In memoriam

Lars Arrhenius

Lars Arrhenius (1966-2020) was a visual artist in constant change, moving fluidly between art forms. His work, whatever its shape and expression, tends to be playful and full of cleverness, but it is also characterized by warm empathy and sharp social critique, with just a hint of cynicism. His art has been called humorous attempts at explaining the great questions of of our time. The works often had a popular appeal that took him beyond the art world and into children’s programmes on television as well as the subway system. This programme includes a selection of his short films.

Distributor: Filmform

Screened:
Kortfilmfestivalen Play 19-25 October

Elisabeth

Elisabeth is a formal facial portrait of a person from being a newborn baby to drawing her last breath, in steady transformation. This animated short film has a resemblance to the films that focus on a mushroom or a flower that rapidly lives from sprout-flower-back to soil in 20 seconds. This one is a bit longer though, but still a human life-span in 4 min is rapidly fast.

Sweden, 2001, 4,  Direction: Lars Arrhenius.

The Street

The Street is an animation that shows the life in a block during 24 hours. Our daily routines are presented like the mechanics in a speeded up cuckoo clock. Each person contributes like a cog in a machinery, together keeping this tragic-comic musical docusoap running. The film is produced by CGAC, the art museum in Santiago de Compostela.

Sweden, 2003, 6, Direction: Lars Arrhenius.

Mannen utan kvaliteter

An animated short that follows an anonymous Everyman from his birth to his grave. It’s also a play with pictorial conventions; all the images in the film were made from sampled or homemade pictograms. This highly symbolic, global visual language was constructed to relay information in a direct and no-nonsense manner, making it easy to identify with the character in the movie.

Sweden, 2003, 8, Direction: Lars Arrhenius.

Habitat

In Habitat, we follow nine people and a dog in a three-story apartment building. An urban story, where the drama of the building mixes the ordinary and the absurd with humour and seriousness.

Sweden, 2006, 9, Direction: Lars Arrhenius, Johannes Müntzing.

Murmurs of Earth

Murmurs of Earth is a condensed story of creation. The film portrays the story of the earth and its future, as it could be caught and summarized on a radar some million light years away. The title is borrowed from the two discs that were sent out in space with the Voyager expedition in 1977. The film is a sci-fi-dystopia inspired by this epoch, visualizing questions about our origin and our future.

Sweden, 2007, 7, Direction: Lars Arrhenius, Johannes Müntzing.

En dag på varuhuset

An animation that depicts what happened the minutes before the murder of the Swedish Foreign minister Anna Lindh. The department store is filled with people shopping, exposed as filmed by an x-ray camera. A new Sweden is visualized in an empty store. When the merchandise and goods are gone, our actions appear more distinct. As the saying goes “Society is the sum of our individual behaviours”.

Sweden, 2008, 8, Direction: Lars Arrhenius, Johannes Müntzing.

Humor

An 8-minute short that pays tribute to classic pranks while questioning whether they’re even funny.

Sweden, 2017, 8, Direction: Lars Arrhenius.

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