Denmark – The Realm of Silence

Bonn from afar (2025, day 7)

On Day 7 of Bonn, we are once more treated to a full feature film presentation. For today, we are off to Denmark with that nation’s most popular comic duo of the silent era…

Krudt med Knald (1931; Den.; Lau Lauritzen Sr). Long and Short (Carl Schenstrøm and Harald Madsen) live in a boarding house, flirting with their young neighbours – a nimble duo of roller-skating dancers (Marguerite Viby, Nina Kalckar) – and making friends with their older neighbour, the Inventor (Jørgen Lund). The latter has invented a proto-televisual system, which is highly prized by a sinister trio of men representing “United Electric”. The trio move into the pension, aiming to steal the Inventor’s drawings and also the girls upstairs. After inadvertently foiling one attempt to steal the drawings, Long and Short are hired as drivers by the trio. Thinking this will get them out the way, the trio take the girls for a drive – but are once more stopped in their plans of seduction by Long and Short. Meanwhile, the Inventor signs a deal to gain half the profits from his invention from United Electric. But the trio from the company want to steal them from their boss to gain all the profits themselves. The trio enlist Long and Short to help them break into the office and the safe where the plans are, and arrange that the duo get arrested in their place. But the duo escape and save the day, catching the trio and saving the Inventor. ENDE

I’ll be honest: I feared that I wouldn’t get on with this film. I have been aware of the Danish comic duo Fyrtårnet and Bivognen for some years. Many of their films, including today’s, have been long available for free via the DFI silent film portal. But without subtitles or music, this little thread of silent film history has never enticed me to battle through. (On this same theme, I have had a deluxe Film Archiv Austria DVD edition of the films of early Austrian slapstick duo Cocl and Seff on my shelf for years. Somehow, I’ve never quite been in the mood to unwrap and investigate.) Yet this is precisely the kind of hesitancy I should overcome. After all, Danish silent cinema is a much more complex and multifaceted body of work than as represented by the canonical films of Benjamin Christiansen and Carl-Th. Dreyer, or the stardom of Asta Nielsen and Valdemar Psilander. The comic duo Fyrtårnet (Carl Schenstrøm) and Bivognen (Harald Madsen) were wildly popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and not just in Denmark. As the DFI page dedicated to their work reveals, under the names “Pat and Patachon” they were also big stars in Germany. Indeed, even the English version of the DFI pages on the duo stick with the Germanified “Pat and Patachon” as their non-Danish character names. “Long and Short” seem to be the English equivalent, and I only know this thanks to the English subtitles available on this presentation from Bonn.

All of which is to say that I was utterly unprepared for how much I enjoyed Krudt med Knald. I was also unprepared for the rhythm of the film, and how this heightened the pleasure of watching it. Though Long and Short (to reinstate their English aliases) are slapstick performers, the timing and execution of their gags do not attempt the speed or sheer breathtaking cleverness of Keaton, Lloyd, or Chaplin. They are a shambling, mostly slow-moving pair. One can follow their thought patterns more readily, watch their logic slowly unfold with everyday velocity. The opening scene is about neither character wanting to get up before the other: the Keaton-esque pulley system to tip one another out of bed is not especially sophisticated. (As compared to Keaton’s house in The Scarecrow (1920), for example.) But it’s character that seems to drive the gags, not the gags that define the character. It’s the mutual stubbornness, and the ultimately comradely and good-natured conclusion of the scene, that comes across – and brings the laughs.

The world they inhabit is also exceedingly well observed. The lengthy meal scene at their boarding house, overseen by the large landlady, is filled with brilliant touches. While the gags about increasingly large/tall/long-limbed neighbours at the table is good, if not necessarily sophisticated, the real laughs come from the manners and mores of the setting. The film cuts from the duo’s resigned efforts to make the most of their miserly portions to wall-mounted slogans about the health benefits of privation: “Keep sound: Don’t eat too much.” “To eat one’s fill is to eat too much.” “The less you eat, the better you feel.” The efforts of Long and Short to fit in (literally and metaphorically) to the pretensions of their petit-bourgeois hostess is marvellous.

