Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of International Art Cinema - Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6 (34) Scandinavia - Nordic Cinemas part 2 - Sjöman and I AM CURIOUS, Zetterling, Troell, Carlsen

Vilgot Sjoman

Vilgot Sjoman (1924-2006) met Ingmar Bergman when he was only 17. Bergman told Sjoman that he was a gifted writer. Bergman subsequently mentored him for 3 weeks in script writing and in 1952 Sjoman wrote a script for veteran director Gustaf Molander. He became an established novelist in the 50s. In the early 60s Sjoman’s ‘Diary with Bergman,” a report on the making of Winter Light, confirmed his passion for film and led to the funding of his first feature as writer-director.

In Alskarinnen/The Mistress (1962), a young woman’s moral sense is challenged by a classical triangle formed in her growing infatuation with an older married man, her crisis of conscience exacerbated by the clinging diffidence of the boyfriend of her age. The psychology of the affair is convincingly handled by Sjoman who “proves himself an observer of behaviour in the Stiller tradition” (q.v.), although the film “with its discordant blend of nouvelle vague slickness and Nordic soul searching is no more than an interesting apprentice work“ (Cowie Sweden 2, 211). One likely inspiration for Sjoman’s third feature Syskonbadd 1782/My Sister, My Love (1966) was his feeling that artists and their audiences are attracted to taboos, here more specifically in John Ford’s Jacobean tragedy, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ set in the 18th century when influence of mysticism was still strong, “people in the period knew what it was to give way to dark and subconscious impulses.” Central to the tragedy is the strong incestuously driven relationship between a brother (Per Oscarsson) and his sister (Bibi Andersson). “Sjoman’s recreation of the period, with its violent contrast between rich and poor, is brilliant “ (Cowie Swedish Cinema 194).

Peter Cowie notes that the board of film censors in Sweden had always been more against violence than eroticism (or pornography). During the Sixties, however, there had been three causes célèbres involving sexually outspoken films - Bergman’s The Silence, Sjoman’s second feature,491, with a climactic scene in the controversial novel - a nihilistic quasi-documentary about juvenile delinquents involving bestiality - simulated only on the soundtrack, and the prolonged controversy amongst board members over the release uncut in 1968 of Jag ar nyficken-gul / I am Curious - Yellow with Jag ar nyficken-bla/I Am Curious Blue following a few months later.

I Am Curious had its beginnings in the refusal of Svensk Filmindusteri to finance My Sister My Love. Sjoman decided as a result “to do something amusing, something with pace, something with young people in it” which was developed with the backing of the production company, Sandrews, over three years and 400,000 feet of raw footage ultimately released in two parts, I Am Curious -Yellow (121 mins) and I am Curious - Blue (107 mins) in what Sjoman acknowledged was a personal blend of Fellini, Godard, and other film-makers’ styles. “Its three-dimensional construction with audience as well as camera crew requested to participate, prefigures the cinema of the seventies” (Cowie IFG 63). Sjoman called it “a polemical kaleidoscope, a mixture of reportage, imagination and demagogy made from the platform of the dissatisfied left” (quoted ibid). Cowie in ‘Sweden 2’ describes it as “a speculation on sex and socialism” (213).

Lena Nyman, I am Curious Yellow

Lena Nyman who had played the girl in Sjoman’s second film, 491, is the eponymous heroine in both I Am Curious films. In I Am Curious Yellow Lena lives in squalor with her father who is bitter and maudlin in turn, confronting her with an image of failure. But through him she meets Borje/Bill whom she tries to use as an ally to shatter Swedish complacency. She has sex with him in a variety of locations - in front of the Royal Palace in Stockholm, up a tree, in a pond, at the top of an observation tower. More humorous than outrageous, for Sjoman their effect should not to be shocking so much as “the film’s revelation of political stagnancy” (ibid). Lena is furious to find not that Borje has relationships with other women per se but that he has failed to tell her of them.

Olaf Palme, Lena Nyman

Disillusioned with Borje, she journeys through Sweden in search of a spiritual father figure in Yellow and mother figure in Blue as well as an answer to Sjoman’s questions about the political health of Sweden after three decades of Social Democratic rule - the extent to which Sweden had become a classless society. In a series of impromptu interviews mainly with Swedes including the soon to be prime minister, Olaf Palme, but also with Harry Belafonte, her mentor Martin Luther King and footage of Lena’s other mentor the Russian poet Yuri Yevtushenko. Lena is the ubiquitous heroine in the role of social dissident on Sjoman’s behalf “trying to raise the dead conscience of the Swedes around her “(ibid).

