The Arts

Danish comedic actor Dirch Passer became hugely popular for his slapstick humour and play with words.

The prolific Danish theatre and film actress Ghita Nørby is famous both for her lighter roles in film and theatre as a young actress and for her psychological character portraits in later years.

Danish director Nils Malmros is known for his authentic depictions of the immediate environment of especially children and young adults. His aptitude for capturing the precise tone of language and physical surroundings according to his own recollection is noteworthy.

Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer is world-famous for his films on passion and compassion. Emphatic depictions of religion and especially women’s destiny in societies ruled by men run throughout his work. Meanwhile, a special form of realism, in which minor facial expressions are more important than larger spatial movements, inspires philosophical readings that transgress the time of production.

Einojuhani Rautavaara is one of the best-known Finnish composers of the twentieth century. Perhaps most famous globally for his Seventh Symphony, the Angel of Light, he made use of many different musical styles and techniques in a variety of genres, and was not afraid to go against musical trends in composition.

As elsewhere, modernism was a movement concerning the profound questioning of traditional values, modes of speaking and interpretations of subjectivity. A mass of Nordic literature was produced that could be said to be modernist, from Norwegian Knut Hamsun’s innovative novels in the 1890s, to the influential high Swedish modernism in poetry led by Erik Lindegren and Karl Vennberg, to stream-of-consciousness prose by Icelandic Svava Jakobsdóttir, to name but a few.