The Danish Directors 3

Description

Following the two previous volumes in this series of practitioner interviews with Danish directors, Danish Directors 3 focuses on Danish documentary cinema. Although many of the directors interviewed here have ventured successfully into the terrain of fiction, their main contributions to the thriving post-80s milieu lie in the interconnected areas of documentary film and television. Emphasizing the new documentary cinema, this book features filmmakers who belong to the generation born in the 1970s. Many of the interviewees were trained at the National Film School of Denmark’s now legendary Department of Documentary and Television. The term “new” also captures tendencies that cut across the work of the filmmakers. For example, for the generation in question, internationalization and the development of a new digital media culture are inevitable aspects of everyday life, and, indeed, of the professional environments in which they operate. A comprehensive overview of documentary directors currently working in Denmark, this is the only book of its kind about this growing area of Danish cinema.

 

Introduction 

Chapter 1: Phie Ambo

Chapter 2: Dola Bonfils 

Chapter 3: Dorte Høeg Brask 

Chapter 4: Mads Brügger 

Chapter 5: Pernille Rose Grønkjær 

Chapter 6: Jesper Jargil 

Chapter 7: Torben Skjødt Jensen 

Chapter 8: Max Kestner 

Chapter 9: Mikala Krogh 

Chapter 10: Simone Aaberg Kærn 

Chapter 11: Asger Leth 

Chapter 12: Janus Metz 

Chapter 13: Eva Mulvad

Chapter 14: Michael Noer 

Chapter 15: Katia Forbert Petersen 

Chapter 16: Jeppe Rønde 

Chapter 17: Sami Saif 

Chapter 18: Anne Wivel 

Chapter 19: Anders Østergaard

Sujets

• Energie & environnement
• Film
• General
• Engineering
• Technology
• General officer
• Cinematography
• Film director
• Sciences et techniques
• Power Resources

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783203260
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2014 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2014 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose
Copy-editor: Michael Eckhardt
Cover image: Søren Solkær Starbird, courtesy of Danish Documentary
Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-041-2
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-325-3
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-326-0
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
 
 
 
