“It All Comes from Beer”: Tuborg, Carlsberg, and the Role of Film in Danish Cultural Diplomacy

Abstract

It All Comes from Beer is the title of a 1952 short film, commissioned by Carlsberg to showcase its philanthropic contributions to science and art in Denmark to anglophone viewers. But Carlsberg and its rival brewery, Tuborg, used film at least a quarter-century earlier as “propaganda”, not just for their beer but also for the culture, industry, and landscape of their home country. The case studies in this chapter show how inter-war film genres such as tourist films, promotional footage, educational films, and even science films tended to overlap and merge, depending on where they travelled and to which audiences they were screened. The movement of films and of the material culture (from beer glasses to science equipment) that accompanied them facilitated an entrepreneurial form of cultural diplomacy on Denmark’s behalf.

Can beer inspire you to travel the world? Probably. It all comes from beer

—Carlsberg marketing campaign, 2020

One June evening in 1935, the salubrious central London boulevard of Park Lane was briefly witness to a 1600-strong horde emerging from Grosvenor House, all of them with beer glass in hand. According to a short report headlined “Films and Beer Glasses” in The Times, the large crowd had enjoyed a selection of films depicting “the attractions of Copenhagen in particular and Danish enterprises in general”. The film screenings were accompanied by a traditional Danish “cold table”, with “some tons” of food (and presumably beer) having been flown in “by airliner” from Copenhagen. Hosted by the Anglo-Danish Society, the event was the brainchild of Einar Dessau, an amateur filmmaker, radio pioneer, and heir to the Tuborg brewing dynasty.¹

This vignette in The Times ties together a number of threads that linked Denmark and Britain across the North Sea in the inter-war period. Firstly, strenuous efforts were ongoing at governmental level to strengthen trading links between the two countries; these efforts were buttressed by businesses and trade associations.² Secondly, economic relations were underpinned by bilateral cultural diplomacy, in the broadest sense. The Anglo-Danish Society, which hosted the film evening on Park Lane, is a good example of this activity. As the headline of the 1935 article in The Times suggests, this sort of cultural diplomacy was often underpinned by a combination of visual media and material culture (in this case, film and beer glasses). Trade deals and international understandings are facilitated by interpersonal interaction, the exchange of gifts, and, of course, refreshments—as Einar Dessau and his friends in the Anglo-Danish Society knew only too well.

While beer remains a social lubricant today, what is more historically specific is the kind of media event that Dessau organized on Park Lane in June 1935: a non-theatrical screening of a commissioned, promotional film, typically transported and screened in portable, small-gauge format. While it would be another decade before Danish documentary and informational film really blossomed, under pressure from the German occupation of the country during World War II,³ the inter-war years spawned a number of notable film commissions with the aim of promoting Danish culture and industry abroad. Curiously, beer often played a role in such efforts: not only in trade terms but also because the two major Danish beer brands (Tuborg and Carlsberg) were significant actors in philanthropy, science, nation-branding and filmmaking.

What this chapter aims to do, then, is to look through the bottom of the beer glass, so to speak, at a selection of films made with the involvement of Tuborg and Carlsberg to promote Denmark overseas before and after World War II. Here, I am inspired by Stephen Greenblatt’s “Mobility Studies Manifesto”, in which he insists that any understanding of how culture travels must “shed light on hidden as well as conspicuous movements” of objects, texts, people, images, and so on, and “identify and analyze the ‘contact zones’” where cultural goods are exchanged.⁴

Examining such films has something to reveal about their role as “propaganda” for Danish culture and industry. Such films were often referred to as propagandafilm by commissioning bodies and other authorities, but they sit at the intersection of a number of sub-genres of “useful cinema”,⁵ films which are defined by their intended purpose of educating, persuading or enlightening their audiences. How did such films get commissioned and distributed, and how did they represent Denmark to an implied foreign viewer? During World War II, international systems of exchange of informational films were established via diplomatic networks, national cultural institutes, and international organizations, and Denmark and the UK were quick to engage post-war in this kind of formal exchange.⁶ Particularly after the war, this international ecology was predicated on, as Kirsten Ostherr describes it “a mass, civic-minded audience willing to view regularly the thousands of instructional films that were produced in the post-war period”.⁷

