Colin Marshall sits down at Copenhagen’s Husets Biograf with Jack Stevenson, programmer of the theater and author of books on both Scandinavian and American film. They discuss Lars von Trier as the world’s representative of Danish cinema; the difficulty of creating scandal within unshockable Denmark; revival theaters across the world as a nation of their own; the film education he drew from haunting the revival houses of Boston; his plan to serve ten White Russians during a screening of The Big Lebowski; Copenhagen as Scandinavia’s most “real urban environment” in which to show films; the slow emergence of the strengths of the current generation of independent cinemas; the question asked about both Denmark and Korea, “How does that small country make such interesting films?”; his own introduction to Danish film, through Lars von Trier and others; how, in the era in America when “Scandinavian movie” meant, more or less, “porno movie,” Danish film helped make porn chic; the ideal grind house experience evoked by Jack Kerouac in On the Road; the days when every train station in Germany, “a special place,” had a porno theater; America’s lack of an “off cinema” scene like the ones in European countries; why Danes can’t accept film noir (and don’t know about soul food); the history of the Husets Biograf’s 19th-century industrial building, overtaken by anarchist squatters in the sixties; the surprises of filmgoing in Brussels; his resolve to program Halloween shows in the face of Danish indifference to Halloween; and his current work with traditional Danish ghost stories.
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