Films by and with Poul Gernes

9 films, total 54 min. DVD
© PLAGIAT FILM / KLARA KAROLINES FOND 2007
In commission at BORGENS FORLAG

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Text by Tania Ørum from the dvd booklet

Poul Gernes (1925-1996) was one of the central figures in Danish art life during the latter half of the twentieth century. His experimental art holds a firm place on an international level and as one of the founders of Den Eksperimenterende Kunstskole [The Experimental Art School] he has exerted considerable influence on the whole of the generation of artists who make up the Danish postwar avant-garde. The films by and with Poul Gernes presented here would presumably not be acknowledged by people working in professional film as “real” movies. This has been a recurrent problem for experimental film in Denmark. The experimental film makers Jørgen Leth and Ole John, who in 1968 formed the film collective ABCinema in collaboration with artists from The Ex School, had to defend their films with the purely technical argument that “it was shot and it was edited. It is film, even though other people may not think so, because they believe that film has to be something very exclusive and technical and costly” (Interview with Leth, 1999). Certainly in Gernes’ case, it is never technical or expensive. This would run contrary to his production ethics. Often, the film sequences were left unfinished and have had to be edited by others after his death. In the early films, there are no soundtracks. However, these films document an important part of Danish art history – from the early collective cinematic investigations made at the Ex School (started in 1961 by Poul Gernes and the art historian Troels Andersen), all the way up to Gernes’ 1994 demonstration of the guiding principles for his artistic activity. These films offer an insight into Poul Gernes’ activities and a glimpse of his personal charisma.

Brækfilm [Vomit Film] (1963) is one of the early films made at the Ex School as an element in the first years’ exploration of many different kinds of media and materials. Per Kirkeby has described how the students at the school set about working with the actual film stock by sawing in it or punching holes through it and how they shot a primitive version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Swine-lad”. Another student during the school’s early years has recounted how a man (Poul Gernes) “stuffed his mouth with oatmeal and water and then – ‘BRVDR’ — he threw up all over the floor and his beard was completely soiled.” The idea was, he explains, “to make something disgusting”. The film consists of several bits, presumably filmed by different participants, some of whom experiment with the camera’s possibilities — which sometimes makes it hard to distinguish the motive – and some of whom record a narrative sequence in which Gernes, dressed in his characteristic Icelandic sweater, corduroy trousers, ski socks and sandals, lies on the floor, throws up and rolls around, so that not only his full beard but also his face, hands, hair and clothes are gradually smeared with the very credible looking vomit.

From the same period dates another short film possibly showing Gernes’ signature, since it starts off with a few of his graphic prints. However, the prints may be included simply because they happened to be hanging on the wall or were being created while the film was being shot. The film shows an arrangement with two chairs situated in a corner in front of a heater. The minimal action consists of a person — wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, with a visible watch and hands, but no visible head — who keeps changing position from one chair to the other. Between each change of seating, the camera was switched off, so that when the film is projected, it looks like the movement of a trick film. The omitted head, the accidental arrangement and the lack of lighting all indicate that focus is on the cinematic experiment of the movement from one chair to another. In 2001, the “chair film” was edited by the Danish photographer and cinematographer, Steen Møller Rasmussen, who has given the resulting film the title, Make, and has also re-shot a Remake (2001), where a person, in better light, repeats the same jerky movements between two chairs. As the editor who has completed a number of Gernes’ films and assisted him in making others, Steen Møller Rasmussen wanted to remake the “chair film” in order to understand Gernes’ way of thinking and working.

The vomit film and the chair film can also be seen as documentations of an activity, much like the two amateur films (shot by Ole Schelde) which document Poul Gernes as a performer in two of his best known “happenings” that were performed in 1967 at Toftevang School: Papirperformance [Paper Performance], where Gernes winds himself up in a roll of paper and then cuts himself free from inside the paper roll using his pocket knife; and Cirkelperformance [Circle Performance], where Gernes slowly and sculpturally rotates. The Paper Performance is also included in a reconstructed color version filmed in 1986 in which Gernes cuts himself out from within the paper roll with a pair of scissors.