The violence of Lena's reaction to Borje’s deception destroys Lena’s confidence in her ability to practice non-violence, the espousal of which seemingly stemming from her interview with Martin Luther King. The sex scenes have a vigour that furthered rather than allayed the controversy surrounding the film. The story of Lena’s relationship with Borje, Clyde Smith explains, “is set in the matrix of the story of Lena’s emotional and sexual relationship with Sjoman, the director in the “external”film” interweaving “direct social comment with two sets of emotional relationships” (38). He keeps the differentiation between the levels of reality indistinct. Only on a couple of occasions does the film escalate into fantasy. Sjoman acknowledged that he moved into the difficult field of psychodrama in trying to incorporate the experience of himself and the actors - cinema vérité with a difference” (Cowie Sweden 2, 214).

It became a trend for stars to be seen attending a screening of I Am Curious Yellow. Norman Mailer described it as “ the most important film he had seen.” The initial banning of the import of I am Curious Yellow by US Customs led to court proceedings over 12 months which finally cleared the way for public screenings. At various times it was subsequently banned for screening by 18 states. The films (mainly Yellow) ultimately grossed more than $US 20 million (plus $7 million in Sweden), in real terms still a record for the release of a foreign film in the US. The importers, Grove Press, spent $ 5 million successfully fighting bans. Yellow uncut was given re-run releases in Sweden for tourists during several successive summer tourist seasons.

The mainstream critics in the US were divided. To Vincent Canby in the NY Times it was “a good movie about a society in transition,” to Rex Reed “vile and disgusting,” to Roger Ebert “a real dog, slow and uninteresting” while for Pauline Kael “the only good part is the rather amusing sex scenes…It may be one of the last vestiges of American puritanism that entertaining sex is, in the courts, redeemed by poor sociology.” In countries such as the UK, critics required to review prints of Yellow with the sex and nudity (11-15 mins) cut, generally adopted a tone of patronising resignation. An unnamed reviewer in the ‘Monthly Film Bulletin’ of April 1969 thought I Am Curious Yellow “might be meaningful in Sweden [but is tedious for an outsider] with its pornographic pleasures [rendered] … non-existent.” Parent publication, Sight and Sound,ignored I Am Curious altogether until the uncut 1994 video release was deemed to be “tame by today’s standards and tediously long.” The critics were evenly divided following the full Criterion release of the uncut two parts on DVD in 2003 and an accompanying commissioned essay by Gary Giddins with a ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ rating of 52% -13 favourable out of 25 reviews and

The Curious films were granted what seems to be the only contemporary in depth review (5000 words plus) in English in Film Quarterly, Summer 1969, by Clyde B. Smith who identifies himself as a “young film critic age 50.” While recognising the two films as being “structurally similar,” Smith considers that “I Am Curious (Yellow) placed against I Am Curious (Blue) “becomes something quite different from I am Curious Yellow taken alone. In the Yellow film much emphasis is placed on Sjoman’s perception of social ills. The relations between the characters in the film are developed as an effect of the social forces impinging upon the people. I Am Curious (Blue) is much more concerned with the relations between people (cause) and implications of these relations for the social structure of the nation (effect). Yellow is a man’s film - Blue is a woman’s film. Yellow is Sjoman’s film. Blue is Lena’s” (42).

Kovacs in ‘Screening Modernism’ identifies cinematic modernism in Sjoman’s deployment of “the Godardian cinema verite-style documentary of the mid 60s (eg Masculine Feminine, Two or Three Things…) in I Am Curious Yellow “not for representing “reality” but for making it possible to express subjective views through images that give the impression of a direct relationship to reality” (170). Again the Godard influence in a general “new wave style” is in Sjoman’s 491 (also eg by Bertolucci in Before the Revolution, Kluge in Yesterday Girl ) involving an extreme fragmentation of the narrative, verbal commentaries, reflexive reflection on process, and documentary-style camerawork (173). I Am Curious Yellow is also an important example of the expression of a subjective vision by the filmmaker in personal terms and his ambiguous relation to it, inspired by Fellini’s 8 1/2 (322).

Mark Cousins in ‘The Story of Film’, identifies Swedish film-makers in the sixties as the source of significant contributions to modernising film language : Sjoman with I am Curious, Zetterling with Night Games, Troell with Here is Your Life and, in a class of its own in this regard, Bergman with Persona.

