DARK SIDE
OF
Bodil Joensen
or
Bodil Jørgensen
(pronounced "Yu'En-sen")
(25 September 1944 - 3 January 1985)
was a Danish actress born in the village Hundige, near Copenhagen
In April 2006, the UK station Channel Four Television screened a fifty-minute documentary, The Search For Animal Farm, as part of their Dark Side of Porn season. Several interviewees, including David Kerekes (co-author of Killing For Culture and See No Evil), author Phil Tonge, feminist writer Germaine Greer and British pornographer Ben Dover, all confessed to having seen bootlegs of Animal Farm in the 1980s, but were apparently unaware that there was no such film - the entity referred to as such was merely a number of existing bestiality shorts tacked together.
DARK SIDE OF PORN: SEARCH FOR ANIMAL FARM
Tonge described the owner of the copy he saw as an "evil, evil scumbag" and recalled how several "hard lads" either "left the room" or "vomited", Dover remarked that owning the bootleg was a useful aid to games of one-upmanship, since nothing could top the onscreen depravity of Joensen and her co-stars, and the normally easy-going Kerekes was moved to remark that "you can only wallow in filth for so long, and Animal Farm represents the very bottom of the barrel". Its impact on viewers was compared to that of hearing for the first time about the Kennedy assassination.
The documentary also told the sad story of Bodil Joensen, a psychologically traumatized young woman whose brief notoriety as the 'Queen of Bestiality' was followed by a downward spiral of alcohol abuse and prostitution before her death of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of forty, and featured an interview with the Danish pornographer Ole Gee.
The 1970 documentary, A Summer's Day, apparently formed at least some of the content of the Animal Farm bootleg, having been shown at the "Wet Dreams" pornography film festival beforehand.
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.
She gave her last interview in 1980 and died in 1985. Many believed her to have committed suicide, however in the April 2006 UK documentary, "The Dark Side of Porn: The Search For Animal Farm," which traced the production of the notorious underground film known as Animal Farm from excerpts of her many bestiality films, it was stated by a close friend of Bodil's that she died on January 3, 1985 from cirrhosis of the liver.