Later, there is another rather shambling sequence involving a sleepwalking Short, who walks along the rooftop of the boarding house and frightens the inhabitants. A rooftop sleepwalking sequence is hardly novel (especially for 1931), and it doesn’t pretend to offer the suspense or drama of the stunt work of a Keaton or Lloyd. But what it does instead is take the opportunity to poke fun at the landlady and her friends, who are busy having a séance. When the landlady sees the silhouette of Short, wrapped in his bedsheet, she screams: “It was Napoleon!” It’s a brilliant gag, in which the landlady’s fear also boasts of her pretension at having summoned a mighty name of history to her boarding house séance. The payoff, too, is surprising. For Short’s friends all rally round him and they form a little community, gathered round the Inventor in mutual support.

Time and again, I was surprised by how plot lines or details of character developed in unexpected directions. For example, the Inventor is portrayed initially as a comic figure, inspired by drink. “At the bottom: that’s where the good ideas are!”, the Inventor explains to Long and Short, motioning to his bottle of liqueur. “I’ve never found anything up there”, he adds, pointing to the top of the bottle. It’s a marvellous line. (And the kind of joke about drink and human foibles that still inflects Danish cinema today.) But it also marks the old man as vulnerable and human, facets which foster his friendship with Long and Short, and with the two performing girls.

Regarding the latter, I was also very touched at how Long and Short treat them with almost chaste respect. There is no romance as such, just a kind of comradely innocence and mutual respect. The pleasure of their relationship is not so much the prospect of romantic love as of protective friendship. We first meet the girls on the rooftop of the boarding house, where they are trying out their new “number” on roller-skates. It’s an entirely unnecessary sequence, as far as narrative is concerned, but it’s utterly, utterly delightful. Filmed on an actual rooftop overlooking the city (Copenhagen, one assumes – but I’ll gladly be corrected), there is a real sense of freedom and space – but a freedom and space that are also limited. It’s a moment of joy, demarcated in this small, somewhat precarious space, but set against the bright, open sky and the huge sweep of the cityscape. It’s more than charming or silly, it’s really rather beautiful.

Indeed, there are many moments like this, when the use of location is more than merely incidental but striking and beautiful. The yard where Long and Short are employed to move barrels has some amazing piles of materiel, used to striking effect in some compositions (as when the dup appear right on top of a mountain of barrels) – and for an extended and wonderful sequence involving hiding from the police among the barrels. Here again, it’s not so much the speed of the chase as the sheer extension of the gag: Long and Short popping up and down at random places amid the barrels, while an ever-increasing number of policemen crawl into the maze.

Later, there are also some gorgeous glimpses of the summer landscape. There is a shot of the duo driving through a wheat field in which we see only their heads and shoulders moving through the crop. The sky is bright, the wheat is swaying in the breeze. It’s a surreal sight, wonderfully shot and composed. But there is also great beauty in the way the scene shows us the sweep of countryside. The scene lingers just long enough for the sway of the crop and the treetops to become a subject of contemplation. Even in the middle of a chase sequence, the film is paced and short such as to have an interest that is more than merely narrative.

Krudt med Knald is also weirdly moving. I’ve tried to explain above how the rhythm of the film allows for an accrued sense of emotional engagement – at least with this viewer. So when we see the Inventor, the duo, and the girls join forces and make friends in the boarding house – not just sticking together but living together in one toom – I was genuinely glad that these people – poor, struggling, disappointed, but hopeful – came together. Whenever there is misfortune to any of them, they come together to commiserate or reassure. When Long and Short finally earn some money, the first thing they do is buy food and drink to share with their friends.

That the film successfully mobilizes a sense of emotional connection is really felt near the end. When, near the end, Long and Short have been supposedly caught in the act of stealing the Inventor’s plans to give to the criminal trio, all their friends are present to witness their arrest by the police. The moment when the girls and the Inventor believe that the duo have betrayed them packs far more emotional punch than I expected. It’s not the outrage at false accusation that stings so much as the hurt of betrayal by those they believed were their friends. It’s very subtly played. (One can imagine a Hollywood production laying it on more thickly.) And it’s the subtleness that gives it an emotional reality, an emotional edge. So it’s all the more effective when we see the group all together in the final scene, where a dinner has been arranged to celebrate the Inventor’s success with United Electric. “This is one of the happiest days of my life!”, the Inventor says. “And I am fill of the deepest gratitude… especially towards my two friends…” – and here his hand falls for a moment on Long’s shoulder. His words, and the performances here, make this moment surprisingly touching. Isn’t it nice to feel happy for such characters? It isn’t the neatness of the narrative resolution, it’s the cumulative sense of comradery build up between character, and between them and us, that makes the end effective.

