The White Slave Trade

In 1910, filmmaker Ole Olsen, who had established in 1910 Nordisk Films Kompagni, the oldest Danish film production, hired actor August Blom as its new Head of Production. Between 1910 and 1925, he directed more than 100 films and started a new genre, the erotic melodrama. The White Slave Trade was his third film and it was a remake a film with the same title released in the Spring of 1910 by Nordisk Film's main competitor: Fotorama. That film was the first multi-reel film in Denmark and one of the first in the world, and its duration of 40 minutes as well as the fact that it showed life inside a brothel, made it a resounding success.^[2] It was stressed at the time that the longer visual form did not inhibit comprehension, but aided it instead. A reviewer marveled that it was "The first artistic film. As a guide, the printed programme is unnecessary, the rapidly shifting but carefully linked episodes speak for themselves".^[3]

To bank on this success, Olsen asked Blom to watch carefully the Fotorama film and to make a scene-by-scene re-creation of it. This was done, except for a few roles that got a name change. Nordisk did not hide its plagiarism, boasting that the film was executed exactly in the same way as the Fotorama film, but performed by better artists.^[4] This was not illegal because the Danish law on copyright did not cover films at the time.^[5]

When Nordisk, in line with it usual practice, decided to distribute the film outside of Denmark, notably in Germany, he faced initially the reluctance of German distributors to present a film with of such a long duration, the standard for films being at the time one reel of about 15 minutes. Ole Olsen threatened a Hamburg cinema owner to stop supplying any Nordisk production to him if he did not program The White Slave Trade. According to Olsen, the result was an unprecedented success. "The next day the cinema was packed and on the third day, it took twenty police officers to retain order since people were queuing around the block to get tickets."^[6] 103 copies were sold worldwide in comparison to a 1910 average of 40 copies per film. In the United States however, the film could not be released as it was forbidden by censorships boards.^[7] Apparently the censors, shocked by the brothel scenes, were not convinced by the argument that the film exalted the innocence of the heroine and that white slavery had the power of metaphor "to reduce the complex problem of prostitution to a simple story of villain and victim."^[8]

Given the success of the film, Nordisk produced two sequels, Den hvide slavehandel II (In the Hands of Impostors) in 1911 and Den hvide slavehandel III (The White Slave Trade III) in 1912.^[9]

• The White Slave Trade at IMDb
• Den hvide slavehandel (1910) The White Slave Trade at A Cinema History