{"id":28015,"date":"2025-04-09T16:30:40","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T15:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=28015"},"modified":"2025-04-09T16:28:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-09T15:28:41","slug":"four-short-films-by-lejf-marcussen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2025\/04\/09\/four-short-films-by-lejf-marcussen\/","title":{"rendered":"Four short films by Lejf Marcussen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"marcussen1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s more Surrealism inside this 34-minute collection<\/a> of films by Lejf Marcussen<\/a> (1936\u20132013), a Danish film-maker and animator whose filmography has never been easy to explore on the internet. Marcussen made an impression on a number of Britons in the late 1980s when The Public Voice<\/em> was shown on TV, one of many such films broadcast during a time when British television channels still dared to screen unusual animations. I’ve written about The Public Voice<\/em> before<\/a> so there’s no need to repeat myself, it was a search for a better copy that led me to this compilation of four Marcussen films\u2014The Conductor<\/em> (1978), Tone Traces<\/em> (1983), The Public Voice<\/em> (1988), and Angeli<\/em> (2002)\u2014all of which differ so much from each other they could easily be taken for the works of four different directors.<\/p>\n

\"marcussen2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Conductor<\/em> is the one closest to traditional animation, being a comic portrait of an orchestral conductor’s wildy exaggerated actions and facial reactions during the performance of a piece of music. It’s music that turns out to be the dominant theme in this collection, and the sole consistent element.<\/p>\n

\"marcussen3.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Where The Conductor<\/em> is overtly comedic and grotesque, Tone Traces<\/em> is completely abstract, an illustration of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5<\/em> whose unfolding is depicted by coloured lines on a black background. Marcussen’s approach differs from earlier musical illustrators like Oskar Fischinger in restricting his shapes to lines that follow the instrumentation and composition in great detail.<\/p>\n

\"marcussen4.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This version of The Public Voice<\/em> is another one taped from a TV broadcast, it’s not necessarily better than any of the others but it does at least keep Marcussen’s remarkable film circulating. The music this time is a chaotic amalgam of pieces by Luciano Berio, Henry Cow and Gustav Mahler.<\/p>\n

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Angeli<\/em> was Marcussen’s final film, another remarkable piece of work although it’s not one I like very much. Watching computerised shapes jump around in a jaunty manner isn’t how I prefer to spend my time, and the score for this one is chaos of a different kind, a collision of digital keyboard pieces with the superior music of Handel, Dvorak and Beethoven. Watch the second and third films in this set if you do nothing else.<\/p>\n

Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 A Picture, a film by Lejf Marcussen<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Public Voice by Lejf Marcussen<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s more Surrealism inside this 34-minute collection of films by Lejf Marcussen (1936\u20132013), a Danish film-maker and animator whose filmography has never been easy to explore on the internet. Marcussen made an impression on a number of Britons in the late 1980s when The Public Voice was shown on TV, one of many such films … Continue reading “Four short films by Lejf Marcussen”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Four short films by Lejf Marcussen","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[49,52,2,7,3,18],"tags":[13923,13925,13924,2392,3041],"class_list":["post-28015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abstract-cinema","category-animation","category-art","category-film","category-music","category-surrealism","tag-carl-nielsen","tag-gustave-mahler","tag-henry-cow","tag-lejf-marcussen","tag-luciano-berio"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-7hR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}