Peter Cowie revealed that as early as 1965, Sjoman told him that he needed to experiment with a wide range of different styles before he could “liberate” himself artistically. According to Cowie few were prepared in the early 70s for the sudden change to the warmth and charm of Blushing Charlie (1970) dealing with the growth of a relationship between a truck driver and a pregnant woman in need of a father for her child filmed by Sjoman with a super 8 camera for greater intimacy (IFG 75 p.64).

Mai Zetterling

Actress and writer-director Mai Zetterling (1925-94) was not the first woman to direct a feature film in Sweden but she was almost certainly the first to direct four. Like Bergman, she asserted her individuality when the opportunity arose. She was trained and spent her early acting career in Sweden making her debut on stage and screen at 16. She regarded her role in Alf Sjöberg's Hets/Torment/Frenzy (1944) as her best film role - she appeared in more than 20 films in Sweden and Britain (1944-65) abandoning Hollywood after only one film - Knock on Wood starring Danny Kaye (1953). Her career as writer-director followed from her disillusionment with acting. She made many documentary films, some co-directed with her husband David Hughes.

Zetterling made a positively received directorial debut with the ironically titled Loving Couples /Alskande par (1964) based on her own script adapted from the fifth of a scandalous seven volume novel 'The Misses von Pahlen' by Swedish writer of eroticism, Agnes von Krusenstjerna. Set at the turn of the century, it is told in a flashback structure as three women in a maternity hospital each relate events that led to their pregnancy. Zetterling’s feature films depict the social status and psyche of women, reflecting feminist concerns, peaking emotionally in often difficult to direct group scenes of parties and social gatherings for which she was praised. She regarded scenes of explicit sexual behaviour as integral to her themes of loneliness and obsession. There were comments from different sources - Zetterling had received “much help and support” from her male associates, among them Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist. “It seemed that the critics had a hard time accepting that a woman directing her first feature had achieved such extraordinary success.” (Soila)

Night Games

She directed three more films in quick succession. Night Games /Nattlek (1967) is based on a novel Zetterling was then writing involving Marxist and Freudian elements with past and present subtly blended in a series of erotic gatherings. The main protagonist tries to achieve re-birth of his psychological freedom by tracing the experiences of his childhood portraying incest. Zetterling explained that in filming a story of modern Europe, honesty required showing signs of decadence including perverted sex, believing that “you can only come to a positive view […] by passing through innumerable negative views” (quoted Cowie Sweden 2, 241). The Venice Bienniale would allow it to be screened only to the jury.

Zetterling was criticised for “directing like a man.” She responded with episodes of “outraged feminism” with “real bite” in The Girls /Flickorna (1968). Three actresses touring Sweden with “a production of Lysistrata acting out views of the Aristophanes' play in their own lives” (Edgardo Cozarinsky 1079). A film of great sincerity, it was dismissed by some critics as a self-indulgent mix of Greek comedy and soap opera, described by David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary as “almost a parody of feminist cinema.” Considered a failure it was not awarded sufficient quality points to qualify for funding from the then recently established Swedish Film Institute.

Zetterling's career as a director of feature films was all but ended with Doktor Glas (1968), an adaptation of a novel by Hjamar Soderberg, her “most pessimistic film” told mainly in flashbacks in Glas's mind, it “was dismissed as clumsy and ... the meaning blurred and confusing.” (Soila 219). Zetterling continued working for television through the seventies including a film on Vincent van Gogh, a segment on the weightlifting for the 1972 Olympics film Visions of Eight, and a seven hour documentary based on Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' for French television. She directed Amorosa, in Sweden (1986) a biopic about the author of the novels from which Zetterling's first feature, Loving Couples, was adapted.

Jan Troell

Jan Troell directed 14 short films for tv which showed his ability to focus on small details as writer, director and cinematographer filming narrative features in a leisurely expansive style, epic in scope, adapted from exponents of epic novels, all embracing in their humanity, by Swedish writers Evind Johnson and Vilhelm Moberg. Troell was also fortunate in establishing an enduring partnership on his first feature with a producer Bengt Forslund with a special ability for uncovering and accessing offbeat sources of finance but also a talented writer sharing the credits on Troell’s first five features.

