ABBA - Eagle (Video)

What this video is

Released in May 1978 as the third single from ABBA: The Album (December 1977), 'Eagle' arrived at the height of ABBA's global commercial dominance. The track — ABBA's longest at 5 minutes 51 seconds — was a deliberate artistic departure: a slow-building, orchestrated meditation on freedom and transcendence, its lyrics inspired by Richard Bach's 1970 novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Written as a partial tribute…

Why it matters

A landmark in the pre-MTV promotional film genre, 'Eagle' represents ABBA and Hallström's mature command of the concept-driven music video — using symbolic imagery, optical effects, and editorial pacing to visualise an abstract theme (transcendence, flight) rather than narrate a literal story. Its…

The director

Lars Sven 'Lasse' Hallström (born 2 June 1946, Stockholm, Sweden) is a Swedish film director who first rose to prominence directing nearly all of ABBA's promotional film clips between 1974 and 1982, as well as the 1977 concert film ABBA: The Movie. His 1985…