Luscious legs revealed by racy bathing costumes, poster-sized reproductions of recently deceased superstars, and scandals involving big game shot dead in front of rolling cameras. The film industry’s advertising people did not shy back from sex, death and scandals in their efforts to secure a box office hit.
Lars-Martin Sørensen, Head of Research Unit | 27 August 2024
Making films is expensive, so you need to sell tickets – and a great many of them – before a film begins to make money for those who have staked their fortunes on it. Right from the dawn of cinema, all sorts of advertising have accompanied films as they make their way into the public eye. Reflecting this, our efforts to digitise the cultural heritage of Danish silent film have not only seen us handle many kilometres of silent film strips. We have also digitised – and in some cases restored – heaps of programmes, posters, stills and other marketing material. Together, all of this material, which we at the Film Institute generally call the ’supplementary collections’, speak eloquently of how filmmakers tried to sell their product back in the infancy of the film medium.
Putting films on the programme
The first activities made to promote films were presumably those of the street criers taking up position in front of entertainment establishments in cities everywhere, enticing audiences in with the allure of moving pictures as one offering among all sorts of other wonders and curiosities. Like so much other oral history, we cannot conclusively determine what the street criers called out at passersby. What we do know for certain, though, is that the earliest preserved film programme in the Film Institute’s collections dates from 1906. Among other things, the programme advertises film pioneer Viggo Larsen’s A Gift to my Wife.
The film is a short farce typical of the period, telling the brief tale of a gentleman who, rather the worse for wear, returns to the marital home with a bottle of his wife’s favourite port – the titular gift intended to mollify the raging dragon in her lair. However, he accidentally smashes the bottle and duly receives a sound beating with a broomstick. This information about the now-lost film can be gleaned from the programme, which in this case took the form of a simple flyer intended to advertise the services of the cinema run by the founder of Nordisk Film, Ole Olsen, proclaiming that the institution was now able to proudly present ‘The first-ever Danish Programme’. Olsen had taken a decisive step: he was now no longer just a cinema owner but also the owner of a film production company, which could supply his cinema with films produced in Denmark. And the audience needed to be made aware of that fact! Because in Denmark, buying Danish has always been a selling point.
Corporate branding on the silver screen
Danish film producers also sold films to agents and distributors in Denmark and abroad. So quite a large proportion of the oldest preserved programmes, which advertise only a single film, rather than an entire cinema programme are clearly aimed at professional buyers within the film industry. One example is the advertisement for Happy Bob Rat-hunting – an English-language marketing pamphlet promoting one of Danish cartoonist and jack-of-all-trades Storm P’s very early serial comedies with the Danish title Happy Bob paa Rottejagt (1907).
As a piece of advertising, it comes off as slightly peculiar: while the film is indeed praised for its ability to ‘stir the risible muscles of the audience very often’ and for being a whopping 92 metres long – in these days films were sold by the yard – you need to turn to page two to find all these glories extolled. The front page, by contrast, consists of words of warning to anyone who might conceivably want to imitate the company’s films, and an admonishing text about the terms of trade. Of course, this could also be construed as a kind of advertisement: it implicitly announces that Nordisk Films Kompagni (called The Northern Films Company on the pamphlet) sells products that are worth copying, and that the company has enough cachet to impose demands upon its customers. After all, tooting one’s own horn can take several forms. The admonitory words also testify to a problem with copycats stealing good movie ideas. Around this time, the company began to place its logo visibly in the films, ensuring that no one could be in any doubt as to who had produced them. This can be seen, for example, in The Anarchist's Mother-in-Law (1906), where a sign bearing the company’s polar bear logo follows the fun as the mother-in-law goes in wild pursuit of the anarchist through the various rooms in the house.
Essentially, this is an example of early copy protection which exposes the company’s logo again and again – corporate branding in the pioneering days of Danish silent films. In the film itself, everything comes to a head when the mother-in-law is sent skywards by anarchist dynamite!
The first movie posters
Posters gradually gained traction as a method for advertising film. The invention of the lithographic printing technique had made poster advertising increasingly widespread up through the nineteenth century, so the poster medium was fully primed when a new mass medium, film, appeared on the scene. As in the case of programmes, posters were initially used to advertise what the cinemas had on offer in the next few days; later, posters for specific films began to appear. The oldest preserved example in our collection is the poster for The Morphinist (1911). The film itself is now lost, but the pale-looking drug addict protagonist can still be seen today on the surviving advertisement. A poster from Helsingør Theater Kosmorama dates from around the same time, judging by the fact that it advertises the film The Rights of Youth, which is from 1911. This particular advertisement combines the poster format with the kind of text content found in programmes: the long, by modern standards overlong, plot summary of The Rights of Youth is exactly the kind of thing visitors could find in the so-called souvenir programmes sold in cinemas at the time, which advertised individual films. The poster offers clear evidence that things were going well in the cinema business: at the bottom of the poster is a statement affirming that ‘This extensive and interesting programme will only be available for these three days’ – meaning that cinemas could afford to print advertising posters with a shelf life of just three days.