A fascinating aspect of this system of film-based cultural diplomacy is the role of “diplomatic entrepreneurs”.⁸ In the context of informational film, I use this term to refer to business people, explorers or other luminaries who carried small-gauge informational films with them around the world. Such individuals feature in this chapter—Einar Dessau being an obvious example—but I also want to expand on this notion to consider the role of non-governmental organizations in the production of propagandafilm. In the films discussed below, beer brewed by Carlsberg and Tuborg becomes a national cipher, entangling images and narratives of culture, industry, modernity, science, and philanthropy.

“Nuestra material de propaganda”: Marketing Tuborg

The film screened on Park Lane seems to have been the 31-minute Copenhagen, Gay and Vivacious, which Einar Dessau himself had directed in collaboration with the veteran Danish director A. W. Sandberg in 1934. Commissioned by the Tuborg-Carlsberg conglomerate,⁹ the film shows off Copenhagen through the eyes of an English couple, and was a black-and-white sound film produced by Palladium, one of Denmark’s major studios. Music was by Kai Normann Andersen, conducted by Erik Tuxen. All in all, this indicates a prestigious film that was an investment. Various international titles are listed under this film’s entry in the Danish Film Institute’s database,¹⁰ indicating that this film travelled, or at least was intended to travel, to a broad range of countries: Copenhague, la ciudad hermosa, viva y encantadora, Kopenhagen, die schöne und heitere Stadt, Copenhague, la ville jolie, gaie et charmante, Kopenhagen, de vroolijke, lachend-moiië Stadt.

This list of international titles reflects Dessau’s work to expand the global reach of Tuborg: by the time he retired as a company director in 1963, he had expanded sales of the beer to 63 territories.¹¹ Dessau was a trained engineer and a life-long innovator in his use of radio and media, and in his marketing strategies. The collaboration on the London film screening with the Anglo-Danish Society exemplifies how such films often travelled—that is, under the auspices of ad hoc visits by diplomatic entrepreneurs, as well as more established consular and business channels—but it is also suggestive of Dessau’s nose for cultural diplomacy and his international connections at high levels. The individual and collective social capital of the Anglo-Danish Society’s members can be illustrated by the short account in The Times, each June through to the outbreak of World War II, of the Society’s annual dinner at Claridge’s Hotel. Invariably, these dinners featured British and Danish minor royalty, up to and including the Danish Crown Prince and Princess at the 1939 gathering. The courses were punctuated by toasts to the bilateral friendship of the two nations and speeches touting the steady improvement in trade relations.¹² As well as oiling the wheels of Anglo-Danish trade, the Society funded exchange programmes after World War II to give British children access to Danish tuberculosis sanatoria, and to facilitate mobility for students, a scholarship programme which continues to this day.¹³ The screening on Park Lane was therefore an example of how informational films were put to work amid a complex web of cultural diplomacy which combined trade relations with cultural, political, intellectual, and even philanthropic exchanges.

