Director sets rules for Copenhagen Art Festival project to reinterpret six famous art works, including controversial monument by Nazi architect Albert Speer.

Maverick director Lars von Trier has set the parameters for a user-generated film project produced by the Copenhagen Art Festival.

Participants are asked to reinterpret, through film or sound recordings, one or more of six famous works of art, including Nazi architect Albert Speer’s controversial Nuremberg monument Zeppelinfield.

Von Trier praised Speer during his controversial Melancholia press conference at Cannes.

The project’s editor, Danish director Jenle Hallund, says the ambition of the community piece is to “create a cacophonous testimony of the human condition’s greater purpose than power and profit.”

The six art works are:

James Joyce’s novel Ulysses

August Strindberg’s play The Father

Albert Speer’s monument Zeppelinfield in Nuremberg

Paul Gauguin’s painting Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?

César Franck’s musical improvisations

The music of Sammy Davis Jr.

Participants can shoot up to five minutes of material.

Jenle Hallund, director of Zentropa drama Limboland and script consultant on von Trier’s Melancholia, will arrange selected material into a ‘universal art work’ called Gesamt, which will be presented from October 2012 at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg exhibition space in Copenhagen.

“This project is interesting because it is based on ordinary people’s creativity and imagination,” says Hallund. “Therefore It has the potential to reveal the health of a civilization by exposing its soul. Together we can try and create a cacophonous testimony of the human condition’s greater purpose than power and profit. When these great works are filtered through the body and mind, what do we end up with? Regimentation or revolution? Bigotry or innovation?”

Von Trier came under fire earlier this year when he made remarks sympathizing with Adolf Hitler during a press conference for Melancholia at the Cannes Film Festival. The comments led to the director being banned from all future editions of the festival.

During the director’s controversial speech he claimed to “like Speer”, descibring him as “one of God’s best children” and “a talent”. After apologising for the comments shortly after the conference the director then retracted his apology later in the year.

Material is to reach the organisers by September 6, 2012.