Approaches & Analysis (Week 4)

Directors influenced by Bergman:

• Alejandro González Iñárritu
• Woody Allen
• Lars Von Trier
• Michael Haneke
• Martin Scorsese
• Ang Lee
• David Lynch
• Satyajit Ray

Roy Arne Lennart Andersson:

• Born in 1943, Gothenburg Sweden
• Known widely for his hit film: A Swedish Love Story (1969) - a lyrical teenage romance film that was created due to Andersson being influenced by the Czech New Wave.
• His 'Living Trilogy':

1. Songs From The Second Floor (2000)
2. You, The Living (2007)
3. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014)

• After the failure of Giliap in 1975, had to turn to making advertising commercials to survive. Made 300-400 ads including one in 1985 for the leftwing Social Democrat party. Bergman described Andersson’s commercials as the best in the world.

Rather than writing scripts, Andersson prefers to sketch individual scenes by shooting 35mm tests for them, reworking them until he is satisified. 

For one role in Songs from the Second Floor, he tested 1,000 different actors before he decided on rewriting the part entirely.

Andersson, termed as a perfectionist, will often do 40 to 50 takes of a single scene, he's known to tear down carefully built sets in his studio 24 just to start filming from scratch.

Themes and Features:

• Static tableaux shots with deep focus and depth of field
• Multiple characters in frame
• Pallid, anemic individuals in a washed out world
• Consumer chaos and capitalist dystopia
• Critical of power structures and dominant ideologies such as; Religion, The Army, Corporations.

''I think that the wide shot tells a lot about the human being that a close-up can’t. About their place in the world. The wide shot defines the human being more than the close-up because, for example, the room where the person is tells about his tastes, his life. Even if it’s not home, you can read the history of a person better in a wide shot. When you read this wide shot, there are so many elements that make the picture more tragic…the closer you get to a person the further you get from the truth. ''

- Roy Andersson, Via Mubi 2009

Overview of Songs from the Second Floor:

• It's the first in Andersson's Living Trilogy
• Composed of 46 set-piece sequences featuring mundane people; ‘together they comprise an archetypal human being, who is the film’s subject’
• The setting is an apocalyptic wasteland where  society has failed.
• The film sympathizes more on the side of the working class
• The score is by ABBA's Benny Anderson
• Andersson states that ''Songs breaks with the conventions that have developed within the Anglo-Saxon film epic with their roots in 19th century melodrama. It doesn’t have a straight story with the development of a conflict, plot twists, and resolution, according to set-patterns. In SFTSF we meet an existence that can neither be apprehended nor surveyed, teeming with human destinies some of which we come to learn a little more about…bumping into them, losing them from sight, then bumping into them again - and again, and again.''

Philosophy:

Many people are needed to show how broad the human spectrum is. It isn’t enough with just one person. There will be no ‘happy end’ for any of us . 

Andersson advocates a radical departure from what he calls ‘bourgeois’ cinema. 

‘You have this scene at the end where English colonists torture and kill black people in this metal chamber. It’s about colonialism, that scene, with the English people there, and even the scene before, when they are very cruel to animals and make experiments on monkeys, without respect, without empathy at all’. 

• He's deadly serious '' I felt it was not fair that painting should be regarded as visually richer than a movie. When I decided to be a director, it was the period of Wajda, Antonioni, Bunuel. Nowadays that seriousness is very rare. I try to work for that to come back. We have to get back the responsibility and respect for quality and seriousness. ''

• Wrote a book - Our Fear of Seriousness in Our Time - "about moral questions, arbitrariness, guilt, morals and art". 

• Espouses a scathing critique of Western capitalist societies, colonialism, and contravenes conventional methods of filmmaking 

Art, Drama, Film & Literature:

• Samuel Beckett - absurdist theme in his play Waiting for Godot and August Strindberg

• Franz Kafka and his systemic bureaucracy of Metamorphosis, The Trial 
• Terry Gilliam's film Brazil
• Film Theorist Andre Bazin
• Italian Neo Realism; The Bicycle Thieves being Andersons's favourite film
• Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo
• The paintings of Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, German artist Otto Dix (1891-1969) and American realist, Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

Bergman Vs Andersson 

Politics:

• B: Largely apolitical (as a teen he was fascinated by Nazism but after hearing about the Holocaust he thought, never again.)

• A: Working class background with strong left-wing ideologies. 

Existential Introspection:

• B: Existential introspections and turbulent meditations on religion - He engages with religion induced guilt

• A: Shares Bergman's theme of existential introspection but openly denounces religion and its symbols as he encourages a guilt towards existence.

Humour

• B: Dark and wry humour

• A: Mirrored in Andersson's darkly tragicomic vision - earning his title 'the slapstick Bergman'

Set

• B: Minimalism - examples in his chamber films.

• A: Elaborate mise-en-scene with a multitude of actors and extras

Cast

• B: Used stock company of regular actors

• A: Largely uses non-professional actors many from his Swedish TV commercials

Structure

• B: A modernist structuralist approach, uses binaries (example good v evil, male v female)

• A: A more post modern approach - audience is given a fragmented dystopian world where individuals are alienated from society.

Film-making

• B: Prolific Filmmaking output

• A: Significant Gaps between films