While the report in The Times did not specify the design of the beer glasses gifted to Dessau’s guests in London, images of contemporary promotional glasses are to be found in surviving documentary and advertising footage from 1936, a year after the London trip. Poul Eibye, the same cinematographer who had worked on Copenhagen, Gay and Vivacious, shot 50 minutes’ worth of footage for the Tuborg brewery (Tuborg Film 1–6).¹⁴ These clips seem to showcase some of Dessau’s marketing ideas and reflect his ambition to expand exports into new markets: illustrious guests visiting the brewery, some of them being treated to a guided tour by Dessau himself, or his father, company director Benny Dessau; clips showing trucks painted with “Bière Tuborg”, and “Boy Beer Tuborg Pilsener” (for the francophone and anglophone markets); English-language labels being pasted onto bottles in a labelling machine; and four bottles with different labels on a shelf, all in English. A giant bottle standing at the centre of a model village rotates on a turntable, and beer is poured from a bottle into a glass by an invisible hand. The Scandinavian market is not forgotten; a shot records the delivery of many cases to Swedish training ship Fylgia. Most strikingly, a sequence showcases marketing materials for the unfortunately named Cerveza Boy, la legitima pilsener Tuborg, showing a young Black servant boy and a drinking sailor. A poster featuring the boy and the sailor unfurls on screen, detailing “nuestro material de propaganda”, a branded range of merchandise which includes a brochure, playing cards, a dice shaker, and table skittles [Fig. 1]. These would seem to be film clips destined for trade fairs in the Spanish or Latin American market, along with the promotional items, and indeed the beer, that they showcase. In fact, Tuborg had had this and other export markets in its sights since its foundation in 1873, as evinced not least by the brewery’s harborside location north of Copenhagen, though high tariffs had made export to South America difficult.¹⁵

Fig. 1

Promotional footage for Tuborg displays a range of branded merchandise, or “material de propaganda”, destined for the Spanish-speaking market. From Tuborg Film 1–6, Poul Eibye, Denmark, 1936. Framegrab

These film fragments, tantalizingly decontextualized in their new digital instantiation, consolidate a few points for us: firstly, the use of the term “propaganda” as a synonym for what we would today call “marketing” (and, interestingly, its use in Spanish by a Danish company). At almost the same time, “propaganda” was also used in Danish in the mission statement of the dominant Danish body on the informational film scene: Dansk Kulturfilm was established in 1932 to coordinate the production of films for “education, enlightenment, and general propaganda”, indicating the flexibility of the term.¹⁶ Secondly, the involvement of the illustrious A. W. Sandberg as co-director of the tourist film, as well as renowned cinematographer Poul Eibye in both the prestige production and the more workaday publicity footage, has something to say about Tuborg’s marketing budget. But they also confirm that these two quite different domains of filmmaking were not discrete; indeed, there was considerable cross-over of personnel between documentary and commissioned films and feature filmmaking in Denmark.¹⁷ Concomitantly, taking these two points together, and as we shall also see in connection with the other films discussed below, it is often difficult for us today to tease out the distinctions between genres of the period, especially when the films are on the move—tourist film or educational film? Science film or travel film?

Thirdly, in their contingent, archival ordering, Eibye’s film fragments juxtapose disparate actors in the network of relations between beer and society. What emerges from the accidental montage is a tension between beer as a drink for the masses—visualized by the sheer volume of bottles and cases borne out onto the streets of Copenhagen by a never-ending parade of horse-drawn carts—and the kudos of the Tuborg brewery as a place where film stars and royalty (from Jean Hersholt to King Christian X) would flock to be guided around the premises by its directors. The footage thus reflects the global web of royals, philanthropists, tourists, businesspeople, and, of course, beer drinkers connected by the commercial, promotional, and philanthropic activities of Tuborg and other Danish breweries—and by the transnational movement of beer, and of films.

The Carlsberg Model: Beer, Science, and Philanthropy

Eibye’s surviving footage for Tuborg includes a sequence documenting a trade fair stall erected by Bryggeriforeningen, the Danish Brewers’ Association. Established in 1899, this organization still represents the interests of almost all Danish brewers. Before Eibye’s camera, a rotating display listing the achievements of the country’s brewers includes a panel depicting two scientists (one male, one female) conducting experiments and claims proudly: “Danish research—supported by Danish breweries—has broken new ground for beer-brewing worldwide”.

