The Films of Roy Andersson
October 1, 2004 - October 2, 2004
October 1
"A slapstick Ingmar Bergman" is how The Village Voice described Swedish director Roy Andersson, while The Washington Post name-dropped Jacques Tati, Monty Python, and even Andrei Tarkovsky to sum up an aesthetic that combines formal rigor with anticapitalist critiques, bizarre human caricatures, and sight gags. Having graduated from the Swedish Film Institute in the late 1960s, Andersson debuted with A Swedish Love Story, but soon abandoned its humanist, Czech New Wave–style approach for one of long takes, deep-focus imagery, and a fixation on the abnormal. Casts of Felliniesque grotesques and visions of societal collapse both absurdist and horrific haunt our clean modern world in Andersson's films, but an unshakable beauty arises from the intoxicating stillness from which these visions emerge. No camera movement, no cutting within scenes: Andersson works like a portrait artist more than a director. "Editing is banal," he writes. "You can look at a painting many times and remain fascinated. That seldom happens with the movies." Seething with tranquility as riveting as it is unsettling, Andersson's "motion pictures" present still lifes of modern catastrophe.
Notes by Jason Sanders
Friday, October 1, 2004
7:00 p.m. Songs from the Second Floor
An intensely visual, surrealist, and frequently uproarious end-of-the-millennium epic about humanity's confusions, regrets, and needs. "Like an Ingmar Bergman film as realized by Monty Python."—Toronto Globe and Mail. Winner, Cannes Special Jury Prize.
Friday, October 1, 2004
9:00 p.m. Commercials and Shorts by Roy Andersson
These hilarious little capitalist nightmares will change how you look at advertising. Droll, strange, completely original: "the best commercials in the world."—Ingmar Bergman. With shorts World of Glory and Something Happened.
Saturday, October 2, 2004
6:30 p.m. A Swedish Love Story
A moped-riding Romeo loves a gum-chewing Juliet in late-1960s Sweden, but dreamless, refrigerator-selling parental figures stand in their way. A wry, Milos Forman–inspired look at youthful hopes and middle-aged sadness.
Saturday, October 2, 2004
8:50 p.m. Giliap
A drifter gains employment in an isolated Swedish hotel with some peculiar goings-on. Tranquil long takes and bizarre humor create "visually a film in the masterpiece class…a thing of sheer beauty to behold."—Variety
This series was organized by Peter Wahlqvist, Cultural Counselor, Embassy of Sweden, Washington, D.C., in collaboration with Peggy Parsons, head, department of film programs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and with the generous cooperation of Roy Andersson and Studio 24, Stockholm.
We thank Honorary Consul General Barbro Osher, Consulate General of Sweden in San Francisco; and Elisabeth Halvarsson Stapen, Cultural Affairs Officer, Consulate General of Sweden, New York, for their assistance.
