When Urban Gad died of a stroke at age 68 in December 1947, the license for the Grand Teater cinema in downtown Copenhagen that he had run since early 1923 became available. Among the applicants for the license were his widow, the German actress Esther Burgert von Westenhagen (1896-1974), known professionally as Esther Hagan, and his ex-wife, Asta Nielsen (1881-1972). In local newspaper coverage of the selection process, some people argued that Asta should be given the license as a form of poetic justice, while others defended Esther’s qualifications, honed over years of working alongside her husband. The Danish cinema license system, established by the 1922 Cinema Law and revised in 1933 and 1938, gave preference to surviving spouses who wanted to take over a deceased partner’s license, provided they had the necessary skills and experience to continue operating the cinema. The minister of justice decided in Esther’s favor, awarding her the license in July 1948. It was Nielsen’s tenth or eleventh rejection for a cinema license, and it stung. Esther Gad ran the Grand cinema for the next twenty-five years, until shortly before her own death in October 1974. There is much more to this story than the rivalry between Gad’s two wives, however. It is a window into a fascinating period in Danish social and cinema history, as well as into an underexamined phase of Nielsen’s life.
As she mentioned in several interviews, Nielsen regarded each denial of a cinema license as yet more proof that her countrymen resented her for her success in the German film industry, but the evidence tells a much more complicated story about the cultural politics of cinema exhibition that challenges Nielsen’s narrative of personal victimhood. Nielsen’s repeated, unsuccessful applications reveal the high financial and cultural stakes of film exhibition in twentieth-century Denmark. The entire cinema license selection process, from the posting of an available license to the announcement of a new licensee, was covered by local newspapers in detail, which suggests that readers were keenly interested in who got the licenses and that much more was at stake in each case than just a hiring decision. As vehicles for the transmission of ideas and values, moving pictures were a cultural flashpoint in Denmark from their earliest days, which the Danish state sought to influence by regulating who ran cinemas and thus made programming decisions. Thanks initially to a nineteenth-century law about public entertainments and then a series of cinema laws that reinforced and refined the licensing system, the Ministry of Justice was responsible for overseeing the selection process and all other questions relating to the exhibition of films in Denmark, which resulted in the creation of a vast archive of applications, license renewals, correspondence, and financial reports about Danish cinemas in the twentieth century.
In the five decades it was formally in place, from 1922 to 1972, the Danish cinema license system was both a major source of income for the Danish state, as licensees had to pay a considerable share of their profits back in fees, and a desirable, high-status employment opportunity for members of the Danish theatrical, film, and fine arts community. While there is an element of truth to the widespread perception that cinema licenses functioned as a type of state pension for aging artists, the reality is that there were far fewer licenses available than people entitled by such a standard to receive them, so the selection process was paradoxically both rigorous and somewhat arbitrary. By selecting licensees who were perceived to be the best qualified — on the basis of their prior accomplishments in the theatrical and cinematic arts — to provide high-quality film programming to audiences, the Danish state promoted the development of an extremely intimate cinema landscape, while also, perhaps inadvertently, denying production companies access to box office revenue as a means of financing other productions or developing vertically integrated studios. In sharp contrast to the anonymized corporate character of cinema chains in Denmark today, audience members in the mid-twentieth century knew and cared about who ran their local cinemas. This made the selection of cinema licensees intensely personal on one hand and highly political on the other, and yet not truly either, since each decision was affected by a variety of external circumstances. Nielsen took her failure to be awarded a cinema license as a personal affront, based on a perceived narrative about her questionable national affinities, but an in-depth examination of the relevant files in the voluminous archives of the Ministry of Justice confirms that many other factors came into play, from the number of licenses available at any given time to the makeup of the applicant pool for a particular cinema. This article draws heavily on those files for details of the various applications submitted for the cinemas discussed below.
Asta’s application for the Grand in 1948 was one of her last attempts to get a cinema license in Copenhagen, after she had been disappointed nearly a dozen times over a span of nearly three decades. She and Urban had both applied for a cinema license the first time in 1920, five years after their separation and almost two years after their divorce was finalized. They were both unsuccessful the first time, since the number of cinemas in Copenhagen was strictly limited, but when Gad applied again in 1922, right after the passage of the Cinema Law that dramatically expanded the number of cinema licenses in Copenhagen, Gad was given the license for the Grand, which he ran for the rest of his life. Having lost her Danish citizenship when she married the Swede Freddy Wingårdh in 1919, Asta became ineligible to apply for a license under the new law.