In fact, the connections between Danish science and Danish beer were (and are) intricate and originate from the distinctive business model of the Carlsberg brewery. While Tuborg was more conventional in its status as “a corporation to create profits for shareholders”, Carlsberg was purportedly “more quality-conscious and independent of profit”.¹⁸ Carlsberg’s founder J. C. Jacobsen had been in the brewing business since around 1840, and a growing (and thirsty) urban population and the quality of his product had resulted in a healthy and expanding enterprise. Carlsberg began to export its wares to Great Britain in 1868 and to Asia in 1889; Ditlev Tamm contextualizes these export ventures within the national crisis for Denmark triggered by its defeat and loss of territory in the Dano-Prussian war of 1864, and the country’s efforts to rebuild, not least through industrialization.¹⁹ In this respect alone, Jacobsen was a leader, but his contribution to a re-imagining of the Danish nation went much further. In 1876, Jacobsen established Carlsbergfondet, the Carlsberg Foundation, and entrusted the Danish Academy of Sciences and Arts (Videnskabernes Selskab) to run it, with five university professors appointed as directors.²⁰ This was an expression of his faith in science to improve the brewing industry; he had less faith in his son, Carl Jacobsen, and left his entire fortune and company to the Foundation on his death in 1887.²¹ Nonetheless, Jacobsen fils built on his father’s principles with his arts-focused philanthropy under the rubric of Ny Carlsberg (New Carlsberg, established 1882), adopting the motto Laboremus pro patria (“let us work for the fatherland”). In 1906, these old and new Carlsberg businesses merged to form Carlsberg Breweries.²² What father and son had in common was a belief that “wealth and prestige brought responsibility, that from wealth flows an obligation to do something for the society in which they worked and whose growing thirst for beer gave them the economic possibility to do so”.²³

Indeed, science related to brewing was not the only field in which Carlsbergfondet sponsored research. Carlsberg’s expansion to the sponsorship of other scientific disciplines can be traced to the influence of Professor Johannes Schmidt and other members of the Foundation’s Board in the 1920s.²⁴ In turn, Carlsbergfondet’s support ensured that Denmark emerged as a global leader in certain fields, not least Schmidt’s own specialism, marine biology.²⁵ Schmidt was not only an eminent scientist but also a pioneer in the use of film and radio to disseminate his work. Furthermore, he went to great lengths to flag his research achievements as Danish. Schmidt’s ambitious expeditions to explore the world’s oceans offer another example of how Danish beer became entangled with cultural diplomacy, film, and, in this case, science. In what follows, we look more closely at two films associated with the Carlsberg expedition: a film shot during the voyage by Schmidt the scientist, and a film that was carried around the world by Schmidt the diplomatic entrepreneur.

Images from the Carlsberg Fund’s Global Oceanographic Expedition

As early as 1922, Schmidt had made a film of his early 1920s’ Atlantic voyage, re-enacted in the narrow Øresund Strait that separates Denmark from Sweden and used it to illustrate his lectures on marine biology in London, Liverpool, and Paris.²⁶ The strategy of using moving images to mediate his research to the public (and to spread the reputation of Carlsberg as a sponsor of science) found expression again when, in 1928, Schmidt embarked on a hugely ambitious new expedition: to circumnavigate the globe, investigating water temperature, sediment, and marine life in the oceans. The vessel for this voyage, the Dana, had started life as a steam-trawler built for the British Navy during the Great War, and she anchored at Plymouth on the outward and return voyages, securing interest amongst the British public. A correspondent for The Times in 1930 commented that Schmidt’s earlier discoveries about the life cycle of the Atlantic eel had “captured the imagination not only of marine biologists, but of all who as intelligent amateurs take an interest in the wonders of natural history in general and of marine life in particular”. The same journalist explained that the Carlsberg Foundation’s “generosity to science is a household word in Denmark”.²⁷

Along with stocks of food and beer, and scientific equipment, Schmidt and his crew took with them a camera and rolls of film.²⁸ The resulting 20-minute film²⁹ is a fascinating hybrid: it is a travelogue, capturing soaring albatross above the ocean, Tahitian washerwomen, Chinese sailing boats, and a voyage through the Panama Canal. There are also extensive explanations of the scientific experiments undertaken during the expedition: sampling and experiments carried out by the crew are recorded on film; reconstructions demonstrating, for example, seawater and silt samples are filmed in an aquarium; animated drawings clarify the detail; and frequent intertitles supplement the visual information. In this respect, the film is reminiscent of French marine biologist Jean Painlevé’s³⁰ contemporary nature films, though less magical and less ambitious in its use of magnification and other visual novelties. That said, Schmidt’s film has its whimsical moments: the crew frequently bring new pets on board, such as a small monkey, a sea turtle, and a pig.