Here is Your Life (1966) is adapted from four autobiographical novels written by Johnson in the 1930s looking back 20 years to the time of World War 1 centred on the life of Olof born into working class poverty, beginning work at age 14 in the logging industry in the rural north of Sweden then moving through a mix of labouring occupations in the logging industry, as a railway navvy and a film projectionist. Troell ranges over Olof’s relationships in “a three dimensional manner” but also “with more than a hint of nostalgia” strengthened by the poetic lyricism of the music score and the expressive use of colour and monochrome. The landscape and drama are integrated in the great tradition of Swedish silent cinema set against a time of harsh social and political struggle in which Olof actively participates. “Troell catches perfectly the wry mixture of wit, misfortune and discovery that belongs to the Johnson books” (Cowie IFG 72, p.36). Troell and Forslund escaped the theatrical tradition and disinterest in social drama that had dominated postwar Swedish cinema.

Their second collaboration Who Saw Him Die?/Ole dole doff/ (1968) from a novel by Clas Engstrom who collaborated with Forslund on the script, is more intimate in scope and harsher in the portrayal a school teacher (Per Oscarsson) failing to communicate with his class and to control them. Afforded no release in a loveless marriage at home Martensson escapes into earphones to listen to classical music. He finds brief release and greater self knowledge in this bitter existence through rewarding contact on a school excursion with Anne-Marie, a pleasantly warm colleague amidst otherwise depressing staff. The trap threatens to again close ironically in the final scenes.

The sense of authenticity in the classroom scenes is attributable to Troell’s own experience as a teacher in the same town, Malmo. He shot the film himself with a hand held 16mm camera in available light lending “a surreal quality…creating a visual density that probably could not be achieved with a 35mm camera […] A very powerful ambiguity exists attributable to a dialectic interaction between the documentary surface of the image and the expressionist undertone… An overpowering sensual immediacy is conveyed by every image” (Peter Gay).

The Emigrants

Troell returned emphatically to epic narrative in meticulously crafted and masterfully performed adaptations from a quartet of novels by Vilhelm Moberg in two 3 hour narratives filmed concurrently over one year. The Emigrants (1971) recreates the grim farm life in Sweden under a hierarchy of masters that drove some to undertake the brutal sea voyage across the Atlantic and the struggle of the survivors in The New Land (1972) to travel by whatever means to find and stake out a land claim in Minnesota.

Troell as director, cinematographer, writer and editor working outside mandatory Hollywood protocols, was given a virtual free hand in adaptation of the novels and management of this scale of production on location in Sweden and America. This became further achievable through the immeasurable ability of immersion by actors in the lead roles - Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow - beyond any notions of theatricality (“they belong to the region and the life there”). Troell was, to quote Pauline Kael, “a nature poet telling stories” with a rare total across-the-board involvement “bringing a new visual and thematic unity to fictional films.” This seems to relate to how he developed in his own way out of photography in his first two features following his extensive experience in making documentaries. “Troell composes every shot as if it were his last, but at the same time he expands our notions of what screen lyricism is, because he’s solemn yet lyrical, disciplined yet rapturous” (ibid).

in 1963 the government established the Swedish Film Institute which became the most important centre for film production, distribution, research, archiving and education. Not counting Bergman’s films the momentum given to new cinema was evident each year 1963-66: Widerberg’s Raven’s End (1963), Hans Magnus Lindgren’s Dear John (1964), Jorn Donner’s Adventure Starts Here (1965), and Jan Troell’s Here is Your Life (1966).

Dear John/ Kare John was Lindgren’s second feature, like his first, There are No Angels (1961), a boy meets girl comedy, here spanning 24 hours transformed by unconventional acting style, appealing frailty of sentiment and an intriguing flashback structure adding substance to the love story which proved popular with both home and foreign audiences (Cowie 234). Donner’s Adventure Starts Here/Har borjar aventyrret, is centred on following the unresolved course of a romantic relationship built up through fragments from memory amidst multilingual tensions, an underlying sense of uncertainty shared by the couple on whom Donner is reticent in passing judgment (ibid 218).

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After 1914 the film industry in Denmark began to lose its foothold in Europe to the intensified competition of foreign companies coinciding with lack of imagination and willingness to take creative risks by producers. The creative talents of Carl Th. Dreyer and Benjamin Christiansen were increasingly employed elsewhere. The development of the art moved in the opposite direction from that of Sweden where investment continued for imaginative adaptations from literary originals. “Popular genres were introduced in Sweden to oust the ambitious literary films which carried the sophisticated filmic expression of the silent era which drew severe criticism from the arbiters of taste.” (Soila175).