After moving back to Copenhagen from Berlin in 1937 and reclaiming her Danish citizenship, Nielsen applied another ten or twelve times, but she never managed to attain her goal. The closest she came to getting a license was for the Triangel cinema in Copenhagen in 1948, when the Film Council recommended Nielsen, out of 54 applicants — including the former’s licensee’s widow Ingeborg and his son Knud Jørgensen — for the license. Instead, however, the license went to Knud, who had the support of the Danish Exhibitors’ Association. Nevertheless, several German newspapers articles and film histories from the 1950s and 60s describe Nielsen as having received a cinema license, some painting a rather pathetic picture of the great diva sitting perched on a stool in the ticket booth instead of on screen (Zglinicki 1956, 453). Some people, notably Nordisk’s distribution chief Olaf Dalsgaard-Olsen, publicly speculated that Nielsen had been denied the license because of a perception among Danes that she was too pro-German (Nielsen 2022, 13), but in reality the selection process was quite complex, unpredictable, and competitive, reflecting the shifting political, economic, and social priorities of inter- and postwar Danish society.
Nielsen's first cinema license application, 1920
Immediately after World War I, Nielsen returned to Berlin with her second husband Freddy Wingårdh (1884-1967) to begin making films again after a few fairly unproductive years in Copenhagen (aside from a single Nordisk film, Mod Lyset (Towards the Light, Holger-Madsen, DK, 1919)). With funding from Wingårdh’s family, she founded her own production company, Art Film, and undertook some of the most artistically ambitious projects of her career, including a gender-bending adaptation of Hamlet (Svend Gade, DE, 1921). Yet amidst this flurry of filmmaking activity, the nearly 40-year-old Nielsen decided to try to cover her bets in a financially unstable, inflation-ridden interwar Europe by applying to run a cinema in Copenhagen.
Dated October 11, 1920, before a standardized application form had been introduced, Nielsen’s first cinema license application consists of a single, typed, highly formal letter addressed to the Danish king. In this letter, Nielsen attributes her need for a cinema license to the physical costs of the acting profession, which she and her doctor did not think she would be able to endure for much longer. In order to underscore her claim of deep familiarity with film technique that would allow her to “accomplish truly artistically meaningful work as director of a Copenhagen cinema,” she reminds her intended audience (the king and his minister of justice) that she has “striven to my utmost ability to elevate film acting to true art, that I have had a groundbreaking effect in international film art around the world, and have sought to the best of my ability to bring honor to my country and my name as a Danish actress.” She expresses her hope that these accomplishments will weigh in favor of being granted a license for a Copenhagen cinema that would bear her name and “be directed according to the artistic principles I have followed as an actress.” The attribution of her own fame to the enhancement of her country’s reputation is a savvy rhetorical move that reflects her high status in Denmark in the 1910s.
The first page of Asta Nielsen’s initial application for a cinema license in Copenhagen, October 1920.
Nielsen accompanied her application with a handwritten letter of support from the renowned Danish literary and cultural critic Georg Brandes, with whom she had been close friends for nearly a decade. Brandes offered a very strong endorsement of Nielsen’s contributions to film as an art form:
In my, and likely almost everyone’s, opinion, there is no one more qualified to be considered for the privilege of running such a theater than the woman who is the first person, not just in Denmark but anywhere, to make film into an art form. Asta Nielsen’s fame is global. For a long time the term “film” was practically synonymous with Asta Nielsen’s name. (…) Everyone who knows of this talented lady’s contributions to the art form that her abilities have enabled to reach its current heights will confess that no one is better suited to directing a cinema.