You can watch the main attraction on the poster, The Rights of Youth, on this site – and you can even physically enter the theatre where the film was shown more than 100 years ago if you visit the open-air museum Den Gamle By in Aarhus, Denmark, where the cinema has been rebuilt. As an added curiosity you can watch the Film Institute’s conservator, Katja Glud, making glue according to an ancient Japanese recipe as she restores posters from the silent film era in this video.
The pull of celebrities
The cinema Kosmorama in Helsingør featured the names of actors on its posters, which in 1911 was still a relatively new phenomenon for programmes and posters alike. The Aarhus-based company Fotorama produced the earliest known Danish programmes to feature actors’ names. This ties in well with the fact that Fotorama was the first company to proudly proclaim that real actors from the realm of theatre were cast in the company’s films, which could therefore be considered ‘art films’ – for example the ‘Art film in 17 Acts’ Ambrosius featuring ‘the esteemed actor Aage Fønss’ in the lead role of the titular poet with the surname Stub.
This was back in 1910, the same year that Asta Nielsen danced her way to European stardom with the ‘gaucho dance’ in The Abyss – a steamily erotic sequence widely advertised in the newspapers of the time.
Following this, stars became a popular commodity that were extensively advertised, regardless of whether they had any theatre training or not. Indeed, whether they were dead or alive. The world-renowned Valdemar Psilander was so famous that in the year after his death, his name and face were more prominently featured than the title of the film itself on the colour print poster advertising The Road to Happiness (1918). The Road to Happiness was one of a string of Psilander features released as ‘memorial films’ following his sudden and shocking death at the young age of 32. In those days too, an early death was conducive to both stardom and marketability. The films were accompanied by various ‘In Memoriam’ booklets featuring pictures of the recently deceased Valdemar, ideal for reaffirming his reputation posthumously – and for bolstering Nordisk Film’s earnings, of course.
Scandals sell!
Not only did Nordisk Film not shy away from using Psilander’s death to market the films they had shot while he was alive; they also knew that besides death, a good scandal could sell movies too. The company learnt this first-hand ten years earlier with its first international blockbuster, Lion Hunting (1907). The Danish Minister of Justice Alberti, who desperately needed to redirect the press’s attention towards subjects other than his own highly questionable handling of state funds, banned the film under the pretext of animal cruelty even while it was still being filmed. Indeed, Nordisk Film had loudly proclaimed that shooting was underway in the press, and Olsen and his company blithely ignored the ban against the filming and screening of the film, making it a blockbuster in exile, as it were: if the film could not be shown in Denmark, the Danes could go to Malmö in Sweden. By this point, classified ads in the daily newspapers had already been used to attract people to cinemas for a long time. Now, the ads included the added allure of a tram service taking audiences from the harbour directly to the Malmö cinema where they could watch ‘the lion hunt banned by the Police Authorities’. When Alberti was jailed for his massive theft from the state treasury, and the ban on the film was lifted in Denmark the following year, the company deliberately highlighted the scandal in the programme accompanying the film: that sort of thing sells tickets. Forbidden fruit is the most tantalising of all!
Guardians of morality and art films
Appeals to the viewing public’s baser instincts were not alone in promoting ticket sales. In the early 1910s, moral guardians in Denmark and abroad increasingly began to regard the film medium as a new-fangled invention that coarsened and corrupted its audience. Then as now, the question of children and young people’s use of the new media spurred schoolteachers, politicians and church circles into action, rallying under the banners of virtue. The response from the film industry came promptly in the form of a massive effort to raise cinema to an art form. As was mentioned above, one route towards this end had already been taken: using actors from the world of theatre, an acknowledged highbrow form of entertainment, on film. The brief film career of Danish theatre diva Betty Nansen can be viewed in this light.
Well-respected names from the world of literature could also be used in the service of film art. Great efforts and resources were devoted to adapting the works of Danish and foreign authors, turning them into films – perhaps most notably when Nordisk collaborated with the German Nobel Prize winner Gerhard Hauptmann on a film adaptation of his novel Atlantis (1913). The poster and programme for the film are both adorned with Hauptmann’s countenance – in the programme he sports a commanding gaze and a windswept hairstyle quite suitable for a great man of letters!
Star intros and self-promotion
Film trailers emerge around 1913, too, albeit not in Denmark. However, so-called ‘star intros’ became a brief phenomenon in Danish film a few years later. A star intro is simply an opening sequence that introduces the biggest name(s) associated with the film, whether this is the lead actor, as in the case of The Candle and the Moth (1915), the renowned author of the novel behind the film, as in Lay Down Your Arms (1915), or the brilliant director showing his female star a model of the film’s sets, as in the case of Blind Justice (1916).
