1953 Ringe, Denmark

Johannes Eskær

1939

Ringe, Denmark

Interviewed on 2/6/23

By Pablo Causa

I remember the first movies I used to watch were the westerns. Though there were a great many films about the war, children weren’t allowed to watch it. I think you had to be 18. There were Danish films, the likes of Morten Korch which idealized the life of the farmer or the comedy series Father of Four, but I was never interested in them. I wasn’t particularly impressed. So, instead I watched the westerns, though I think I’d find them terribly boring if I saw them today. They had subtitles of course. I had to bike 4 or 5 kilometers with my brother to get to the theater Ringe Bio, a ticket was about 1,5 kr. Because it was just after the war, you couldn’t really buy any concessions. We were all too poor. The first time I saw popcorn was around ‘55 when I moved to Copenhagen. In the countryside the theaters were open maybe 3 evenings of the week whereas in Copenhagen they were open all the time. The seats in that Ringe theater were also horribly uncomfortable, it could seat maybe 60-80 people, though they were rarely filled up. Such were all the provincial theaters. Though, you’d be surprised by just how many provincial theaters there were in the countryside of Denmark.

Once in a while, documentarians would visit our school and show us recordings of animals or Africa. It was some sort of competition. They would set up in the school gymnasium and everybody at school and their families would come. Those were some of the few times I watched any sort of film with my parents. They didn’t watch much film, they used to read or listen to the radio for the most part. Only with the animal film and photography did they indulge. That was in the late 40s. For the most part I saw the films in the theater in Ringe with my brother and some friends. Years after the war we dug out the buried WW2 Resistance Fighters parachute equipment and made costumes out of the nylon-esque material to play pretend as though we were in the westerns.

The first movie that I remember watching more concretely was in the early 50s. It was a film starring Ava Gardner. I remember us all being in love with her, she was so beautiful. It must’ve been Lone Star (1952, Vincent Sherman) because I was around 12 or 13. The other boys and I were raving about Ava. I can’t remember anything other than her involvement. The next film I even more clearly remember seeing was “The Man With The Golden Arm” (1955, Otto Preminger) starring Frank Sinatra. I had just moved to Copenahgen and I became viscerally aware of the danger of drugs. It really left an impression on me. I remember going a few times to the theater with my sister while in Copenhagen, though I never went with her while we lived in Ringe as children. A lot of the cinemas in Copenhagen have closed since that time. Some of them are still around, but most of them are gone.

When I moved to Odense in 1959 that’s when I really started paying more attention to films. There was an art cinema house where I used to go 2-3 times a month with some theatre friends. We saw the likes of Buñuel, French and Italian art cinema, Antonioni, Fellini, Katrine Deneuff, Dreyer, Roger Vadim, Hitchcock, etc. This is also when I started watching films about the WW2 Freedom Fighters, those really left an impression on me. And, in the later 60s, you started to see the likes of Scorsese and Coppola moving and growing. Then Spielberg soon after them. Though around 1964 I had to do mandatory military training and I didn’t have the time to see films, I was also busy practicing the Viola.