As the literary critic most associated with the naturalistic Modern Breakthrough in the Nordic countries and Germany, Brandes’s judgement on artistic matters was highly regarded. He also included two newspaper articles about Nielsen’s new Hamlet film, one in Danish and the other in Swedish. Rather than elaborating on Nielsen’s artistic aptitude for cinema management, however, Brandes devotes the bulk of his letter to describing the health problems caused by working in unheated and uncooled film ateliers by the light of quicksilver lamps, which can damage the eyes, and calling attention to Nielsen’s advancing age. Brandes recommends giving Nielsen a downtown cinema bearing her name in order to spare her such inhumane conditions, promising that if she had a cinema, she could manage it and still perform in a few films per year. Such a sympathy-inducing approach was rarely successful, as comparable, equally unsuccessful applications from other actors, including the stuntwoman Emilie Sannom (1886-1931) in 1928, can confirm. Despite Brandes’s support, Nielsen’s initial application was unsuccessful, perhaps because of its narrow personal focus, but more likely because there were simply no licenses available at that time.
For the sake of comparison, it bears noting that Urban Gad, who was also making films in Germany again in this period, submitted his first application for a cinema license six months before Asta Nielsen, in May 1920. His initial application consists of two letters — one to the minister of justice, the other to King Christian X, in which he expresses his views about the central role of film as one of the most important factors in modern society in “with regard to popular education” and his intention of using a cinema to help rebuild the Danish film industry, both artistically and economically. Citing statistics about the importance of the film industries in the US, Sweden, and Germany, Gad pivots to argue for film’s role in Danish nation branding:
Apart from the purely socio-economic significance for the country that a Danish film industry could have, it would perform a no less important task by, so to speak, showing our colors in countries that hardly know Denmark’s name otherwise; there was a time when Danish film spread knowledge of and interest in our country to the farthest regions, as is now the case with Sweden, and the propaganda about America’s greatness and wealth that is presented daily on thousands of white screens for millions of viewers around the whole earth is certainly immense.
Having established film’s centrality to cultural politics while omitting the fact that he had nearly exclusively made films in Germany between 1911 and 1920, Gad attributes the decline of the Danish film industry in the post-World War I era to the fact that “cinema licenses have often been awarded more on a charitable basis than with an eye to the flourishing of cinema as a factor in public education,” which anticipates the selection criteria that would be enshrined in the cinema law of 1922. Gad acknowledges that he does not have experience running a business but expresses hope that “the honored ministry will be familiar with my many years of activity in the service of artistic film, as well as my publications on film theory,” primarily Filmen. Dens Midler og Maal [Film. Its Means and Goals], his book-length treatise on cinematography that had been published in 1919.
The first page of Urban Gad’s initial application for a cinema license in Copenhagen, May 1920.
Instead of a letter of support, Gad’s application included an endorsement list of thirty-three of Copenhagen’s intellectual and cultural elites, including Brandes, the authors Henri Nathansen and Sophus Michaëlis, and several actors. Gad promises, if awarded the license, to “regard it as my goal to relocate my extensive activities abroad to Denmark in order to attempt to contribute to rebuilding the fallen reputation of Danish film. At the same time, I will strive, as I described in my book … to create a large and cheerful public cinema with low admission prices, which Copenhagen yet lacks.” He concludes by expressing his gratitude for being considered for a cinema license and vowing “to assemble significant forces in our country around a business that can disseminate knowledge of and interest for Denmark to distant lands.” Despite the fervently patriotic tenor of his application and his illustrious list of endorsements, Gad did not receive a license right away either.
Undaunted, Gad reapplied in April 1922, just weeks after the passage of the 1922 Cinema Law cleared the way to permit the establishment of eighteen new cinemas in different neighborhoods across Copenhagen (Sandfeld 1966, 367). In this new application, Gad promises to bring his filmmaking business with him from Germany in order to “contribute, according to his abilities, to the resurrection of the Danish film industry.” He applied specifically for a license for Det lille Teater on Vesterbrogade, a live theater that Frede Skaarup had been trying to convert into a cinema, Svend Nielsen’s Biorama on Østerbrogade which had become available upon Nielsen’s death in January 1922, or somewhere equally centrally located, with the hope of moving soon to a larger cinema “which could properly frame important film premieres.” This time around, Gad was successful, part of the wave of new cinema directors, and he gave up his directorial career in Berlin to return to Copenhagen, where he married Esther Burgert von Westenhagen on Christmas day, 1922. As of January 1, 1923, he was given a license, together with the activist writer Thora Daugaard, to run a cinema in the area near the main shopping street downtown, between Frederiksberggade and Østergade, which ended up being the Grand Teater in Mikkel Bryggersgade, located in the back of the Palads Hotel (Sandfeld 1966, 374).