For Arne Bro
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Phie Ambo
Chapter 2: Dola Bonfils
Chapter 3: Dorte Høeg Brask
Chapter 4: Mads Brügger
Chapter 5: Pernille Rose Grønkjær
Chapter 6: Jesper Jargil
Chapter 7: Torben Skjødt Jensen
Chapter 8: Max Kestner
Chapter 9: Mikala Krogh
Chapter 10: Simone Aaberg Kærn
Chapter 11: Asger Leth
Chapter 12: Janus Metz
Chapter 13: Eva Mulvad
Chapter 14: Michael Noer
Chapter 15: Katia Forbert Petersen
Chapter 16: Jeppe Rønde
Chapter 17: Sami Saif
Chapter 18: Anne Wivel
Chapter 19: Anders Østergaard
Glossary
Index of Titles and Names
Index of the Institutional Landscape and Central Topics
Acknowledgements
All of the directors included in this volume have been very supportive of our project. They have been generous with their time, have lent us films, and have provided feedback on the edited transcripts of the interviews, as well as on their translations. We are deeply grateful for their enthusiasm for the project, and for their generosity.
Madeleine Schlawitz, Christian Hansen, and Henrik Fuglsang, all at The Danish Film Institute Stills & Posters Archive, helped us to secure portraits for each of the directors. Susanna Neimann, head of communication and press at The Danish Film Institute, also offered her kind assistance with images. The support of producers Sigrid Dyekjær and Katrine A. Sahlstrøm, and production assistants Minna Kirstine Katz and Ida Marie Gedbjerg, at Danish Documentary is gratefully acknowledged. Photographers credited in the captions throughout the book have graciously granted us permission to reproduce their work. Lars Ølgaard and his colleagues at the DFI Library have helped us to retrieve relevant newspaper clippings and, in some instances, films.
We are happy to acknowledge a publication subsidy from The Danish Film Institute, which has helped to reduce the cost of the book, and thus to make it more readily available to readers.
The team at Intellect Press, including May Yao and Jelena Stanovnik, has, as always, been a joy to work with.
The Danish Directors 3: Dialogues on the New Danish Documentary Cinema is dedicated to Arne Bro, in recognition of his tireless efforts as an educator, on behalf of documentary filmmaking in Denmark.
Introduction
Ib Bondebjerg, Mette Hjort, and Eva Novrup Redvall
In the two previous volumes in this series of practitioner interviews with Danish directors, documentary cinema has had a minor, but not always insignificant, role to play. Several of the directors featured in the first interview book, entitled The Danish Directors: Dialogues on a Contemporary National Cinema (Hjort & Bondebjerg 2000), have made important contributions to both fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, and this was necessarily reflected in the discussions. A case in point is director Henning Carlsen, for not only did this central filmmaker launch his filmmaking career with documentary films, he is also widely regarded as having helped, in the 1960s, to take Danish documentary filmmaking in new directions often described as ‘modern.’ Similar remarks are relevant with reference to filmmakers such as Jørgen Leth, Jon Bang Carlsen, and Jytte Rex, who first began exploring the possibilities of more poetic and reflexive approaches to documentary filmmaking several decades ago. Whereas the interviews with these filmmakers in The Danish Directors: Dialogues on a Contemporary National Cinema included some discussion of relevant documentary issues, and this within the context of a comprehensive evocation of the filmmakers’ oeuvres, documentary filmmaking is virtually entirely absent from the second book, as its full title suggests: The Danish Directors 2: Dialogues on the New Danish Fiction Cinema (Hjort, Jørholt, & Redvall 2010). Only in the interviews with Jacob Thuesen and Omar Shargawi did documentary filmmaking impose itself as a necessary focus for discussion.
Motivating this third book of practitioner interviews is the aim of giving Danish documentary cinema, and especially new Danish documentary cinema, its due. Although many of the directors whom we have interviewed have ventured onto the terrain of fiction (often successfully so), their main contributions to the thriving post-80s milieu that has produced what counts as a new Danish cinema (Hjort 2005) lie in the (interconnected) areas of documentary film and television. The emphasis here is very much on new documentary cinema, for the vast majority of filmmakers included in this third volume of interviews belong to the generation that was born in the 1970s. Date of birth is by no means negligible in this context, for it was during this very same time frame that documentary filmmaking became part of the curricula offered by the National Film School of Denmark (NFSD). Many of the interviewees, although not all of them, were trained at the School’s now legendary Department of Documentary & TV, which is closely associated with the untiring efforts of Arne Bro (Hjort 2013a), to whom this volume is respectfully dedicated.
The fact that thinking along generational lines is a defining feature of the new Danish documentary cinema is clearly suggested by the filmmakers themselves. Selected observations by Eva Mulvad and Michael Noer help to substantiate this point:
My generation was simply carpet-bombed with black-and-white documentaries about WWII during secondary school. And those films created that dusty feeling of obligation that has been such a feature of the [documentary] genre. We feel a certain obligation to shake that off. […] my generation clearly dreams of making films that will be shown in the cinema. Our desire is to make films that are at once cinematic and entertaining.
(Mulvad, this volume)
What was missing [amongst documentary filmmakers at the Film School around 2000] was that sense of new beginnings, of a new generation making its mark. Ten years on, it’s clear that the situation has changed completely. Now it’s actually possible to talk about the impact that a new generation has had on the aesthetics and practices of filmmaking.
(Noer, this volume)
The term ‘new’ references the impact of a generation, and of the Department of Documentary & TV, but also captures tendencies that cut across the work of the interviewees. These include the aspiration to draw on the full spectrum of cinematic tools and formal/stylistic/aesthetic possibilities, to think carefully about audience appeal, and, through intense collaboration with other film practitioners, to produce films that meet professional standards with respect to such areas as sound, cinematography, and editing. The realities about which the filmmakers in question make assertions through their documentary filmmaking also reflect a generational specificity. For filmmakers born in the 1970s, globalization and internationalization are inevitable aspects of everyday life, and this common ground has clear implications for their films.
Yet, not all of the names listed in the ‘Table of Contents’ can be neatly captured by this generational way of framing things. As will be clear, we have also opted to interview a number of filmmakers who, having demonstrated a capacity for innovation and renewal, can legitimately be seen as having helped to shape the contours of the new Danish documentary cinema. Directors such as Anne Wivel (b. 1945), Dola Bonfils (b. 1941), Jesper Jargil (b. 1945), and Torben Skjødt Jensen (b. 1958) have mostly followed paths quite different from those that have led a younger generation into documentary filmmaking. In several instances, for example, it has been a matter of ‘learning by doing’ in an industry context, as compared with the younger generation’s typical exposure to a more formal process of film education at the Copenhagen-based conservatoire-style school that defines its profile in terms of a strong commitment to film as art. The documentary work of these filmmakers is crucial, however, in the context of any discussion of new Danish documentary cinema, and not merely for reasons relating to issues of continuity and renewal. More important still is the role that these filmmakers have played, as teachers and creative consultants, in inspiring filmmakers belonging to that younger generation that is so central to the new Danish documentary film phenomenon.
Like all of the programmes delivered by the National Film School of Denmark, those offered by the Department of Documentary & TV rely heavily on the ongoing involvement of a group of trusted practitioner-teachers. The interview with Anne Wivel in The Danish Directors 3 provides insight into the emergence of this key department, but also into the role that well established documentary filmmakers (among them Wivel herself) play in sustaining it. Indeed, her reflections suggest a causal narrative about the emergence of the new Danish documentary cinema, one that points to the decisive vision of key practitioner-teachers, as well as to certain mentorship practices. As Wivel remarks, the current success of the new Da