“Happy New Year, Happy New Year, May we all have our hopes, our will to try, If we don’t we might as well lay down and die, You and I”

In 1980, ABBA released their big new years-hit. The video was made by Swedish movie director Lasse Hallström. He directed most of ABBA’s videos and their cooperation began already in 1974 with the video for “Waterloo”. With his playful camerawork and use of narrative ingredients he was part of creating the ABBA-image. And also a part of the music video-development before MTV. In the video for “Mamma Mia” you can see the use of one person in profile with the other one en face, with shifting focus, for the first time.