Competition for Copenhagen cinema licenses, 1938-43
Pursuing a successful film and stage career in Germany kept Asta Nielsen busy enough that she didn't apply again for a cinema license in the 1920s or early 1930s. She may also have been discouraged by the public scandal surrounding director Benjamin Christensen, who received a joint license for the Park Theater in 1922 but lost it in 1930 because he was living in the US. Nielsen’s life and career in Germany in the 1930s were complicated by her advancing age — she turned 50 in 1931 — and the rise of the National Socialist regime, which demanded ideological loyalty from artists to be allowed to continue working, but she was surrounded by friends and family and enjoyed owning her first home, a cottage known as Karusel on the German Baltic Sea island Hiddensee. She had divorced Wingårdh in 1923 and lived in a common-law relationship with the Ukrainian actor Grigori Chmara (1893-1970) from 1923 until around 1933, then she embarked on a long-distance relationship with a German violinist from Ulm named Rudolf Mendler, who was 26 years her junior. That relationship eventually petered out during Mendler’s military service in World War II, but Nielsen decided to relocate permanently back to Copenhagen in mid-1937, two full years before the outbreak of war.
Nielsen appears to have submitted an inquiry to the Ministry of Justice about applying again for a cinema license in 1937, shortly after her return to Denmark. While her inquiry has not been preserved, a note in the Ministry of Justice files dated September 10, 1937, explains that Nielsen had automatically lost her Danish citizenship when she married Wingårdh, who was Swedish, and was therefore ineligible to hold a cinema license. This citizenship law was in force until reform act nr. 252 was adopted by the Danish parliament on May 27, 1950, which allowed married women to hold citizenship independently of their husbands. Since she had been divorced from Wingårdh for over a decade already, Nielsen successfully petitioned the Department of the Interior to restore her Danish citizenship on May 14, 1938, which made it possible for her to begin applying for cinema licenses as they became available.
Ministry of Justice note about Nielsen’s ineligibility for a cinema license in 1937.
The competition for cinema licenses in Copenhagen in the 1930s and 40s was fierce, with dozens of applicants for each license. The many people who wrote to the Ministry of Justice asking about applying for a cinema license were instructed to watch for vacancies announced in the government newspaper, Statstidende. Most cinemas in the metropolitan area were profitable, even after heavy licensing fees and entertainment taxes were paid to the state, so people tended to apply for every available license. Some people, such as author Paul Knudsen, applied for dozens of cinema licenses without ever being awarded one, while other people, such as the nationally famous actress and film director Bodil Ipsen, applied only once or twice before being selected. As elderly licensees died, licenses became available. In 1943, for example, the licenses for Odeon Teatret, Rio Bio, and Enghave Bio were opened for applications, and Nielsen applied for all three, as did the internationally renowned actor and film director Benjamin Christensen and director Svend Gade (who had directed Nielsen’s Hamlet film in 1921). Odeon was given to Ipsen, who was applying for a license for the first time; Rio Bio went to Christensen, who had lost his earlier license for the Park Theater because he lived in California while working in Hollywood; and Enghave Bio was granted to Lotte Sara Madsen, widow of film director Holger-Madsen, who had been the director of Enghave Bio since it first opened in 1938, even though she had fled to Sweden because of the Nazi occupation. Although the licenses were no longer automatically given to a surviving spouse, it was still very common for a widow to take over her deceased husband’s license. Seven of the 12 licenses Nielsen applied for between 1938 and 1948 went to the widows of the previous license holders, including Lotte Sara Madsen and Esther Gad.
By the late 1930s, after the revisions of the cinema law in 1933 and 1938, the procedure for applying for a cinema license was much more standardized than it had been when Nielsen and Gad applied in 1920. Applicants had to confirm that they held Danish citizenship, lived in the area near the cinema they sought, were not incapacitated in any way, did not have a criminal record, had access to sufficient capital, possessed the requisite artistic and business skills to manage a cinema, and were not employees, investors, owners, or representatives of any film production or distribution companies. The relevant municipal police department had to verify the applicant’s statements and confirm their accuracy to the selection committees. Given the law’s stated preference for people with artistic qualifications, applicant pools for cinema licenses were disproportionately made up of people from theatrical, literary, musical, and artistic professions. The 85 applicants for Enghave Bio in 1943, for example, included five theater and film directors, nineteen stage and screen actors, five photographers, five authors, two editors, eight musicians, and five people who were already cinema managers but hoped to move to a more lucrative, modern, and prestigious theater. There was little room for personal, freeform letters of the type both Nielsen and Gad had submitted in 1920. Applications now included a life narrative that laid out the applicant’s educational and professional accomplishments, accompanied by the abovementioned legal and financial declarations.
