CoMo No. 24: Sweden (June, 2024)

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Holdrüholoheuho
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Re: CoMo No. 24: Sweden (June, 2024)

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A DAY IN THE CITY (Hans Nordenström, Pontus Hultén, 1956) #CoMoSverige
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A dadaist explosion that starts as a typical travelogue of Stockholm and ends in the city's total destruction by fire and dynamite.

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This is an hilarious anarchist film, made by the then unknown Hulten, now director of Stockholm's Museum of Modern Art.

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Lampooning those lyrical "symphony of a city" movies.

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more in the other thread → https://scfzforum.org/phpBB3/viewtopic. ... 146#p47146
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FRAME LINE (Gunvor Nelson, 1983) #CoMoSverige
Gunvor Nelson’s collage film, Frame Line, is a 16-mm film shot in black and white. The film follows no narrative except for that it is based on Nelson’s experience of returning back to Sweden and Stockholm in the early 1980s.

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MIRAGE (Peter Weiss, 1959) #CoMoSverige
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In 1959, Peter Weiss made his first feature-length film, Hägringen, with Staffan Lamm and Gunilla Palmstierna in leading roles. The script to the rather experimental film is based on the novel Document I which he had published in Swedish in 1949 on his own initiative. Hägringen creates a real synthesis of both key elements of Weiss' practice in working with film:
the subjective and the documentary approach to reality.
The film shows the encounter of a young man with a large city that is yet unknown to him. His passage, accompanied by often surrealistic and absurd impressions, turns into a tour-de-force through various urban milieus. He fails to get in touch with those he meets or to keep up with the dynamics of modern life that is set to the clock of automation. Finally, his journey ends where it has started: following a row of telephone poles he escapes towards the horizon.
— Florian Wüst

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Beautifully photographed by Gustaf Mandal, the film shows things rarely glimpsed in the cinema, harshly lit roads, menacing construction cranes and vertigo-inducing views from the roofs of Stockholm's Old Town. Peter Weiss himself was responsible for the soundtrack: with its high-pitched staccato, its jazz and its almost brutal sound effects from the everyday world of work; it is quite unique.
— Gunder Andersson (2011)

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Considering my situation at the time [Hägringen] was terribly expensive [to make]. It ruined all of us; my whole family, myself and the crew. No one ever made money out of it. [The film production company] Nordisk Tonefilm took over the production and paid for the sound. I do not know if they made any profit. In any case we didn’t get paid. To sum it up it was incredibly fun to make it, but it ruined us. I got most of the film stock from America, from the magazine Film Culture. Then they got a copy to screen at Cinema 16 in New York. Gustaf Mandal, the photographer, provided sound equipment. Staffan Lamm played one of the leading roles, together with my wife. On a practical level we all worked in different ways. Everyone involved sacrificed several months, so to say. The whole film took about a year to make. Some supporting roles were praised by the critics. He who played the boxer was praised and several others were also mentioned. Providing food for the crew also costed quite a lot each day. I wrote letters, begging for money here and there, but without any success.
— Peter Weiss (interview, 1969)

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i watched 3 "Stockholm movies" (A DAY IN THE CITY, FRAME LINE, MIRAGE) within a single day (yesterday) without a big/intentional scheduling — those were rather random picks — but it was a very happy coincidence. i loved them all and, now, i would certainly put them into one program together if making any Stockholm-dedicated screening.

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Post by Holdrüholoheuho »

finally!
here we go!!
a moment giving the meaning to this entire thread!
Bergman!!
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THE RITE (Ingmar Bergman, 1969) #CoMoSverige
There's always so much pretentiousness surrounding films.

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So much apparatus. Shooting takes forty-five days, fifty days, sixty-five days.

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For Fellini it takes twenty-eight weeks and there's a hell of a hullaballoo and it costs God knows how much.

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So I thought: Hell, I'll gather four of my close friends and we'll rehearse for four weeks and then we'll shoot it.