In the first of these examples, we are invited into Valdemar Psilander’s study to see the actor reading for his part of the preacher John Redmond, who duly comes into view in a double exposure – we are taken right inside the head of the greatest star of the time. In the next example, we meet the German author and pacifist Bertha von Suttner. She too is placed in what is supposedly a study, fiddling with some letters and notes. The scene is followed by a clip of the film’s female protagonist and its other stars in more or less theatrical poses. In the intro to Benjamin Christensen’s Blind Justice, we see Christensen with actress Karen Sandberg, the former using a pointer to show her around a model of the main location appearing in the film, Dr West’s house. Entirely in keeping with the rest of the promotional materials supporting the film, Christensen is paraded as the great creator behind the film – quite unsurprisingly, given that self-promotion on a scale veering towards the shameless was one of his signature traits. The poster for the movie is a case in point, serving up three versions of his face: as leading actor, comprising young and old versions of the character, and as the brilliant director behind this international masterpiece. See the poster for Blind Justice ('Hævnens Nat'):
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Nordisk Film, the company behind two of the above-mentioned films with intros, also did a small promotional flyover of the studios in Valby in 1915. Whether the aerial film was ever shown as actual advertising is not known for certain. What we do know, however, is that the filmmakers were perfectly aware that while film studios with glass roofs are interesting when seen from an airplane, human interest stories still attract the biggest audience. Accordingly, Valdemar Psilander is woven neatly into this small film historical nod to the audience.
The birth of film reviews
The first decades of the twentieth century saw very little newspaper coverage of the emerging film medium. The aforementioned cinema advertisements and occasional mentions of particularly scandalous films such as Lion Hunting and the controversial ‘based on a true story’ film The Murder on Funen (1907) are all you will find when searching for film-related press coverage up until the beginning of the 1910s. Actual film reviews where critics actively weigh up the qualities and shortcomings of individual films remained largely unknown until this point. In 1911, the newspaper Folkets Avis began to publish a recurring column headlined ‘Den stumme Scene’ – the Silent Scene. Here, films were written about in ways that go beyond the advertising format.
One of Denmark’s leading newspapers, Berlingske, later introduced a similar section under the same heading, but not until the 1920s did film criticism that takes the art of film seriously emerge alongside film journalism and celebrity gossip as we know them today. The tabloid BT was among the first dailies to devote column space to film, spreading knowledge of films and, especially, the film’s stars. Obviously, film producers could exploit this for marketing purposes. And reading these pieces is very instructive for anyone interested in the era’s popular culture.
Asta cigarettes or a Pat & Patachon beer: 1920s merchandise
The 1920s was also the decade when sales of another by-product of the movie star phenomenon took off in earnest: merchandise. Even back then, all sorts of things could be associated with cinematic universes or movie stars. Asta Nielsen’s rise to film diva status in Germany brought Asta soap, Asta cigarettes and the like onto the market down there. In Denmark, comedy duo Pat & Patachon were the leading figures of the merchandise movement. Included for your viewing pleasure here are a few pictures from the Film Institute’s collection of such artefacts.
Perhaps you’d like to try a Pat & Patachon beer? You can, of course, enjoy it from a Pat & Patachon glass. To complete the experience, why not lean against a mantelpiece adorned with a Pat & Patachon clock? Or a small porcelain figure of the two? If this does not appeal, we still urge you to spend some time in the company of one of European film’s greatest comedy duos; allow us to particularly recommend At the North Sea.
Because we too advertise Danish silent films. And in doing so, we keep alive a business cycle which was first set in motion 130 years ago. Of course, we call it ‘presenting cultural heritage’, not business, but nevertheless we will soon have spent 30 million Danish kroner on restoring, studying and digitising Danish silent films and large parts of the collections of other objects associated with them. So money is still being spent on helping silent film reach the public.
Let us end with an ‘advertisement’ for a curious archive find, specifically a shot from the production of Benjamin Christensen's The Witches (1922) in which a somewhat daring costume is being screen tested:
Lars-Martin Sørensen, Head of Research Unit | 27 August 2024
Poster Restoration
Stars selling films
Three 'star intros': Leading names presenting their film to the audience.
Valdemar Psilander
Leading actor Valdemar Psilander presenting 'The Candle and the Moth' (Holger-Madsen, Nordisk Films Kompagni, 1915).
Bertha von Suttner
The German author and pacifist Bertha von Suttner opening the adaption of her novel 'Lay Down Your Arms!' (Holger-Madsen, Nordisk Films Kompagni, 1915).
Christensen and Sandberg
In the intro to Benjamin Christensen's 'Blind Justice' (1916), Christensen himself shows actress Karen Sandberg around the film's main location using a pointer.
Related themes
Gallery
See a selection of original Pat & Patachon merchandise and explore some of the newly restored movie posters from our archive.