Less charmingly, the film is of its time in its othering of a Japanese woman bartering with a sailor or the intertitle which jokes that this is a “black” day for the ship, because “negroes” are loading it up with coal. Altogether, the film is a rich case study in the production of scientific facts through movement and on screen: facts as they construct animal life, land- and seascapes, and people of other races and traditions, as profoundly “other”. But it also seems cleverly calculated to function effectively as a compelling and persuasive educational film, because it balances scientific information and explication, both visual and verbal, with the spectacular, the contemplative, and the cute.

The film produces space and facts in consort with each other. Its short length necessitates a radically truncated, or rather fragmented, account of the voyage; the film sends back “postcards” from a bewildering assortment of places. Without the opening animation of the ship’s route (Fig. 2), there would be no sense of spatial continuity or progress. The globe is a series of waters to be penetrated and sampled, with diverting land- and cityscapes inhabited by exotic creatures, people, and vehicles. While the space of the world is presented as discontinuous, however, the film also renders very viscerally how things move around the globe: food and coal need to be procured and loaded on board; animals seem incongruous on the deck, lifted out of their natural habitat; samples of seabed silt and water are isolated and transported around the globe; radio signals are received by the ship’s operator. Like Greenblatt, this is a film that takes mobility literally and shows—both deliberately and inadvertently—how culture moves, while itself being predicated on maritime mobility.

Fig. 2

An animated map previews the circuitous route of the expeditionary vessel Dana through the Pacific, the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and back to Denmark via Plymouth. From Billeder fra Carlsberg-Fondets oceanografiske Expedition omkring Jorden 1928–1930 (Danmarks Fiskeri- og Havundersøgelser, Denmark, 1930). Framegrab

In its animated maps of the global route of the Dana, in its emphasis on mastery of global space, and in its painstaking demonstrations of water sampling techniques at depth, the film envisions how Carlsberg’s money and expertise enact a profound and very physical shift in the frontiers of knowledge: “the scientific frontier of the deep sea was pushed literally kilometres down into the ocean and wide across the Atlantic at first, then later the Pacific and Indian Oceans”.³¹

The Film About Denmark, and the Danmarksfilm Tradition

But not only was the expedition itself to be filmed: on board the ship would be copies of two promotional films about Denmark, and Schmidt would ensure that they were screened to local audiences in places agreed with the Foreign Office. The Dana, then, was carrying another kind of artefact designed to travel: the propaganda film. As Poulsen puts it, the expedition not only was to be “a showcase for Danish enterprise and ingenuity”, but would also provide the opportunity to “highlight and showcase aspects of Denmark” on a truly global scale. For example, in Sydney, Wellington and Bangkok a “substantial Danish contingent” was to be found, making “a willing audience for the Danish talks and films”, and in Durban City Hall in South Africa it attracted a crowd of 2500.³²

The films on board the Dana had both been made a few years earlier and bore the baldly literal titles typical of their time: one which focused on the Faroe islands, and another entitled Danmarksfilmen (The Film about Denmark, Poul Henningsen, 1926), an epic documentary at 150 minutes in length, displaying any and all thinkable aspects of Danish life: nature, architecture, folk culture, and industry.³³ It is not until the 85-minute mark that around five minutes are devoted to an aerial view of the vast scale of the Carlsberg and Tuborg breweries, and a range of processes in the production of beer are demonstrated, showing a bustling, well-ordered factory setting full of gleaming, whirring equipment. While the length of The Film About Denmark seems excessive, and many of its sequences do seem interminable to today’s viewer, it was not untypical of its genre and time. A comparable undertaking was the Finnish six-part documentary Finlandia (Erkki Karu & Eero Leväluoma, 1922).³⁴

