In the Sign of the Virgin

Together with Sweden, Denmark in the 1960s was already considered to be the most liberal country in terms of sexuality and its depiction in film. In 1969, Denmark was the first country to officially abolish all censorship, which brought about a boom in pornographic film production. However, it differed significantly from how porn subsequently looked in the US and France. At least the most popular titles, which include In the Sign of the Virgin, the first part of the six-film Tegn series, were aimed at a broad middle-class audience. Instead of long clinical shots and endless monotonous penetration sequences, the most popular Danish porn flicks of the 1970s are thus rather rollicking sex comedies or melodramas, where a fleeting shot occasionally confirms that the escapades here are not fake. In the Sign of the Virgin and the other films in the Tegn series were based on bright erotic comedies such as the still basically softcore Sengekanten series, and it is no coincidence that they exhibit a number of parallels with German erotic films. This was due in part to the fact that Danish porn was created in the context of co-productions and was intended for sale in other, mainly European countries that had not yet established their own porn industry (this also proved to be fateful for Danish films, when they were subsequently displaced by more explicit foreign films in Europe and in Denmark itself). In the Sign of the Virgin shares with German erotic films not only frivolity and playful licentiousness, but also a certain style of humour. With the exception of sportive young girls and the utilitarian nameless extras for the orgy scenes, all of the other characters are portrayed as caricatures and burlesque clowns, entailing a lot of overacting, mugging and superficial jokes. The film thus oscillates between brilliant gags, unexpected formalistic insertions (a symbolist dream sequence on the subject of erections) and drawn-out jokes, as well as incomprehensibly inappropriate passages (an intense bullying sequence). A separate chapter is the narrative itself, in which it is clear from the beginning how the situation around the girls’ boarding school in a remote hamlet will develop, when a commissioner with a libido-suppressing drug and a foolish scientist with a supply of a powerful aphrodisiac of his own making are heading there at the same time. In the end, however, it is possible to ignore the film’s inconsistencies and take it as a playful product of its time, where the overarching ideas that abstinence leads to aggression and lesbian play serves as a futile substitute for the thing women really desire peculiarly give rise to a hippie ode to free love, literally underscored by the contemporary hit What the World Needs Now Is Love. (11/10/2015)