Bodil Joensen (1944 - 1985)
Bodil Joensen (photocredit unidentified)Shinkichi Tajiri, maker of the documentary A Summer Day (1970) commented that "Accepting the 'Grand Prix' at the first Wet Dream Film Festival was the worst mistake we made with our film, but we were too flattered by the response at the time to realize it. Today it is referred to as an 'underground porno classic' and 'porno' was precisely the label I was trying to overcome in making a tender documentary about a very special person." Fleshpot: Cinema's Myth Makers & Taboo Breakers (1992) - Jack Stevenson (Editor) [Amazon.com] [Jul 2006]
Biography
Bodil Joensen or Bodil Jørgensen (September 25, 1944 - January 3, 1985) was a Danish pornographic actress born in the village Hundige, near Copenhagen. (Her name is pronounced "Yu'En-sen"). An animal lover, she ran a small entrepreneurial farm and animal husbandry business, and enjoyed celebrity status from her many pornographic films in which she engaged in sex acts with animals.
An icon and celebrity for a time, with her own successful business, she failed to make the transition to movies when market sentiment changed, and became impoverished, dependent on alcohol, stopped being able to care for her animals, and died some few years later. The love of her life was her dog, but friends comment she was very close to all animals, and before her decline cared deeply and affectionately for every type, from rabbits to pigs. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodil_Joensen [Jul 2006]
One Summer Day / Animal Lover
The most controversial Danish import ever, won best film at the Copenhagen Wet Dream festival under its original title One Summer Day. Bluntly titled Animal Lover in the U.S., the movie documents the barnyard antics of Bodil Jensen. An attractive blonde farm girl, Bodil fucks a dog, rolls in shit as she blows a pig and lets a rubber filled with horse semen burst on her smiling face as a finale.
Bodil, who, in the film, claimed that she preferred animals as sex partners, was such a curiosity that she was even studied by swingin' sexologists Drs. Phyllis and Eberhardt Kronhausen. Her unexpected stardom gave pause to many questions. Why did she do this? What burned out the line between the socially acceptable and unacceptable so thoroughly in her? Even if Bodil liked it, the sadism inherent in the act of watching this woman fucking with an animal was the societal taboo stigma that drew and aroused so many male ticket buyers.
Distributed by Chelly Wilson's Variety Films, Animal Lover was a big hit. It played three San Francisco adult theaters simultaneously and the Mini Cinema in New York's Times Square. Animal Lover's run at the Mini was well publicized in New York's daily tabloids with ads featuring a cartoon of Bodil with a farm animal under each arm. After months at the Mini, Animal Lover was busted. A Manhattan judge found it obscene and ordered the print destroyed. Apparently, it was the print at the Mini, because a few weeks later, Animal Lover continued to play at Mrs. Wilson's adult theaters in Brooklyn and Queens.
To this day, top quality prints of Animal Lover change hands in the film collecting world and video companies will supply a copy of it if asked. --Copyright 2002 Alpha Blue Archives, accessed and copied for research purposes from http://www.alphabluearchives.com/euro.html on Jun 2004
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