Denmark

The plot:
Hans Thomsen is a man from the lowest end of society. A looser. He works for little money at the local crematory, running the furnace. Spends his time drinking with like-minded people at local bars. He never lets down an opportunity to score some extra bucks from shady business, like pillaging the corpses he processes every day, or reselling coffins on the black market.
Allan Berg is from the opposite world. He is a winner. High class, powerful, a successful businessman, a man of stature.Read More »

Det Danske Filminstitut wrote:
An experimental portrait of American jazz pianist Bud Powell. In most of the film, Powell walks the streets of Copenhagen, but there are also excerpts from ‘… a concert recording from Montmartre, where Powell’s fingers and face are studied in a series of beautiful, dark settings while he plays, but without synchronous sound. On the soundtrack, Bud Powell is heard playing, and Dexter Gordon tells a few stories at the beginning and end about Powell and his innovative impact on jazz’Read More »

Det Danske Filminstitut wrote:
Collective film. The ultimate happening film, created by a group of ABCinema members during a tent camp at Randbøl Hede in the summer of 1969. One of the members of the collective, Henning Christiansen, describes the film as follows:Read More »

Det Danske Filminstitut wrote:
This film was shot in the autumn of 1967 among European and American hippies in Nepal. We observe the way of life these hippies have chosen to live »outside of society« in the light of the everyday rites and ceremonies of the Nepalese. We see that the hippie movement is not just a caprice of fashion, but a religion. »We have to be here. To meditate. To pray. This way we can turn the atomic bomb into a flower«.Read More »

Quote:
In Per Kirkeby’s set with a blue backdrop beside a woodland lake Lene Adler Petersen pronounces Ophelia’s madness monologue from Hamlet, but she is constantly interrupted by the sound of two wooden blocks and has to start again: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance …” The words thereby rapidly lose their meaning and our interest turns to the specific sounds emerging from Adler Petersen’s lips and the choreographed ways she touches her face. The film starts and ends classically with a zoom in from an establishing shot and a zoom out onto a concluding tableau in which Ophelia throws herself into the lake, but in between the film is experimental, with two cameras on tracks abiding by a carefully conceived but highly impenetrable system. The frame thus changes apparently according to signals from Leth, and occasionally the camera seems to track right off the set into the sylvan wilderness. At its premiere at the Carlton it was shown before Roman Polanski’s Dance of the vampires.Read More »

Det Danske Filminstitut wrote:
Per Kirkeby og Jørgen Leth om filmen: “Det skal være en smuk film, som helt reelt skildrer naturen, og som også udnytter associationer, der er knyttet til Dyrehaven som begreb. Skelettet er årstidernes skiften, skildret i billeder. Med “billeder” menes enkelte billeder uden anden indbyrdes kontinuitet end den, som selve rammen, årstidernes skiften, giver. Ind i dette skelet bygger vi rent romantiske billeder som et associationsfelt, der ligesom rummer den historiske side af Dyrehaven. Dyrehaven er jo ikke en hvilkensomhelst skov, men en skov, som optager en stor plads i landets kunstneriske bevidsthed.”Read More »

imdb:
An insight into the work by composer and pianist Herman D. Koppel with the American Cantilena Quartet before the first performance of his piano quartet ‘opus 114’ in 1986. The film is shot at Louisiana, the museum of modern art north of Copenhagen, which serves as a setting literally rich in images. The director and founder of the museum, Knud W. Jensen, talks briefly about Louisiana and what art means to man. Herman D. Koppel also plays a piano piece by Carl Nielsen – conveyed in the film as a study in fingers dancing on the keys.Read More »

When Pontus, a poor writer, enters city life, he finds himself in a struggle. He spends his time selling what he can and looking for work. However, as he searches for food, his pangs eat at his sanity. Hesitant to admit his own poverty, Pontus drifts through the town, indigent and lonely, as the film captures his certain peril.Read More »

From the Danish Film Institute website:
The titular villain is an infamous international criminal, Mrs Valentin Kempel, known as “The Predator Spider” due to her habit of ensnaring innocent victims in her web. Men are enchanted by her, and she uses this to coerce them into taking part in her criminal activities. When one of her victims takes his own life, the victim’s brother and a detective decide to put an end to the beautiful criminal’s reign of terror. But The Hunting Spider does not give in so easily – and she is not afraid to use unsporting tricks against her new opponents.Read More »