Abcinema and Super 8 Technology

ABCinema and Super 8 Technology

Tania Ørum

Abstract

Danish avant-garde film has been pioneered mainly by visual artists. When small, portable, cheap cameras appeared in the 1960s, a new generation of avant-garde artists started making films as part of the cross-aesthetic experiments going on in the circles around the Experimental School of Art in Copenhagen. In 1968 they formed the film collective ABCinema, which experimented with new film languages while also striving to secure democratic access to the medium and trying out novel forms of film projection.

Experimental films in Denmark have been made mainly by visual artists and have never been accepted as “proper films” by film critics, the film industry or film historians. The pioneers of Danish experimental film started out during World War ii, a period of relative isolation during the German occupation, when visual artists were nevertheless very active in the circles around Asger Jorn, the Danish part of the Cobra group and the art and literature magazine Helhesten. These films were mostly the result of collaboration between paint- ers (such as the constructivist Albert Mertz) and film photographers.1 From 1947 into the early 1950s visual artists from the constructivist group linien (the line) and others experimented with non-figurative film, sometimes painted directly on the filmstrip (Søren Melson and Richard Winther), with collage film (Albert Mertz, Jørgen Roos) and with surrealist film (Jørgen Roos, Wilhelm Freddie).2 By the early 1950s these film activities had faded away, and experimental film did not revive in Denmark until the early 1960s – characteristically, in the avant-garde groups of visual artists who emerged at this time. The Scandinavian offshoot of the international situationist movement, cen- tered around Jorn’s brother the writer and painter Jørgen Nash and the painter and art critic Jens Jørgen Thorsen, made so-called décollage films and arranged five festivals of international experimental films in 1964–1965. The German

1 For the experimental films made during World War ii see Krarup and Nørrested 1986: 15–20 (English summary p. 167). 2 For the experimental films of the late 1940s see Krarup and Nørrested 1986: 20–30 (English summary p. 167).

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artist and gallerist Arthur Köpcke, who lived in Copenhagen, made several experimental films.3 The visual artists from the independent Experimental School of Art (founded in 1961) used film as one of several experimental media – and later on, in 1968, formed the nucleus of the production collective ABCinema, in collaboration with writers, architects, composers, actors, film workers and photographers.

ABCinema – The Technological Basis and Its Artistic and Political Implications

There are clearly technological reasons for this new direction in avant-garde cinema in the late 1960s: by 1968 film cameras had become sufficiently small, portable and cheap to be available to everybody. Most of the Nordic (and European) population started filming family birthdays, holidays and other memorable moments in the 1960s. Small portable cameras made the elaborate division of labour in the film industry unnecessary. The avant-garde artists around the Experimental School of Art saw this as an important step towards media democracy, opening the way for a new, interactive use of film that would make it possible for everyone to make their own films and show them to one another in public meeting places or at home, not necessarily in cinemas. The cinema public would thus be liberated from their passive position as consumers submitted to the one-way communica- tion of one celebrated film auteur or the commercial products of the capitalist film industry. “Film is easy to make” was one of the slogans of ABCinema. Projecting films outside the cinema, several at a time, thus introducing a more relaxed and less dramatic viewing experience, was an integral part of the film experiments. ABCinema members talked of “being with film” rather than “watching a film”, thus combining the new viewing habits introduced by televi- sion and the experience from the visual arts of using film in installations or events to create a total environment in which the viewer is free to move around and choose his own perspectives. The ABCinema collective set out to demonstrate just how easy it was to make films by making their own. And they also saw it as a political obligation to secure access to filmmaking based on artistic merit, not commercial interest – to make film an art form instead of a commercial product. In February 1969 a

3 For the films by the situationists and Köpcke see Krarup and Nørrested 1986: 31–40 (English summary p. 167).