A governess with strong eyeglasses and a newspaper addiction finds herself constantly losing track of her charge as she tries to keep up with her reading.
Home Media Availability: Stream courtesy of the Danish Institute.
She had one job
The short comedies of Danish director Viggo Larsen have been among my favorite personal discoveries, thanks to the Danish Film Institute’s continuing efforts to make their silent films available. Silent comedy tends to be associated exclusively with slapstick and Larsen employed pratfalls as much as the next pre-World War One funnyman but, like Jean Durand and Max Linder, his films always had that extra special something that elevated them above the crowd.
The Short-Sighted Governess has the sort of easy-to-communicate concept that Larsen tended to favor: a governess with a newspaper pressed up to her face cannot take her eyes off her reading and ends up in all sorts of unhappy predicaments as a result.
The comedy opens with the governess walking in the park with the young girl in her charge. Distracted by her newspaper, the governess does not notice when a pair of sailors take the place of the girl as a prank. The governess only realizes the switch when she looks down while turning the page of her newspaper and then chases them off. The nerve!
Does she learn her lesson? She does not. The little girl attempts to speak with the governess but is harshly silenced. Still holding the enormous newspaper in front of her face, the governess walks into a man on the path and enrobes him in newsprint. She then sits down on a freshly-painted bench.
Does she learn her lesson? She does not. The governess meets another woman charged with watching over a little boy. They chat about her misadventures and then the governess shares a page of her newspaper—my word, the scandal, you must read it to believe it—and then resumes reading herself and drags along the kid she is supposed to be watching. Of course, it’s the wrong kid.
The governess’s employers are horrified when she returns home with a small boy instead of their daughter and the father of the family fires her on the spot. The governess boxes the poor little boy’s ears and sends him packing before sinking into a chair to weep about her lost job and… well, that item in the newspaper certainly looks interesting and needs her immediate attention.
Did she learn her lesson? She does not but she certainly got what was coming to her, at least in the eyes of the audience of the time.
Newspapers were a craze when The Short-Sighted Governess was shot and had been for decades. Denmark had a high rate of literacy and, by 1914, Danes had their choice of over a thousand different newspapers and other periodicals. For a voracious reader, there was essentially an unlimited supply.
Larsen’s comedies have aged well because, while they addressed then-topical predicaments of pre-WWI Denmark, their humor was primarily derived from human nature. We may no longer wear gigantic hats and hobble skirts but the characters’ enslavement to fashion in A New Hat for the Madam will always be relatable. And, in the case of The Short-Sighted Governess, she may just as easily have been distracted by using social media on her smartphone.
Easy and inexpensive access to misinformation and trash journalism were concerns soberly discussed at the height of the golden age of newspapers. For a few cents, people could read about crime and vice. Newspaper moguls could spoon feed their own opinions to a gullible populace. In Denmark, the culture of newspapers had been rooted in political party-owned press and reforms aimed at more objective journalism had begun in 1905, just four years before The Short-Sighted Governess.
While the exact sort of newspaper that the governess is reading is not specified (though it may have been obvious in context to Danish viewers of 1909), we can surmise that the news must have been pretty juicy based on the eager way she hands a page over to her friend.
If we want to dive more deeply into the parallels between the modern internet and the newspaper culture of the early twentieth century, we have only to read how it was described by reformers of the era.
King C. Gillette made a fortune with his wildly successful safety razor and decided to turn his time and fortune to social reform. His 700+ page tome Gillette’s Social Redemption is a tedious doorstop but its section on the evils of newspapers is quite interesting and amusing.
“The individual addicted to newspapers soon becomes unfit for any consecutive intellectual effort.” The book then details a congressional hearing in which a publisher claimed that the daily newspaper enlightened readers, only to have a congressman respond that “One-third of the entire space was given up to advertising pelvic diseases and men-only abominations, and that four fifths of the news items related to elopements, defalcations, seductions and unnamable crimes.”
Gillette’s tome was mocked when it was published (the New York Times’ review spoke well of the crispness of its typeface, classic damning by faint praise) and the prose is deliriously purple but he wasn’t wrong about the state of some newspapers, even though his blanket condemnation was ridiculous. Negative stories were amplified in order to get a rise out of readers, sleazy snake oil cures were advertised, fat cats used the press to push stories favorable to their own businesses… in short, the modern internet. Gillette’s book was published in America, referenced the American press and was meant for an American audience but the wild wild west of newsprint was international. For further context, the newshound culture of Danish crime journalists was sent up in the charming mystery-comedy mashup Nedbrudte Nerver (1923).
So, the newspaper that so intrigued the governess would likely be a very familiar sight to anyone who spends time online. And, much like modern skits and comedy bits that revolve around smartphone distraction, the humor of The Short-Sighted Governess builds to greater and greater consequences and ends with the irresponsible governess losing her job.
And, while some of the humor is based on the governess’s poor eyesight, most is centered on her moral failings rather than her physical disability. The governess may not have been able to see the wet paint sign but she clearly could have told the difference between the little girl in her care and the little boy (or sailor!) she takes home instead if she had simply looked up from her newspaper for a moment. Prioritizing her own pleasure as a reader instead of keeping the child in her care safe is a comedic crime and one that must be punished.
The Short-Sighted Governess is another success in Viggo Larsen’s filmography and helps establish him further as an unsung hero of cinematic comedy. The details have changed but the heart of his humor is timeless.
Where can I see it?
Stream for free courtesy of the Danish Film Institute.
☙❦❧
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