I should also mention that the film’s title Krudt med Knald seems literally to translate as “Gunpowder with a bang”, but is translated in this presentation as “Long and Short invent Gunpowder”. Original and given titles are both somewhat misleading, but this seems to me rather typical of the film’s approach. One subplot is indeed about Short trying to concoct his own brand of gunpowder. He is inspired by the Inventor’s reliance on alcohol to fuel his inventiveness, so starts guzzling bottles to receive inspiration. It’s a silly plotline, one that interacts only tangentially with the main storyline of the Inventor and his drawings. But it is the source of some good gags, especially the postscript to the final dinner scene. Here, Short is ready to show off his own invention to the assembled cast. As he prepares his experiment, the film cuts back and forth from Short’s preparations (the danger of which looks increasingly alarming) to the guests leaving, one-by-one. The time this gag takes to unfold is typical of the film’s rhythm: it’s quite slow, but the sheer elaboration of the single gag attains its own humour. The pay-off is exactly as one would expect: there is a huge explosion, with Long and Short emerging, smoke-blackened and in tatters, from the wreckage of the room. But the pleasure is not in being surprised, so much as in seeing the inevitable conclusion of this plotline, so long prepared and so inevitable that the sheer pointlessness of it – and its stubborn and unnecessary pursuit – is itself the source of humour. By this point, I had already been totally won over by the film. The cumulative silliness had me chuckling throughout Short’s demonstration. And the final shot, of both characters looking directly at the camera, is both funny and touching. Their look is not one of pleading or bafflement or attention-seeking, but a pleasing moment of engagement from character to spectator. And the way Long strokes away the ash from Short’s head – an act of cleanliness, yes, but more a gesture of care and affection – sums up the curious emotional tenor of the film. It’s deadline and funny and moving all at once. A lovely way to end.

The presentation of Krudt med Knald via the DFI portal is with replacement (i.e. modern, digital) intertitles in Danish. There is neither music for subtitle options, so while looking great the video is useful only to the more devotedly interested. As presented here at Bonn, the film has new digital German titles (a sensible option, given that no original aesthetic is being lost) and optional English subtitles. There is also a pleasing musical accompaniment for electric guitar and piano by Tobias Stutz and Felix Ohlert. Like the film, the music has an amiable, rambling quality that suits what I might call the gentleness of the film. While I am curious about the kind of musical accompaniment available in 1931, it was nice to see the film with music that didn’t overstate itself. It’s a curiously subtle film, one that might easily be overpowered by too strident a score.

So, overall, a very pleasant experience. I’m so glad that I’ve finally seen something with Fyrtårnet and Bivognen, as they have been on my horizon for years. While their films have been available via the DFI, this is the first time I’ve had the chance to see one presented in such a way that I gladly seized the chance to sit down and watch it. (As a foot note to the pertinence of programming this film, it was a pleasure to see the Danish director Holger-Madsen playing the small role of the detective. Given that we saw one of his films on Day 4 of Bonn this year, and that I have recently been trying to track down a copy of one of his German films of late, it was rather nice to see the man himself, alive and well and very much not lost from history.)

In sum, Krudt med Knald was a delightful surprise. But that’s rather what I’ve come to expect from the programme at Bonn.

Paul Cuff

Bonn from afar (2024, days 1 and 2)

Not going to silent film festivals is becoming something of a habit, if not a hobby. In October I don’t go to Pordenone, and now in August I’ve begun not going to Bonn. As with Pordenone, the Stummfilmtage Bonn (aka the Bonn International Silent Film Festival) offers a “streamed” festival for viewers like me who, for various reasons, cannot attend in person. (I consider not going to Bonn a kind of pre-season training for not going to Pordenone.) Unlike Pordenone, however, the online content of the Bonn festival is free. Each film is available for 48 hours after each screening. No fees, no obligations – just a (quite generous) time limit. I aspire to one day having the kind of lifestyle that enables me to go to some, any, or all, of the wonderful festivals partially or wholly dedicated to silent film across the summer months – Bristol, Bologna, Bonn, Berlin (the “Ufa filmnächte”), Pordenone. But until this magical surfeit of time and budget is forthcoming, I shall remain at home, eagerly scrambling to fit in at least a couple of weeks’ worth of cinema into my free time. So, this week (or rather, last week) I’m not going to Bonn, and can share my experience of staying at home. First up, days one and two (and spoilers galore)…

