the

protagonists as they struggled forward in the dark, was deployed to great effect after

1914, in Gar el Hama III: Slangøn (The Abduction, or Dr. Gar el Hama's Escape From

Prison, 1914) by Robert Dinesen, and in Verdens undergang (The Flaming Sword, or The

End of the World, 1916) by August Blom. A variant on this effect was to have a character

enter a dark room and turn on the light. The shooting was suspended and the actor

blocked as the lamp in shot was about to be turned on; the scene was then lit as if by the

lamp in question and shooting recommenced. Often the two segments of the shot were

tinted in different colours, usually in blue for darkness and ochre for light. Another

powerful effect, hardly seen outside Denmark before 1911, was the silhouette outline,

shot from an interior with the lens pointing towards an open or half-open door, or a

window. These ideas, which characterize two films directed by August Blom for Nordisk

-- Ungdommens ret (The Right of Youth, 1911) and Exspeditricen (In the Prime of Life,

1911) -- are taken to an extreme in Det hemmelighedsfulde X (Sealed Orders or Orders

under Seal, 1913), the first film by the greatest Danish director of the silent period besides

Carl Theodor Dreyer, Benjamin Christensen ( 1879-1959). Christensen developed

techniques and figures already used by the French director Léonce Perret in L'Enfant de

Paris ('The child of Paris'), and Le Roman d'un mousse ('A midshipman's tale', Gaumont,

1913), and arrived at extraordinary results using silhouettes and half-lit images. His

aggressive experimentalism reached its peak in the thriller Hævnens nat (Blind Justice,

1915).

Another frequent trick was to show a character who was out of range of the camera's field

in a mirror: for example, in Ved fængslets port (Temptations of a Great City, 1911) by

August Blom -- starring the most famous male lead actor of the time, Valdemar Psilander-

and in for åbent Tæppe / Desdemona ( 1911). In all probability, the mirror was used as an

expedient to avoid the need for montages of several shots in a scene (since Danish

directors seem not to have been keen on elaborate editing techniques), but nevertheless,

its allusive and symbolic impact enriched the treatment of sexuality in films such as the

frank and open Afgrunden by Urban Gad ( The Abyss, Kosmorama, 1910), which saw the

début of the greatest actress of Danish silent film, Asta Nielsen.

Early Danish film-makers paid relatively little attention to the narrative dynamic of their

films: before 1914 tracking shots, flashbacks, and close-ups were very rarely used. They

thus fell well short of the fluidity and naturalism typical of American cinema of the same

period. However, the Danes had a profound and lasting influence on film production on

an international scale. On a general level, their most significant contribution was in the

development away from short-length narrative films to films of three, four, or even more

reels -- August Blom's Atlantis (Nordisk, 1913), with a huge budget, ran to 2,280 metres

of film, excluding intertitles -- and in the cultural legitimization of cinema, which was

encouraged by the appearance of established actors and actresses from classical theatre.

On a more specific level, Danish cinema had an enor mous impact on its neighbours. The

first works by the Swedish directors Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström, along with

almost all Swedish films before 1916, bear the technical imprint of Denmark, and only in

the following two years was an autonomous identity developed in Sweden. Danish films

were also widely distributed in prerevolutionary Russia, leading some companies to shoot

alternative endings designed to satisfy the Russian taste for tragic denouements. Films

shot in Russia in the earlier 1910s, and especially the first dramas by Yevgeny Bauer from

1913, display techniques of lighting (back- and multiple-lighting) and framing (doors and

windows shot from within) which clearly derive from methods current in Danish cinema.

The most lucrative foreign market for Nordisk was Germany -- at least until 1917, when

the German government took control of the national film industry. Profits were so high

that the company could invest in a huge chain of cinemas. The close relationship between

Danish and German cinema in the 1910s and 1920s becomes apparent if one compares

the 'sensational' themes (criminal geniuses, white slave trade, extreme passions) and the

markedly expressionist camera techniques (oblique shots, half-light effects) of pre-1914

Danish dramas with the work of German directors such as Joe May, Otto Rippert, and

early Fritz Lang. Vilhelm Glückstadt, whose extraordinary work as a director has

remained almost unexplored to this day, was the author of three films which reveal

profound affinities with the expressionist aesthetic: Den fremmede ('The benefactor',

1914); Det gamle spil om enhver / Enhver ('Anyone', 1915), a complex tangle of

flashbacks, parallel story-lines, and strongly metaphorical imagery; and the impassioned

Kornspekulanten ('The wheat speculators', 1916), whose attribution to Glückstadt is not

entirely certain, but which looks forwards to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr ( 1932).

Karin Molander as the reporter in Mauritz Stiller's brilliant comedy Kärlek och

journalistik ('Love and journalism', 1916)

Dreyer is a towering figure in the pantheon of Danish cinema. His work represents the

most complete synthesis of its expressionist tendencies with its meticulous figurative

sobriety. His interest in psychology and in the conflicts between the unconscious and the

rational elements in human actions was already apparent in his first film Præsidenten (The

President, 1919), and in the episode film Blade af Satans bog (Leaves from Satan's book,

1921), and reached a new level of excellence in Du skal ære din hustru (The Master of the

House), produced in 1925 by a new, fierce competitor of Nordisk, Palladium, run by Lau

Lauritzen. Danish cinema went into gradual decline after the First World War, and Dreyer

remained an isolated figure of genius in his home country. He was driven to continue his

career abroad, in Norway, Sweden, Germany, and France. Danish cinema responded to its

inexorable loss of influence by turning in on itself. In the early 1920s, in a lastditch effort

to stop the rot, Nordisk offered huge sums of money to the director Anders Wilhelm

Sandberg to adapt a number of Dickens's novels, but the genuine success of the results in

Denmark struggled to transfer abroad. A similar fate awaited the first Danish animation

film, De tre smaa mænd ('Three little men', Robert Storm-Petersen and Carl Wieghorst,

1920), and experiments in sound cinema carried out by Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen

after 1922. The only significant exception to the rule was the series of comedies

'Fyrtaanet og Bivognen' ('Long and short'), produced between 1921 and 1927 by Carl

Schenstrom and Harald Madsen. Klovnen ('Clowns', Anders Wilhelm Sandberg, 1926)

was the last great drama film made by Nordisk to be distributed in America, but its

success was not sufficient to prevent the virtually total eclipse of Denmark in the arena of

the great producing nations.

Around 2,700 fiction and non-fiction titles were produced in Denmark between 1896 and

1930. Most of the films of which copies have survived (including about 400 fiction films)

are to be found at Det Danske Filmmuseum in Copenhagen.

SWEDEN

The first entrepreneur to dedicate himself full-time to cinema in Sweden was Numa

Peterson, a photographer who had begun his activity by showing Lumière films. In 1897 a

Lumière agent, Georges Promio, taught an employee of Petersen's, Ernest Florman, how

to film events live and how to stage short comic episodes. However, foreign companies

remained the dominant force in the Swedish market until 1908, when an accountant who