LONGBRIDGE

“Whatever is perfect suffers no witnesses...”

Copenhagen, St George’s Day 2008. The Institute of Film and Video Studies produced a documentary about a mysterious case of arson somehow connected to the coincidental encounter of three individuals at the famous landmark of Longbridge. The documentary presents original footage from the only surviving piece of evidence-a video tape recorded by the arsonist who was compiling a video archive spanning years of private surveillance of the citizens of Copenhagen.

“We were brought in to interpret the video created by Madam Sørensen because she was apparently resisting efforts by the police to extract a motive for her crime. Having studied the tapes of her deposition she explained at length how she started the fire, but at no point did she say why she did it. She was also very frank in explaining her activities with the video camera; how she forged identity papers, signatures, and letters; how she used disguises to follow people about - even seducing a number of people to secure footage, but when asked ‘why’ she did it, again there was no answer. I can’t help thinking that this absence of motive was in some way of greater significance to her than it was to the police.”*

*Fragment of an interview with Inger Lund, Senior Lecturer in Post-Feminine Studies, Institute of Film and Video Studies, Copenhagen