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Being a Human Being: A Guide to the Films of Roy Andersson

A scene from About Endlessness. Image courtesy of royandersson.com

“I wanted to make films the way he made films. I’m glad I dropped that. There’s no recreating that.”
–Ari Aster on Roy Andersson

It’s become cliché to characterize the artistry of a film by saying “every frame is a painting,” but a good cliché can carry an awful lot of truth applied to the right artist. In the case of Roy Andersson, the cliché of the painterly director couldn’t be more apt. Andersson’s career has a difficult trajectory, to say the least, so consider this a guide to diving into the Swedish master’s hand-crafted, humanist comedies. On the one hand, the key works in his filmography might seem quite contained and approachable: the “Being a Human Being” Trilogy consisting of Songs From the Second Floor (2000), You, the Living (2007), A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014), followed by the brief, beautiful coda About Endlessness (2019). Like the four great plays of Anton Chekhov that forever altered the face of drama across the transition into the last millennium, Andersson’s four masterworks have marked the beginning of the new millennium irreversibly, even though those who were influenced by him, like Wes Anderson, Ari Aster, and fellow Swede Ruben Östlund continue to be more visible in the popular eye.

At a glance, Roy Andersson may simply seem to be an underappreciated cinematic voice of the last quarter century, but where the story gets interesting is when you discover that Andersson also directed a huge Swedish and International hit called A Swedish Love Story…released in 1970. What’s so interesting about A Swedish Love Story is how it reveals stylistic and thematic choices that would re-emerge 30 years later for Andersson, but also contains elements that would never really appear again in an Andersson film. For instance, A Swedish Love Story is, on the one hand, a sweet tale of a budding romance between two fourteen-year-olds (the unforgettable Rolf Sohlman and Ann-Sofie Kylin) that follows a fairly traditional narrative arc in a cinematic language that Andersson would all but abandon, but the portrayal of the adult lives surrounding that young romance often emerges in more static tableaus or scenarios that would eventually develop into his signature cinematic lingua franca. A Swedish Love Story might stretch the comfortability levels of modern audiences in its depiction of youthful intimacy (it is Sweden in the 70’s, after all), though it never feels exploitive. The film still plays well on its own, but it’s also a fascinating film to watch in relation to how Andersson developed over time, with his distinctive, fully realized style not making an impact on cinema until many years later.

An intimate moment between Rolf Sohlman and Ann-Sofie Kylin in Roy Anderssons 1970 film A Swedish Love Story
Ann-Sofie Kylin and Rolf Sohlman in A Swedish Love Story. Image courtesy of royandersson.com

So, what happened to Andersson between 1970 and 2000? Well, there was a feature-length follow-up to A Swedish Love Story called Giliap in 1975, but with that film he set out to drastically change his style and rebel against his own accessibility and success as a director. Andersson’s influences range from the Italian neo-realism of Vittorio De Sica to the satirical blasphemy of Luis Bunuel, and Giliap definitely followed his more challenging, Bunuelian inclinations over the universality of something like De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. As a result, Giliap became an utter flop with critics and audiences alike and remains difficult to see in it’s entirety to this day. One telling of the story around the failure of Giliap (possibly apocryphal) has Ingmar Bergman commenting to Andersson after a screening that it would be best if he got out of the movie directing game altogether.

In a sense, Andersson did get out of the movie directing game. Rather, he began his career as a maker of many tiny movies in the form of Swedish television commercials. While many great directors have journeyed into directing commercials, Andersson is the rare example of someone who used the medium to hone their skills toward an unusually long-awaited comeback that would often brutally critique capitalist and bureaucratic systems. Equally rare is how similar Andersson’s commercial work would mirror the post-millennium features for which he would become most known. In one commercial, for instance, a country priest sitting down to a farmer’s table first samples a small bite of “Red Cow” cheese, but when the farmer leaves the room for a moment the priest is unable to resist cutting off a huge chunk and cramming it into his gluttonous gob. The farmer re-enters, giving the side-eye to the priest who tries to act as if he took a reasonable bite. Minus the commercial logo (“There’s a little Red Cow in all of us!”), this scene would fit perfectly into any one of the four cornerstone Andersson features. The color palette is a highly particular shade of beige, the skin a highly particular shade of ash, and the figure being satirized is less the working class one than the costumed parishioner. Likewise, the shot is static, and shows the actors in medium to full frame. The setting seems realistic, but on closer inspection is a carefully constructed set that considers everything down to the placement of the knife on the breadboard.