During the ABCinema period, while others from The Ex School were busy making films, both in groups and by themselves, Poul Gernes did not make many films. But he did collaborate with Per Kirkeby on a feature-length film entitled Normannerne [The Normans] (1976), which was made while he was preoccupied with the large decoration assignment for the new hospital in Herlev, which was the start of his long career of decorative work in the public space. Nevertheless, film continued to interest him, as can be seen from the fact that in 1978 he traveled to Egypt with a camera and shot quite a few rolls of film, even though these were never edited into a finished film. The soundtracks for these shots have vanished. However, after Gernes’ death, the rolls from this trip that were left behind were spliced together and edited by Steen Møller Rasmussen, resulting in the film, Cairo (1997). Since nothing was known about Gernes’ plans for the film, Steen Møller Rasmussen’s cut follows the recurrent patterns of visual interest on the film rolls, so that the film becomes a portrait of Poul Gernes’ way of looking at Egypt – and more especially a study of the artist’s interest in different constructions of water mills. Steen Møller Rasmussen has chosen to include Gernes’ synchronization clapping, so that the viewer gets to see Gernes in action and is made to understand that there once was a soundtrack.

Shortly after his return from Cairo, Gernes made plans with Steen Møller Rasmussen and the anthropologist Bjarne Kildegaard to make a film about shoes, costumes and other objects of utility. The idea was to create a film for intervals between television programmes. The three men met once a week for an extended period, until Steen Møller Rasmussen got impatient to start filming and suggested shooting a test film at the shoe museum in Hellerup. These shots were made and developed in 1978. But after this, the project came to a standstill. The shoe sequence was left unattended until after Gernes’ death. In 2007 Steen Møller Rasmussen edited the shots from 1978 to create the resulting film, Sko [Shoes]. The film consists of a series of tableaux of shoes from different historical periods. Each pair of shoes appears on the same blue background, framed by a light-blue edge of lace, which Gernes had made out of a plastic tablecloth. It was also Gernes who arranged each pair of shoes in such a way that their form and historical characteristics emerge. One can see from his knowledgeable treatment of the shoes that Gernes was, in fact, the son of a shoemaker. The original plan was to provide the shoes with a visible date, but it proved impossible to accommodate this within the lace frame in the test film. In the finished version of the film, each pair of shoes appears with its own individual characteristics in terms of form, color and position. And in the movement from one tableau to the next, the shoes almost seem to be dancing. The focus on the shoes serves to endow them with personality, as they step forward with shifting attitudes: dispassionately pointing forward; demonstrating sculptural or pedagogical issues, coquettishly displaying the heel or the instep – or as couples, now turning away from each other in different directions, now joined by having their shoelaces tied together. In all its minimal simplicity, this is a quite a refined and multifaceted film. The impression of the dancing shoes is heightened by the soundtrack which Steen Møller Rasmussen has added on which Poul Gernes is heard improvising on the organ.

Steen Møller Rasmussen’s film, Rum [Space], completed in November 1994, presents Poul Gernes in dialogue with the painter Erik A. Frandsen – although dialogue is perhaps not exactly what is going on. With their faces looking at the camera, the two walk along, following Steen Møller Rasmussen’s direction, from the Palads Movie House in Copenhagen, which was decorated by Gernes, past Vesterbros Torv [Vesterbro Square] and then down Istedgade until they finally take leave of each other with the acknowledgement that the gulf between their respective points of view is too wide to enable any genuine dialogue. Gernes is not interested in making an appearance here as an individual but is willing to carry out a task and to clarify his understanding of the mission of art. Colorfully dressed in white craftsman’s pants, sandals, a red jacket and a yellow cap, he advances with great conviction and no interest in objections, his thesis that visual art must be decorative and fulfill the social function of making the world more brilliantly colored.

© Tania Ørum, 2007
translated by DAN A. MARMORSTEIN

The dvd can be ordered through www.borgen.dk