Another context for The Film About Denmark is the national genre it established, known today as Danmarksfilm: “Denmark Film(s)” in English. Ib Bondebjerg gives an overview of how the genre has evolved since its mid-1920s origins, retaining, and occasionally subverting, an established grammar of images and ideas about the nation.³⁵ Oddly enough, the image of the beer bottle has been a crucial part of that evolution. While in the 1926 film that travelled the globe with Schmidt’s expedition bottles feature in great numbers in an aerial shot of the bottling hall, the same object was instrumental in having the next Danmarksfilm censured by the press. This film, simply entitled Danmark, was commissioned by the Foreign Ministry, Tourist Board, and other organizations, and directed by the designer and cultural critic Poul Henningsen in 1935. As Bondebjerg explains, controversy was stirred by the film’s avant-garde editing, not least “when a shot of beer bottles on a production line is succeeded by images of a great number of foreign envoys getting out of a car to visit the Danish king”.³⁶ The Carlsberg Foundation, Ny Carlsberg, and the brewing industry itself were credible and respectable pillars of the social and economic life of the nation, and part of its visual repertoire. Royals, film stars, and other dignitaries were happy to be filmed for newsreels tasting pilsner in the brewery function room; princes sat down to eat on board the Dana; some documentary footage of esteemed guests and schoolchildren alike flocking past the stone elephants guarding the brewery entrance could even be conjectured to frame Carlsberg as a kind of proxy royal court.³⁷ But in the case of Henningsen’s 1935 Danmark, the Soviet montage-style collision of royalty with beer in an already controversial film triggered the plebeian associations of the national tipple—a tension echoed in the popular nickname for a bottle of Carlsberg: Hof, literally “court”. Later iterations of the Danmarksfilm³⁸ continue to feature beer brewing and drinking as crucial visual icons of Denmark and, concomitantly, as genre markers. For example, close-ups of bottles circling in a labelling machine under the watchful eye of workers feature in the high-water mark of the genre, the Oscar-nominated short A City Called Copenhagen (Jørgen Roos, 1960).³⁹

The existence of a Danish-language printed programme for the 1926 Danmarksfilm makes it clear that the film had a double purpose, at least during the expedition. It could indeed function as propaganda for Denmark as a leading industrial hub or picturesque tourist destination. But it could also serve as a nostalgic litany of images of the homeland amongst the worldwide diaspora that the good ship Dana visited. The Danish-language printed programme begins by explaining the origins of the film as a Tourist Board project for foreigners, but ends with a declaration of patriotic affect: “Denmark,—our Fatherland, as it looked thousands of years ago,—as it looks today after suffering and joy,—sorrow and loss,—Denmark, as Danes will always love it!—”.⁴⁰ It is unclear whether a similar brochure was taken along on board the Dana for Danish-speaking ex-patriots, but the tone of the programme provides a sense of the nation-building effects that may have obtained alongside its original goal of cultural diplomacy. The journey of The Film About Denmark around the world, aboard Schmidt’s marine survey vessel, is a particularly intriguing example of diplomatic entrepreneurship, with film (and beer) in a key role.

It All Comes from Beer

The Film About Denmark and its successors in the Danmarksfilm genre tend to situate the Carlsberg and Tuborg breweries as fixtures at the heart of Copenhagen, modern facilities from which beer flows outwards to the nation and the world. A later film commissioned by Carlsberg goes further, articulating how Carlsberg had shaped the cityscape and underpinned Danish scientific and artistic life. Destined for the anglophone market, this 1952 film goes so far as to declare in its title that It All Comes from Beer⁴¹—a motto still used by Carlsberg today in its online promotion.⁴²

The 15-minute film fastidiously explains for an anglophone audience how a range of aspects of mid-century Danish life did, indeed, “come from beer”—at least in the sense that the Carlsberg brewery’s profits were ploughed into the arts and sciences. The audiences at the film’s 1952 premiere in London⁴³ would have learnt about the equivalent of GBP 3.5 million given to science by Carlsbergfondet (the Carlsberg Foundation) to date, encompassing cancer research, Greenland expeditions, and funding for visiting researchers. The film also shows some of the 80,000 visitors from all over the world who, the narrator claims, visited the brewery every year. Indeed, from other surviving footage of the brewery from the early 1930s onwards, it is clear that Carlsberg had enough kudos to attract illustrious visitors from movie stars to royalty for tours of the premises, as we witnessed earlier depicted in the Tuborg footage.