Danish production through the 1930s was dominated by popular light comedy, economic conditions applying a brake to more creativity. During the German Occupation comedies and regionalist movies continued their popularity with audiences. The standard of comedy was lifted especially by the witty, elegant movies of Johan Jacobsen, a Danish pupil of Ernst Lubitsch. Day of Wrath (1943) marked Dreyer’s successful return to feature filmmaking in Denmark. In the immediate postwar years there was a movement toward realism and social criticism. During the 50s,138 feature films were produced in Denmark. The first major international critical success for Danish art cinema since the war was Dreyer’s adaptation of Kaj Munk’s play Ordet /The Word (1955) which had also been filmed by Gustaf Molander during the war. Molander was a great Swedish director of melodrama “with a profound and insightful understanding of the expressive possibilities inherent in the filmic image” (ibid 177).

Danish cinema in the sixties was marked by increased eroticism and international box office success. Denmark became the first country to fully abolish the adult censor in 1969; a wave of sex comedies followed. The notion of film as culture became increasingly subject to debate following the introduction of a quality subsidy in1964 to be completely independent of a film’s commercial success. This issue was unexpectedly further focused by the disastrous critical and commercial opening in Paris in 1965 of what was to be Dreyer’s final film Gertrud, the opening of the Danish film school in1966, and the formation of the Danish Film Institute, modelled on its Swedish counterpart, in 1973.

The crisis experienced across film industries at the shift of the decades to the 1960s resulted in the breakthrough of the French new wave hastened by the encroachment of television, to which an industry of the previous form was ultimately required to admit defeat. “The transition was slow and hesitant in Denmark - in Sweden, [it] was considerably swifter” (Widding 24).

Henning Carlsen

The decade’s most successful Danish art feature internationally was Hunger/ Sult (1966), the fourth feature of writer-director Henning Carlsen (1927-2014) - he directed twelve features from 1964-86. According to Tytti Soila, Carlsen was “forced to step in as producer of his own films [including Hunger] and he had problems finding a distributor for it” (25). Adapted from a novel by Knut Hamsun set in 1890, “the film offers a personal vision of the Hamsun story with the writer Pontus [Per Oscarsson] and the city of Kristiania (Oslo) as the two main protagonists. Carlsen’s subjective narrative style breaks down the boundaries between reality and fiction in the portrayal of the writer’s confinement in a suffocating urban environment” (ibid 27). More emphasis is given to the writer’s interaction with the squalor of the surroundings and his behavioural responses to hunger than to his complex mental processes. “ Per Oscarsson’s brilliant performance as Pontus - he won Best Actor at Cannes in 1966 - […] lends the interior quality [Hunger] would otherwise lack: arrogant, sensitive, blustering, delicate, completely wrapped in his own creativity, he is exactly what he ought to be - a great writer in the making” (Tom Milne).

Hunger

Carlsen developed all-round filmmaking experience working on documentaries. He was inspired by cinema vérité especially Jean Rouch’s searching interview techniques in Chronique d’un été. This was most reflected in a documentary trilogy Carlsen made about family life in Denmark in 1961. “The way he handled a social problem with curiosity and open-mindedness brought about a change in documentary filmmaking in Denmark” (Ib Monty).

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Tytti Soila, Astrid Widding et al, Nordic National Cinemas 1998

Peter Cowie Sweden 2 1972; Swedish Cinema 1970; “Jan Troell” International Film Guide 1972, “Vilgot Sjoman” 1975, “Henning Carlsen 1980.

Robin Wood Ingmar Bergman 1969.

David Robinson “Persona” Movies of the Seventies ed. Ann Lloyd 1983.

Susan Sontag “Persona” Sight and Sound Autumn 1967.

Pauline Kael review “Persona” republished Kiss Kiss Bang Bang 1968; “Shame” in Going Steady 1971; “Cries and Whispers” in Reeling 1976.

Jan Dawson review of “Shame” Sight and Sound Spring 1969; “Ingmar Bergman” International Dictionary of the Cinema vol 1 ed. Richard Roud.

James Paul Gay “Red Membranes, Red Banners” Sight and Sound Spring 1972.

Ib Monty “Henning Carlsen” International Dictionary of Films, Directors vol. ed. Christopher Lyon 1984.

Hamish Ford Ingmar Bergman “Great Directors” Senses of Cinema online.

András Blint Kovács Screening Modernism 2007.