Day 1: Du skal ære din hustru (1925; Den.; Carl Th. Dreyer)

I must admit that I considered not watching this film simply because I knew it well from previous viewings. (And have its BFI release on my shelf.) I further admit that if this film had been part of the streamed content of Pordenone (i.e. if I had to pay for it), I would have been annoyed that something so readily available should be chosen over something not otherwise accessible. It’s a film that I have seen before, but never on a big screen and never with live music. If I was actually at Bonn, I would be delighted to see it again – and to see it for the first time in such circumstances. I can understand why festivals put on films that are well-known or made by well-known filmmakers. But the appeal is much less for a viewer who is streaming the film remotely and not gaining anything new from the process.

That said, I still watched Du skal ære din hustru. I’d not seen it in years, possibly not even on Blu-ray. (The copy on my shelf is, now that I think about it, unwrapped.) So why not join in, however tepidly?

Do we all know the plot? Well, just to remind you: Viktor and Ida have been married for years, but Viktor is a domestic tyrant – ungrateful, unthinking, inconsiderate, rude, and subtly cruel. Despite their three children and former happy times, Ida is convinced by her mother and by the family’s old maid, Mads, to leave home. Mads plans to turn the tables on Viktor and make him realize how lucky he is, and how unjust he has been. Seeing the hardship of housekeeping firsthand, Viktor begins to realize his guilt – and eventually the couple are reunited on a firmer basis.

Of course, I was a fool to have thought of skipping this film: it’s a masterpiece. I’d forgotten how perfect it was. I fell all over again for the exquisite photography, those soft yet dark irises – like curtains around the frame, that distance the mid-shots of husband and wife. And I’d forgotten the first real close-up of Viktor, and the extraordinary depth of his eyes – and the way the light catches them and seems to magnify their life and feeling. This shot comes almost exactly halfway through the film, and I was unprepared for its power. So too, I was struck by the minimal number of moments when characters touch each other gently, with kindness. That close-up of the fingers of Viktor’s oldest daughter shyly reaching over to his, the way his respond – and you realize that he has a heart, and a past that was loving, and a future that might rekindle that love. An exquisite moment. So too the skill of rendering Mads teaching Viktor a “lesson” both funny and touching: the reversal of his cruelties, but also the desire to find his goodness. I’d forgotten, too, the embrace of Viktor and Ida: the way it’s a private moment, with Viktor’s back to us, and we see Ida’s hands move over his shoulders. Perfect.

By the end, I felt like Viktor: I had taken something for granted and was glad to be taught a lesson. You can and should always rewatch a great film. It has plenty still to teach you.

Day 2: Jûjiro (1928; Jap.; Teinosuke Kinugasa)

Right, now we’re back on track. A real rarity! Unavailable in any other format! Kinugasa’s film seems to have been released under multiple English-language titles. It’s listed variously as “Crossways”, “Crossroads”, and “Slums of Tokyo”. The dual German-English intertitles of this print gave the title as “In the Shadow of Yoshiwara”. There were no restoration credits to clarify the source of this print, which made me wonder about its provenance. There are evidently some missing titles, if not other material. (For example, one title announces “end of fourth act” despite no other “act” titles appearing in the print.) Furthermore, the English text is often awkward and rife with spelling errors. (The wording offers some very literal translations of the German text.) When and where was this print made?

This reservation aside, the film was excellent. The plot is simple, the drama concentrated – claustrophobic. In c.1850 Tokyo, a brother and sister live in a poor flat near Yoshiwara, the red-light district. The brother hangs out amid the frenzied atmosphere of gambling, stealing, and whoring. He is obsessed with O-Ume, who works in a brothel. He fights a rival for her affections, but the rival blinds him with ash. Believing he has killed his opponent, the blinded brother finds his way home. But the sister needs money to help him, so she is faced with selling herself either to her creepy neighbour or to the procuress of the brothel. The brother’s blindness is lifted in time to witness his sister stabbing the neighbour in self-defence. The pair flee to the city’s outskirts, but the brother is drawn back to O-Ume. He sees her with the rival he believed he had killed. His blindness returns; he collapses and dies in a fit of madness. END.