Bodil Ipsen (Photo: Danish Film Institute), Benjamin Christensen (Photo: Danish Film Institute), and Esther Gad (Sketch: Likie Stork in Nationaltidende p. 7, April 19 1953).
Despite the formalization of the process, it still took a long time to select new licensees, sometimes more than a year, because the process involved so many stakeholders. For Copenhagen cinemas, the Ministry of Justice delegated the selection process to the Film Council (newly established by the 1938 Cinema Law), a municipal committee, and the Copenhagen police department, who each submitted their recommendations to the minister. In most cases, the police department collated the applications, sorted them, and identified a short list of the most viable candidates as determined by the police department and the municipal committee before forwarding all the files to the Ministry of Justice. In the case of Enghave Bio, the police department recommended the actor Kaj Emil Holm, who was already a cinema manager elsewhere; cinematographer Johan Valdemar Ankerstjerne; and film directors Benjamin Christensen, Arne Weel, and Svend Gade, while the Copenhagen municipal committee endorsed Svend Gade. Only the Film Council recommended that the license be given to Lotte Sara Madsen, who had been running Enghave Bio with and then for her husband during the last years of his life. Six members of the council voted for Arne Weel as their second choice, while three endorsed Svend Gade. Asta Nielsen didn’t even make it past the first selection round for Enghave Bio. Her application for Odeon was at least included among those in the viable category but did not receive serious consideration alongside Ipsen, Christensen, Gade, Weel, Ankerstjerne, film censor Olaf Fønss, and Nordisk’s distribution director, Olaf Dalsgaard-Olsen; the shortlist consisted of Ipsen, Fønss, Dalsgaard Olsen, and Ankerstjerne. Out of 81 applicants for Rio Bio, Nielsen was third on the municipal committee’s preference list, but Christensen was the clear favorite of the Film Council and police department.
Triangel cinema in 1937 (Copenhagen Museum).
The End of the Road, 1947-48
By the time the license for the Triangel cinema became available upon the death of Ingvar Jørgensen on June 24, 1947, Nielsen had already begun to lose hope that she would ever receive a cinema license, even though she was in good company with the many other people, including film director Alice O’Fredericks, who had applied many times without success. Given her tenacity at applying so doggedly in the face of frequent rejection, it is worth considering why she wanted a license so badly.
One reason was likely financial security. The perception that a cinema license was a guarantee of a reliable income attracted dozens of applicants for any available cinema, and since Nielsen was no longer working on stage or screen, she needed an income stream. However, under the revised cinema law of 1933, the Ministry of Justice required applicants to prove that they already had the means to run the cinema. Nielsen’s financial need is most visible and plausible in her first application, made in the wake of World War I and amidst rampant inflation that had reduced her pre-war fortune to almost nothing. Her financial situation after her return to Denmark in 1937 is somewhat murky. In March 1943, she applied for the Tagea Brandt fellowship for outstanding female artists, writers, and scientists, which had been awarded to Karen Blixen in 1939, Clara Pontoppidan in 1937, and Bodil Ipsen in 1935, which could indicate financial need or just a desire for recognition. In her cinema license applications in the late 1930s and 40s, she listed a substantial personal fortune as proof of her ability to fund a theater — 70,000 kroner in her 1943 application for Rio Bio, for example. Brian Petersen and Isak Thorsen note that Nielsen listed assets in her applications in the mid-1940s worth the modern equivalent of nearly a million dollars, while her opulent antique home furnishings were auctioned off after her death for the equivalent of another quarter of a million dollars (Petersen and Thorsen 2022, 103).
