The executioner

‘The next great moment in history is ours.’ This is the closing statement in Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s film 'Skarpretteren' ('The Executioner'). The film challenges the roles traditionally assigned to women and also offers an image of the 1970s women’s liberation movement that the artist was herself a part of.

Ursula Reuter Christiansen plays the lead role in the film, which consists of a series of tableaux portraying her encounter with the executioner, an exhausted soldier, whom she breastfeeds, and a group of beer-drinking men who are digging her grave. The artist takes her rejection of the feminine role to the ultimate extreme by letting herself be killed by the executioner, so that she can be reborn a new woman.