The film struggles to articulate the science funded by Carlsbergfondet on screen in compelling ways, choosing to solve the issue mainly via historical reconstruction. While other examples of surviving footage from the breweries demonstrate industrial and scientific processes in detail, drawing on the process film genre, It All Comes from Beer leaves the film format to do the heavy lifting in this respect: allegedly the first 35-mm colour film shot in Denmark,⁴⁴ the film was cutting-edge for its time and ostentatiously expensive. The (now-digitized) 15-minute version screened abroad was cut down from some three hours of footage of historical reconstruction and documentation of processes in the brewery shot over the previous five years. Similarly, the film does little to explore the impressive collections of sculpture donated by Ny Carlsberg to its dedicated museum, Glyptoteket, and dotted around the Copenhagen streetscape; even the world-famous Little Mermaid, commissioned by the founder’s son Carl Jacobsen in 1909, is given only a cursory panning shot. Still, It All Comes from Beer does establish that such was Carlsberg’s tentacular socio-cultural reach that a film documenting the company’s influence on Danish science and the Copenhagen streetscape inescapably also functioned as a handy introduction to Denmark, and even as an anglophone Danmarksfilm. A throwaway remark by a British journalist in 1957 is suggestive of Carlsberg’s renown in this respect: a visit to the Glyptotek, recounted as part of a travel feature, refers to “that engagingly philanthropic brewery organization, the Carlsberg Foundation”.⁴⁵

It All Comes from Beer was made at a moment of confidence for Carlsberg, as post-war beer consumption rocketed at home and abroad, and it held the lion’s share of the domestic market. However, the early- to mid-1950s was a watershed, when Tuborg reversed a slump in sales and national market share, overtaking Carlsberg in productivity and profitability, and eventually leading to a merger in 1969–1970.⁴⁶

Conclusion

The title of Carlsberg’s showpiece 1952 film continues to resonate across Carlsberg’s social media presence today. For example, the 170th anniversary celebrations of the brewery in 2017 spawned a number of short videos, one of which invites the viewer to Fly with Drones and Discover the Art that Comes from Beer.⁴⁷ This 80-second promotional film employs, as the title suggests, a pair of futuristic drones to transport the viewer through the galleries of Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, the kinaesthetic sweep of the robots generating a compelling sense of the volumes and surfaces of the sculptures and marble columns as they unfold in space. Emerging from the roof of the museum and hovering over the Copenhagen skyline, the drones suggest the continued centrality of Carlsberg’s architectural and cultural legacy to the city and nation.

For the brewing company, the phrase “It All Comes from Beer” is a resonant and succinct marketing mantra, explaining the impact of the distinctive business model that ploughs profits back into science and art. But if we take the mantra seriously, following the travels of Dessau, Schmidt and others, and the films and paraphernalia they took with them, we can observe that in the encounters where the glasses clink, the work of cultural diplomacy—and indeed cultural mobility—gets done.

Perhaps we could go further and think of beer itself as a medium. Its chemical and biological instantiation carries textural, olfactory, and gustatory information to the consumer; the glasses that contain it are often inscribed with the logos of the manufacturers; and as we have seen, its consumption as an element in film-centred cultural diplomacy is hard to distil from its representation on screen as scientific process, cultural ritual, and multisensory experience. As a product for export in its own right, beer carried (and still carries) with it a diverse and heavy cultural ballast, shaping the image of Denmark abroad. And a key image that emerged from the screens of the 1930–1950s was of a nation at the cutting-edge of science and industry—in large part due to the tentacular reach of the large brewing companies, Carlsberg and Tuborg, pioneers in promoting their own philanthropic and scientific achievements on film and integrating them into the composite image of the nation that was, and is, exported, in a very material sense.