Another reason was professional satisfaction. Nielsen had not been active on the Danish stage or in film since her rather disastrous performance in the comedy Tony draws a horse at Folketeatret in 1939, when she forgot her lines and couldn’t hear the prompter. In her 1943 Rio Bio application, Nielsen confesses that she can no longer perform the repertoire upon which she had built her reputation in Germany, such as Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias, and she had not received any offers to work in the Danish film industry, either as an actress or director. She explains, "Directing a cinema would thus be the only task that could give me opportunities to exploit my experience in the area of film art to some degree."
It took the Ministry of Justice a full 18 months to reach a decision about whom to give the license for the 800-seat Triangel cinema to, during which time Knud Jørgensen continued managing the cinema, as he had on his father’s behalf for the previous eight years. Despite legal restrictions preventing individuals from operating more than one cinema, the Jørgensen family was a cinema dynasty — in addition to Knud and Ingvar at Triangel, Knud’s brother operated the Metropol Teater on the main shopping street, Strøget, while another brother ran the Gefion Film production company, and their sister was the director of the small distribution company Centrum Film. Although none of the Jørgensens was involved in the artistic side of the film industry, Triangel offered artistically ambitious programming during its first decades of existence, with great success. The cinema prospered in the Jørgensens’ hands, giving 833 screenings per year, which resulted in an annual surplus of around 38,000 kroner and an annual entertainment tax of around 12,600 kroner during the first few years of the occupation. The cinema’s surplus rose to a record 135,979 kroner in 1946, raising its entertainment tax burden correspondingly to 53,285 kroner, leaving a tidy net surplus of 82,694 kroner. This profitability, paired with the cinema’s central location in Østerbro, made it an attractive option for aspiring licensees: fifty-four people applied for the license for the Triangel cinema in 1947.
For a while, it looked like Nielsen was definitely going to get the license for Triangel. A majority (five members) of the Film Council and the Copenhagen municipal committee recommended Asta Nielsen for the license, but the minister gave it instead to Jørgensen, for whom only three members of the Film Council had voted. It was an open secret that the minister’s decision reflected the preferences of the cinema owners’ association, under the leadership of Emanuel Gregers, and the realities of the situation that Jørgensen owned shares in the building where the cinema was located. Alf Refer, a Copenhagen architect, wrote to the editor of Information on October 27, 1948, to complain about the minister’s disregard for the committees’ recommendation, asking why he bothered asking for their input if he just intended to ignore it. Refer demanded that the minister to come clean about the “intrigues” that had led to his ultimate decision, asking whether the rumor was true that the building management had threatened to close the cinema altogether if Jørgensen didn’t get the license. Petersen and Thorsen suggest that Nielsen's lack of business experience could also have been a factor in the minister’s decision not to grant her a cinema license.
Cultural critic Christen Fribert posited in an article in July 1948 that Jørgensen’s youth (45 years compared to Nielsen’s 66) was another decisive factor: “He has the advantage over the female applicant, Mrs. Nielsen, of being relatively young and having enjoyed the income flowing from the cinema for a long time. Since he is lucky enough to be in possession of such a viable project, he will certainly know how to hedge against the loss of this single income source.” Jørgensen was indeed successful in keeping Triangel in the family, which brought him great relief. He told the evening newspaper Aftenbladet on October 14, 1948, that he didn’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t gotten permission to keep running the theater he had already been operating for several years: “I never dared even think that thought. The cinema industry has been my life for 25 years. Today is the first day I feel secure enough to believe that it can continue to be so.” Unfortunately, Jørgensen didn’t get to enjoy his new license very long, as he died suddenly in 1953.