In each small Andersson commercial, there was seemingly a brick of technique being built that would eventually create the foundation of his major works. Through his success as a commercial director, he established in his home of Stockholm the now legendary Studio 24, within which all the “4 films” would be created. Each one of those films is constructed of a series of static shot scenes, and most of those scenes were constructed, rehearsed, and shot within the studio. By most accounts, each scene in an Andersson film takes about a month to complete, from construction to shooting to strike. Not unlike Canadian auteur Guy Maddin (see the last “Guide To” piece I wrote for Film Obsessive), Andersson loves the control the studio environment gives him over the image, and similarly constructs entire films “in house,” but much of the similarity ends there. For one, Andersson never moves the camera—there is often plenty of movement within the frame, but it would be difficult to site a director more adverse to panning the camera in any direction. Also, as I mentioned before, Andersson’s use of color contains very little variation—beige and grey walls, pale to ashen flesh. If there’s a pop of color, it announces itself. In You, the Living, for instance, when a young music fan (hopelessly devoted to “Micke Larsson of the Black Devils!”) is introduced she becomes an unmistakable emotional core of the film not only through her blind longing, but her striking purple boots.

A young music fan in purple boots in front of a mirror in Roy Andersson's You, the Living
A scene from You, the Living. Image courtesy of royandersson.com

The movies of Roy Andersson strip away so many filmic techniques we’re used to it may be just as helpful to note what typical movie elements they don’t contain: Close-ups, Shot/Reverse Shot, Pans, Zooms, naturalistic lighting, naturalistic acting, or anything resembling traditional dramatic story structure, for starters. Also, there are no Hollywood faces or bodies; the sexual desire is the desire of actual human bodies, old and young alike. There is often not even a stable sense of historical time, creating a fluid temporal space between the living and the dead. And while a variety of music is a huge part of Andersson’s films—as is dance, choreography, and movement—it often exists on an unusual diegetic/non-diegetic borderline. In Songs From the Second Floor, for instance, a particularly ash-laden man rides a subway home after having his business destroyed by fire, and his tragic state is amplified by the symphonic choral score being taken up by his fellow passengers who stood stock still and silent only moments before. So, yes, these are art films, in the best sense of that term, with each scene constituting its own individual integrity as not just a painting, but a moving, breathing, and often evolving series of interconnected visual poems. As influenced by painters like Goya and Bruegel as filmmakers like Bunuel and Tati, Roy Andersson’s films ask the audience to contemplate the world around them, to make poetic connections, and through this to contemplate their own nature as human beings.

While Andersson’s influence has reached far into popular cinema, it’s perhaps most notably echoed in the artifice and dollhouse framing of Wes Anderson. In fact, Roy Anderson’s last feature Asteroid City marks a progressive evolution of his work toward the type of all-encompassing studio design that is the signature of Swedish Andersson’s Studio 24. For a frame of reference on what to expect stylistically from a Roy Andersson film, Wes Anderson comparisons might give some context, though the elegance, simplicity, and overall philosophical depths of films like About Endlessness far outshine anything Wes has accomplished in recent years. Likewise (as per the quote up top), it took Ari Aster quite a while to shake Andersson’s influence, especially Songs From the Second Floor, which has an even more chilling scene of communal cliffside sacrifice than the one featured in Aster’s Midsomer, with the difference being the restraint in how the act is shown. And if you roll back to Aster’s previous horror film, Hereditary, the lead character played by Toni Collette almost reads as a haunted version of Andersson himself, painstakingly crafting miniature scenes in fine and startling detail. It may seem odd to compare Andersson’s “4 films” to recent horror pictures, but while they are always very funny, they are nothing if not haunted. Haunted by the past, haunted by the dead, and haunted by the atrocities of war.

