Danish Films about “White Slavery” as a Forerunner of the “Women's Question” in World Cinema

Abstract

The article examines number of Danish films about ‘white female slaves’ which did not only become a noticeable event in European filmmaking and gained popularity in Russia, but also marked the concern for the ‘women’s issue’ in world cinema.
Although small by modern standards, Danish cinema of the early 1910s had a significant impact on the world cinema. Far from being the European leader in the number of releases, it, nevertheless, managed to set the tone in the ‘cup-and saucer’ drama, start a fashion for ‘Danish melodrama’ and provocative movies, introduce the viewer to the ‘Danish kiss’ and generate a new ‘vamp’ heroines which would soon transform into the image of a new woman and mark the most important changes in the socio-cultural and socio-political life of society. Later all the Danish innovations would be picked up and developed by German, Soviet and American film industries.
Danish films exploited the controversial and taboo subject of human vice, sexuality and inter-gender relationships, often responding to current and sensational agendas. What the Russian pre-revolutionary press called “glamorizing the 20th century moral degradation” can in fact be also attributed to the film industry’s adaptation of scandal to its needs, i.e. the creation of an action-packed story. Thus, Danish film industry enters the international film market with the hot topic of “white slavery”.
The paper analyzes the films about “women's slavery” made in 1907–1912 and traces how the cultural and historical context of the time transformed the acute social theme of sexual slavery into an ideological construct of ‘new woman’ representing the ‘spirit of the time’ (German: Zeitgeist).