Many Danish newspapers and their readers had taken for granted that Nielsen would get the license, so there was widespread consternation when Jørgensen received it instead. As Nielsen noted in a letter to Olaf Fønss on February 2, 1948: “Øbro newspaper sent me the enclosed today, which calls out the Jørgensen dynasty. (…) Everywhere I go, people talk about it [the license decision]. Even in the streetcar, perfect strangers approach me to talk about the license that I have not yet received. It is only the film council and the minister of justice who have remained ignorant of my existence until now.” Fønss was one of Nielsen’s staunchest advocates in her prolonged struggle to get a cinema license. He was also intimately familiar with her situation, for he had also applied for more than a dozen cinemas over nearly three decades before he was finally given a license for the highly desirable World Cinema in 1946. On November 8, 1948, when Justice Minister Busch-Jensen participated in the radio program “Hvis jeg havde ham her” [If I had him here], Fønss asked him why the ministry delegated the responsibility for selecting the best candidates for cinema licenses to three separate committees and then, when the committees finally agreed on a candidate, as in Nielsen’s case for Triangel, gave the license to someone else. The minister evaded the question and replied simply and sarcastically, “it could in fact be for the same reason she didn’t get a license the other eleven times,” which Nielsen (and allegedly many others) interpreted as “a vote of no confidence in me, which implies something very problematic about me, which the minister apparently believes he has access to and even presupposes as the reason for the abovementioned 11 earlier rejections.” She demanded in an open letter published in Berlingske Tidende that Busch-Jensen explain himself, but she apparently did not receive a reply. Fønss wrote a letter to the editor on November 11, 1948, to express his disappointment at the minister’s callousness. Perhaps as a kind of compensation, she was awarded a pension by the Danish state in 1963, which secured her financial position for the last decade of her life.
After her Triangel disappointment, Nielsen claimed to have abandoned the idea of trying to get a cinema license, despite rumors that she had applied for Lyngbyvejens Kino in late 1948. Her frustration lay as much with the unpredictability of the system as with the consequences of the decision for her own life and self-esteem. In her private scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, Nielsen preserved dozens of articles about the cinema license system and her repeated failure to obtain the license she sought. One such article, titled “A propos licenses” and dated August 4, 1948, complains that the entire system is unstable and unfair. The author notes that although Jørgensen’s years of running the cinema on his father’s behalf legitimized his selection, it is a scandal that famous actors like Asta Nielsen and Arne Weel, among many others, had been left out in the cold:
We can’t keep passing over such people if the fundamental basis of the entire license system is to have any validity. The entirely natural solution would of course be to make cinemas a free market. The only result would be that Copenhagen, in the course of the next ten years, would be supplied with a range of modern picture houses — which is precisely what we are lacking.
It would be another quarter of a century before Denmark shifted to a free market cinema system, after the popularization of television had resulted in drastic changes to the cinema landscape, but the shift to anonymous corporate chain cinemas did more than just modernize Danish exhibition practices. It also took film exhibition out of the hands of identifiable individuals who could be held accountable for the kinds of films they decided to show audiences and turned cinemagoing into a more transactional, impersonal experience.
Asta Nielsen was so spectacularly successful in so many aspects of her professional life, it seems odd that this one failure should have haunted her so persistently, but it must have, judging by how often she talked about it. She found many other outlets for her creative energy: she published her memoirs, The Silent Muse, in 1945/46, wrote articles and stories for a wide range of newspapers, and found both artistic fulfillment and the love of her life, the art dealer Christian Theede (1899-1988), whom she married in January 1970 at age 88, through making fabric collage paintings. Although her fame diminished after she stopped making films and left the stage, she continued to receive accolades, job offers, and media attention for the rest of her life. Perhaps one reason that she fixated on the cinema license she never received was because it represented in her own mind the acceptance and validation of her countrymen that was denied her for most of her life. In her childhood, she was too poor to matter in Danish society. At the peak of her career, she was perceived as too cosmopolitan to be truly Danish. Sitting in the ticket booth of a Copenhagen cinema, she might at last have felt like she belonged.
Archival Sources
Danish National Archive:
Rigsarkivet, Justitsministeriet, Journalsager 1848-1967
1. kontor, 1920 V 3532
1. kontor, 1920 V 8137
3. kontor, 1922 16 58
2. kontor, 1928 299 4
2. kontor, 1937 300 148
2. kontor, 1943 100 250
2. kontor, 1943 100 276
2. kontor, 1943 100 310
Literature
Fribert, Christen. "Fru Asta og Triangelteatret". Newspaper column, Asta Nielsen scrapbook, Deutsche Kinemathek.
Nielsen, Asta. The Silent Muse, translated by Julie K. Allen. Camden House, 2022.
Petersen, Brian and Isak Thorsen. "Det falske martyrium". In: Filmmagasinet Ekko, July-August 2022. 100-103.
Sandfeld, Gunnar. Den stumme Scene. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1966.
Zglinicki, Friedrich von. Der Weg des Films. Berlin: Rembrandt Verlag, 1956.
See the mentioned silent films:
