Writing
Artist group ABCinema's footage from Rødovrecentret, Denmark's first large shopping center in Rødovre, a suburb of Copenhagen. A collage of super 8 footage, shot with multiple cameras. (DFI)
The Search is the ultimate happening film created by a group of ABCinema members during a camp on the Juttish heath. The film consists of loosely composed sequences. The landscape is the setting for a series of peculiar occurrences in which individual members were free to realize personal ideas, fantasies and themes: a man runs across the heath, shouting, a Molotov cocktail flares on a beach, a man repeatedly falls over, an angel-like woman makes a solitary procession, a burning pine, a man breaking a tree with a shovel, etc.
A girl inherits a string of industrial concerns that will become bankrupt by the inheritance tax unless the girl marries the son of the owner of a competing industrial concern.
Performing in the work The Female Christ, Lene Adler Petersen walks – entirely unannounced – through the building’s vast hall while carrying a cross. The artists introduce a new, vibrant image depicting one of our grand narratives and carry out a startling intervention within the pulsating business world. The resulting clash has become an iconic modern-day image. The footage created for this work should also be viewed within the context of the film community ABCinema, which worked with e.g. collectively produced film and collective film screenings where several films were screened simultaneously. (National Gallery of Denmark)
From the Association for Young Danish Art: The Student Council's premises, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 6 December. 1967
The ABCinema group dispatched Jørgen Leth to make the arrangements with Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag, who good-naturedly put himself at their disposal. Relaxing on a bench in the garden of Copenhagen's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Krag is scrutinised by camera-wielding collective members almost like a model in a life-drawing class. Every possible angle, distance and framing is tried. The result is an image of the prime minister that is both fragmented and multi-facetted, describing his visual appearance as a man and an icon. At the same time, the ABCinema members film each other filming Krag, which gives the film a highly self-reflective character. Like "The Deer Garden," this is a film about a film being filmed. A showdown with the documentary portrait genre, "Jens Otto Krag" is devised according to the principle of keeping the material alive by not editing it but randomly piecing it together. (DFI)