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I figured out I'd be able to shoot it in nine days.

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more in the other thread → https://scfzforum.org/phpBB3/viewtopic. ... 160#p47160
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Post by Holdrüholoheuho »

btw. speaking of Bergman...
in autumn 2021, i bought and planted Ingrid Bergman.
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sofar, it didn't grow really tall.
but (somehow) it's blooming (snapshot from 3 days ago).
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Post by Holdrüholoheuho »

after Bergman, something lighter...

LIGHT YEARS (Gunvor Nelson, 1987) #CoMoSverige
Light Years is the second film of Nelson’s remarkable series of collage films in which she is blending animation with live-action. Frame Line (1983) that was the first, evolved around Stockholm and Sweden, and with Light Years she expanded into the Swedish countryside and landscape.

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WHERE DO YOU WISH TO RIDE? (Rut Hillarp, 1970) #CoMoSverige
Painted pictures of castles, knights and flowers to a poem by Karl Vennberg.

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Rut Hillarp has an assured place in Swedish literary postwar modernism thanks both to her collections of poetry and her novels, tinged with erotic imagery and mythological patterns. After some decades of silence as a writer she re-emerged in the 1980s as a poet experimenting with photography and photo montage in combination with her poetry. What is less well known is that her visual and expressive imagination had also resulted in a number of experimental films which she made in collaboration with the Romanian cinematographer and filmmaker Mihail Livada, whose influence on Swedish experimental film has been immeasurable.

In 2011 Birgitta Holm, who was a close friend, published Hillarp’s diaries alongside a monograph, “Rut Hillarp: Poet and Erotic Genius”. The book documents Hillarp’s fascination with film and her complex relationship with the reticent Livada. It also touches on other figures from the largely unexamined history of Swedish experimental film, from Eivor Burbeck till Jean-Clarence Lambert.

— Lars Gustaf Andersson (2012)
INTERFERENCE (Maureen Paley, 1977) #CoMoSverige
Maureen Paley, who later became a successful gallerist in London, finished three films at “the Stockholm Film Workshop” (Filmverkstan, 1973–2001), of which two have been preserved on U-matic — Spot and Interference, both from 1977.

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re: “The Stockholm Film Workshop”

1/ Spaces of becoming: the Stockholm Film Workshop as a transnational site of film production
(Lars Gustaf Andersson &John Sundholm, 2015)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10. ... 15.1070484
The films and the filmmaking at the workshop are considered as part of a minor cinema film practice in David E. James’s sense. James’s theory is complemented by returning to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s original concept of minor literature in order to stress an analysis that is based on film as a means of production and cultural intervention. This point is emphasized by a presentation and analysis of how various professional and non-professional filmmakers from Colombia, Egypt, Greece and Turkey made use of film at the Stockholm Film Workshop in order to intervene in their new cultural situations.
2/ The Cultural Practice of Immigrant Filmmaking: Minor Immigrant Cinemas in Sweden 1950–1990
(Lars Gustaf Andersson & John Sundholm, 2019)
https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-cult ... lmmaking-1
Based on a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council, this book analyses 40 years of post-war independent immigrant filmmaking in Sweden. John Sundholm and Lars Gustaf Andersson consider the creativity that lies in the state of exile, offering analyses of over 50 rarely seen immigrant films that would otherwise remain invisible and unarchived. They shed light on the complex web of personal, economic and cultural circumstances around migrant filmmaking, and discuss associations that became important sites of self-organization for exiled filmmakers: The Independent Film Group, The Stockholm Film Workshop, Cineco, Kaleidoscope and Tensta Film Association.
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Post by Holdrüholoheuho »

leaving Sweden behind...
(and heading im Deutsch Sprachraum)

JOURNEY TO THE WALL (Johan Donner, 1985) #CoMoSverige
Travelogue depicting a road trip from Stockholm to the Berlin Wall.
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The film is mostly shot from a car window
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but includes found footage as well.
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