Henning Christiansen

With the participation of Danish and foreign artists. Creation of a printing house, film screenings, production of the Potato Opera, etc.

Broadcast to a large portion of the Danish population in January 1970, Hesteofringen ('Horse Sacrifice') was the ostensible ritual slaughtering and dismemberment of a horse in protest of the ongoing war in Vietnam (the horse was actually very old and put down humanely by a vet).

Starring Reuter Christiansen herself and shot in the lush landscape of Møn, the Danish island where she has lived since 1970, THE EXECUTIONER uses a fragmented narrative to tell “a story of woman’s degradation and exaltation,” as its subtitle indicates. A landmark of Danish feminist art, the film was also Reuter Christiansen’s first major collaboration with Henning, who composed the film’s lyrical, subtly experimental music.

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.

An existential pictorial poem about human life. "Can they stand it? Do they never feel?" (DFI)

A cinematic experiment that moves in several planes. Four people act out a human course, seen with white silhouettes on a black background. 'Inside' them - or behind them - a different process plays out, supported and contradicted by the sound side. (DFI)

An elegant and humorous film—in the guise of a serious anthropological treatise—spotlights "The Perfect Human," a model of the modern Dane created by our wishful thinking.

With the relationship between mother and daughter as a common theme, the film is divided into 9 image rooms with action patterns that are based on archetypal images and motifs. The film is unconventional in its choice of means of action. Ursula Reuter Christiansen, who is a painter, tells her adventurous stories with an emphasis on the visual element, which works in interaction with Henning Christiansen's original soundtrack. (DFI)

Susanne, a journalist, and Morten, a cellist, desperately want a child, but are unsuccessful. The situation leads to desperate acts, occasional drunkenness, and solace for her with a discreet lover.

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)