If the plot is mundane, the realization is superb. There are multiple flashbacks, which makes the narrative more complex – more subjective, more strange – than the above synopsis suggests. But it’s the world of the film that is so compelling. The whole story seems to take place at night, or else within a kind of contained nightmare. That might be a starless sky overhead, but it might as well be the void of any reality beyond the comfortless tenements and cacophony of the gambling dens and brothel. It is a forbidding, studio-bound world. It rains (and often you can see the characters’ breath) but there is no sense of the natural world beyond the dark streets, the grimy interiors. The characters who inhabit this place are, apart from the sister, forbidding and grotesque. From the frenzied brother, forever clutching his face, his throat, his blinded eyes, to the creepy, toothless neighbour, the sinister procuress, the bandaged rival and the cackling O-Ume – everyone is unwelcoming, exploitative, angry. The sets in which these characters live, or struggle to live, are marvellous. There are realistically threadbare walls, tattered paper doors, broken windows, forbidding staircases. The world of Yoshiwara is more complex, with multiple interior spaces joined by ornate panels, blinds, windows within windows. Kinugasa turns this space into a bewildering, overwhelming maze: swinging lanterns, spinning umbrellas, tumbling betting balls. And all filled with the mad bustle of drinking, gambling, laughing crowds. The combination of studio-bound sets, dim spaces, and claustrophobia feels very expressionist. (The theme of a wayward man abandoning a homebound woman – not to mention its moody rendering – made me think of Die Straße (1923), shown at Pordenone last year.)

This transformation of physical space into psychological space is heightened by Kinugasa’s superb camerawork. There is a wonderful array of dramatic lighting, sudden close-ups, creeping tracking shots, sinister high-angle viewpoints. Just see how the first montage of the Yoshiwara gambling dens is rendered more effective by the prowling camera, the hallucinatory superimpositions, the leering close-ups. There is a fascinating balance between subjectivity and objectivity in the way the camera shares and/or observes the way characters experience the world. When the brother is blinded, for example, there is a dazzling flurry of pockmarks and lightning bolts that bubbles over the screen: we share the brother’s onrush of terror and bewilderment. But immediately afterwards, as the brother stumbles back and forth through the cackling crowd of gamblers, the camera pitilessly tracks back and forth, keeping its distance, watching him fall apart. The shock of subjectivity is followed by the chill of detachment.

The film’s blend of melodrama and expressionism comes to its climax in the final scenes. The brother recovers from his blindness, and we see the world as he sees it: darkness distorting, weird patches of light, solid objects rippling. But the reality he wakes to is like a living nightmare: the toothless, dishevelled neighbour assaulting his sister, the body falling before him. A series of dissolves transform the scene into a kind of vision, as though these images were also emerging from the brother’s former blindness. The siblings’ rush through the dark and rain is equally nightmarish, and the hut in which they shelter hardly comforting. Their bodies are soaked, and the marvellous detail of steam rising from their shoulders is both realistic and expressive. The titular crossroads of the film appears at the end like a slice of another nightmare. It’s two pale streaks of pathway, crisscrossing a despairingly black landscape. Dim, bare trees in the foreground, dim, distant houses in the distance. The brother crosses this otherworldly space to reach Yoshiwara, where he sees O-Ume and the rival he imagined he has killed. With a rapid montage of hallucinatory images, superimpositions, and distortions, he clutches his eyes and collapses – “This is the end!” he screams. And it is. There’s just one last scene: here is the sister, alone at the crossroads, hesitant, afraid. It’s a superbly disquieting ending to this bleak and gripping film. With touches of German expressionism ala Fritz Lang and French impressionism ala Abel Gance, Kinugasa’s Jûjiro still holds its own – it’s a concentrated, nightmarish, unsettling film.

I must finish by praising the musical accompaniment, which performed on piano and violin by Sabrina Zimmermann and Mark Pogolski. Their score was atmospheric, dramatic, and perfectly in keeping with the mood and tempo of the film. Bravo.

Paul Cuff