A large crowd witness a sacrifice in Songs From the Second Floor
The Sacrifice from Songs From the Second Floor. Image courtesy of royandersson.com

Hopefully, this gets you a bit closer to the experience of a Roy Andersson film. Trust me, they are comedies, but existential comedies that work at their own deliberate pace. Reviewing them again for this piece, I thought about how exhaustingly joke dense comedy became in the time parallel to Andersson’s output in the early 2000’s. TV shows like 30 Rock (which I very much enjoyed at the time) established a new pace in comedy that is the exact opposite of Andersson, who has sometimes been called a “slapstick Bergman.” The key films themselves can be watched in a day, and there’s really no use in breaking them down here in terms of their “stories.” In a way, Roy Andersson’s films are not only an antidote to bloated comedic pacing, but also a blind and very “Sundance-y” understanding adopted by audiences and critics that films are somehow solely about “the power of stories.” Stories are certainly woven into Andersson films, but their power is cinematic in a way that has little to do with any narrative structure. Andersson’s films, instead, hold the power to jar one in their stark contrasts, and inspire awe in their gradual reveals. In About Endlessness, one of my favorite scenes involves a trio of young girls performing an impromptu dance to an inane song pouring out of an open-air café. The following scene depicts a bloody crime scene with stunned, silent onlookers. The sort of tonal shifts Andersson crafts are carefully calibrated, leaving poetic clues, existential quandaries, and joyful affirmations behind in equal measure.

An ashen man rides the subway as those around him begin to sing in Songs From the Second Floor
A scenes from The Subway from Songs From the Second Floor. Image courtesy of royandersson.com

One Unmentioned Short, 4 Favorites Scenes from each of the “4 Films,” and a Documentary Recommendation:

World of Glory (1990) – a short from 1990 that signals what was to come ten years later. Featuring one of the most distinctive Roy Andersson regulars, the unforgettably gaunt Klas-Gösta Olsson. Also features some of the more horrific Andersson images in any of his films, particularly his surrealist manifestations of the gas chambers.

Songs From the Second Floor – This may be my favorite of Roy Andersson’s films. The final scene is a masterpiece take that finds comedic horror in a zombie attack amidst a discarded pile of crucifix merchandise, but the scene I always think about is the military gathering to pay tribute to a completely senile overlord on his 100th birthday. Confined to a sort of metal baby crib, they pay solemn tribute to the deranged man who suddenly, manically bursts forth with his only line in the scene: “My best to Goering! Hoist the flags!” Uncomfortable silence follows. These are the jokes, folks.

You, the Living – A dream sequence within which the groupie in purple boots dreams she is married to Micke Larsson of the Black Devils, and as she unwraps their wedding gifts and he plays a gorgeous guitar solo in accompaniment with the film’s score, we realize the landscape outside is moving by as if their apartment is a train car. They pull into the station, and the girl in purple boots and Micke Larsson are cheered on by their adoring fans. Eventually, their dream apartment building pulls out of the station as they wave goodbye.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence – the breakup of two business partners who were just trying to bring joy to the world through their novelty products; a sort of variation on Roy Andersson himself. But they only sell three items: Vampire Teeth, Laughing Bags, and a goofy mask called “Uncle One-Tooth” (all of which could be catalysts of horror in a different film). When they break their deal, one partner dumps out all their merchandise and walks all over it, setting off all the laughing bags. Like the best moments in these films, hilarious and heartbreaking all at once.

About Endlessness – one of the best films I saw in 2020, and a film I hope more people see. My favorite scene involves a group of people in a bar transfixed by the gently falling snow outside. One patron is hunched over the bar, not joining in their wonder. Another man eventually addresses the room, asking “Isn’t it fantastic?” Another onlooker (played again by Klas-Gösta Olsson) asks “What?” He replies: “Everything.” Then he directs himself to the sad looking man hunched over the bar, and in a moment that exemplifies Andersson’s love of simple human connection says: “I think so, at least.”

Being a Human Person (Fred Scott, 2020) – a beautiful documentary about Andersson at 76 making About Endlessness with his Studio 24 crew. This is essential viewing for the Roy Andersson completist, not only showing the various techniques and process involved in creating an Andersson tableau, but also respectfully revealing the vulnerabilities of a man whose life’s work is, in a way, about human vulnerability. Sadly, this documentary may reveal that About Endlessness is likely the last film we’ll ever see from Andersson. Fortunately, what remains is inexhaustibly rich.

Roy Andersson at work in Studio 24
Roy Andersson at work in Studio 24 image courtesy of royandersson.com

Written by Jason J Hedrick

Author of ECSTATIC Screen Notes, co-founder of the "Cult-O-Rama" film series in Pittsburgh, sometimes educator, sometimes playwright. Lives in the dark.

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