Taking the National Family to the Movies: Changing Frameworks for the Formation of Danish Identity, 1930-1990

Abstract

Through an examination of two Danish films, Denmark (1935) and The King Commanded (1938), this article illustrates how national identity can be conceived as a time specific, gendered image of the modern world. Public institutions were involved in the production of both films, which were filmed in the same period, and both were meant to celebrate the Danish nation. However, they had very different fates. Through a discussion of their histories I demonstrate connections between a Danish national narrative, the way modern society and modernization are perceived in Denmark, and the relations between nation and gender. The article also discusses how the perception of these connections changed with time. The histories of the films illuminate the narratives within which Danes have performed processes of identity formation from the 1930s through the 1980s, and the histories show that in the modern world, cultural perceptions of development themselves are undergoing development. [national identity formation, Denmark, modernity, gender, film] Introduction Benedict Anderson (1983) has pointed out the crucial role print-capitalism - the production and distribution of newspapers and novels - has played in an initial phase of the development of imagined communities. He argues that printed matter established geographically bound public spheres in which the state of a nation was discussed from various standpoints. In subsequent phases of this still ongoing re-creation and confirmation of nations, other vehicles such as national schools, compulsory military service, or the filing of tax returns have disseminated in similar and different ways multiple understandings of community. As nation states imposed themselves on their people, they simultaneously informed and helped individuals in executing their rights and duties as parts of the collective. As new structures continuously developed - from the distribution of Coca Cola to the Super Bowl - they became associated with processes that defined and cemented nations, even if such an effect was not initially an intended one. Consequently, a constantly changing and developing set of vehicles - songs, radio stations, memorials, state institutions, events, and so forth -- characterize at different times the development of modern nations and the ways people identify with them.' As cinematic images and technology in the twentieth century spread around the globe, people learned to appropriate the new moving images. It was inevitable that film would be employed in the production and sacralization of national culture.2 This medium thus became one such vehicle for cultural processes through which nations established traditions and inhabitants of states became citizens. The potential of film was realized when the ease with which moving pictures could be organized and manipulated to propagate certain messages was acknowledged and when the ability of film to appeal to viewers' emotions was recognized. For instance, it was this latter power that was mobilized in the wellknown films from the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. In this article two Danish films from the 1930s and their histories will be used to illustrate the ways frameworks for the understanding of everyday life and identity are created and changed. Such an examination illuminates how Danes' sense of nationhood has evolved in an ongoing process of identity construction. The perception of the themes of the films has changed with the course of time. It is also discussed how the creation, recreation, and transformation of the nation are processes that are never neutral to other modern categories, such as gender. When nations become conceptualized as imagined communities, the respectability of individuals is tied to that of the whole. Consequently, ideas about the different proprieties of gender mean that their roles in the creation of the nation's respectability are different - and far from unambiguous. Gender is not a trans-historical concept, so male and female take on different shapes in different times and different nations. …