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VI
THE SOUND-FILM IN DENMARK
THE Danish film barely survived the coming of sound. There could be no international market for films in the Danish language; and the home market was so small as to make production on any other than the most modest scale a perilous undertaking. The Danish films could not compete with the American productions, backed by the revenue from a world audience; but if they could not compete in quality, they could in popularity, by offering the Danes entertainment in their own language. And so films of a kind continued to be made. When, in 1928, the old Nordisk Company was dissolved, it was reconstructed immediately by Carl Bauder, the banker, who had acquired the rights to the Danish sound-film system invented by the civil engineers Petersen and Poulsen. Using this system sound-films were made — farces, comedies, simple tales set in the country. They made no contribution to the cinema and would hardly have raised a flicker of interest outside Denmark; but they allowed the Danes to hear their own language from the screen and that was sufficient to make them popular. A typical film of the 'thirties, during which these commonplace standards were maintained, was Det Begyendte Ombord (It Started on Board) (1937). a light-hearted comedy of a shipboard romance and its consequences, with three popular players, Gull-maj Norin, Henrik Bentzen, and Peter Malberg. The liner used was a familiar visitor to Copenhagen Harbour, the harbour itself was the background of several sequences, and there was an inevitable glimpse of the Tivoli. Neither direction nor acting attempted to disguise the naiveties of the story. Continuity was jerky and the photography varied greatly in quality. The film looked as cheap as it probably was. But the jokes were in Danish and the songs were familiar, and for many audiences across the country these were clearly enough.
While the average Danish film was content with the trivial and the commonplace, there were one or two more ambitious productions. Palos Brudef oerd (Pah's Wedding: distributed in Britain as Nartisha of the North) (1934) was {produced by the Danish explorer, Dr. Knud Rasmussen, on his 1931-33 voyage to
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