Ole John
2021Pelota
Ole John, Jørgen Leth
Jean-Pierre Laruche, Joseph Laduce
A documentary view of the Basque ball-game in which a small hard leather ball is hit against a wall. The film gives an impression of the game itself and of those who play it, not only the star performers (and the myths that surround them), but also those who just play in the streets and alleyways. The film sees the game it its cultural context and conveys the emotions and stories that are peculiar to the Basque country.
Pelota
Stopforbud
Ole John, Jens Jørgen Thorsen
Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon
Stop for Bud is Jørgen Leth's first film and the first in his long collaboration with Ole John. […] they wanted to "blow up cinematic conventions and invent cinematic language from scratch". The jazz pianist Bud Powell moves around Copenhagen -- through King's Garden, along the quay at Kalkbrænderihavnen, across a waste dump. […] Bud is alone, accompanied only by his music. […] Image and sound are two different things -- that's Leth's and John's principle. Dexter Gordon, the narrator, tells stories about Powell's famous left hand. In an obituary for Powell, dated 3 August 1966, Leth wrote: "He quite willingly, or better still, unresistingly, mechanically, let himself be directed. The film attempts to depict his strange duality about his surroundings. His touch on the keys was like he was burning his fingers -- that's what it looked like, and that's how it sounded. But outside his playing, and often right in the middle of it, too, he was simply gone, not there."
Stop for Bud
Se frem til en tryg tid
Ole John, Jørgen Leth
A study of the basic elements of film, first and foremost framing and the relationship between image and sound. The film consists of shots of a Spanish barber at work, a man telling stories, and the musician Louis Hjulmand playing the vibraphone.
Look Forward to a Time of Security
Eftersøgningen
Ole John, Vagn Lundbye
The Search is the ultimate happening film created by a group of ABCinema members during a camp on the Juttish heath. The film consists of loosely composed sequences. The landscape is the setting for a series of peculiar occurrences in which individual members were free to realize personal ideas, fantasies and themes: a man runs across the heath, shouting, a Molotov cocktail flares on a beach, a man repeatedly falls over, an angel-like woman makes a solitary procession, a burning pine, a man breaking a tree with a shovel, etc.
The Search
