A man stands in a natural history museum and peers into a glass case that displays a pigeon, stuffed and mounted on a stick. He stares and lingers for a moment and then moves on to the next display. This is something akin to what you, the viewer, will do for the rest of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, the final part of Swedish director Roy Andersson’s incomparable trilogy on what it means to be human.
Eighteen years in the making, Andersson’s cinematic triptych — Songs from the Second Floor (2000), You, the Living (2007) and A Pigeon (2014) — is a surreal panorama of human experiences that was painstakingly crafted at the director’s studio in Stockholm.
Shot with a static camera in long, single takes, the films are composed of cinematic tableaus in place of a narrative. The meticulously staged scenes, each lasting a few minutes, evoke a strangely generic city bathed in a distinctively cool, sickly light. Its inhabitants, depicted as almost lifeless, drift from one vignette to another, their faces painted in white.
Photo courtesy of Andrews Film
Operating in between the bleak and the comic, Andersson’s films portray ordinary people in the most mundane, and often absurd, moments of everyday life. Oftentimes, a sense of quiet anguish pervades the characters as they are trapped in absurd situations — such as a couple of salesmen carrying a suitcase full of novelty toys that won’t sell. “We want to help people have fun,” one mournfully murmurs to a client. Or a construction worker, stuck in traffic, relates a dream in which he is strapped into an electric chair by men in business suits, soothing the victim by saying “try to think of something else.”
Sometimes, the visions are like a dream, defying comprehension in the same way that one cannot make sense of one’s own life. In a lyrical passage from You, the Living, a young bride sits on a bed in a tiny apartment, while her husband plays a guitar solo from the kitchen. Outside the window, the landscape moves past as though they are in the carriage of a train. As the space slows, a crowd of well-wishers, seemingly descending from above, come to congratulate the just-married couple.
TOWARD THE ABSTRACT
Photo courtesy of Andrews Film
Andersson’s unique cinematic language, which has won him top honors at the Cannes and the Venice film festivals, developed three decades ago.
While studying at the Swedish Film Institute during the 1960s, Andersson was an admirer of realism. His idol was director Vittorio De Sica, a leading figure in Italian neo-realism. Years later, Andersson realized he had grown weary of the realistic style.
“I even planned to stop filmmaking and get another job. But overnight, I found a solution — to quit realism and venture into abstraction,” the director told the Taipei Times during a Skype interview from his Studio 24 in Stockholm earlier this month.
Photo courtesy of Andrews Film
Instead of De Sica and his Bicycle Thieves, Andersson turned to Federico Fellini and his Amarcord and Roma.
The revelation came in 1985, a decade after the failure of the filmmaker’s second feature, Gilliap (1975). He soon turned to television, where the director found popular recognition for his commercials and creative freedom to develop and refine what has become his distinctive style.
When explaining his aesthetic shift, Andersson also points to his upbringing in a working-class family in Gothenburg, Sweden. In his childhood environment, “nothing else than realism is accepted,” whereas “abstraction in painting and music belongs to the bourgeois taste.”
Photo courtesy of Andrews Film
“After 1985, I dared to leave realism. Now I am a typical bourgeois,” quips the 72-year-old director.
THE HUMANIST
If Andersson’s cinema has any motif, it is not bourgeois beliefs but humanism. Infused with a heightened social consciousness, the surrealist’s films are firmly anchored in history and concrete human existence. In A Pigeon, an unforgettable set piece portrays colonial soldiers leading shackled black natives into a huge copper cylinder. A blazing fire is lit under the machine as the slaves’ screams become beautiful music for the enjoyment of the notables watching from a nearby mansion.
Capitalism and institutional religion come under attack in Songs, whose nominal protagonist Kalle burns down his shop in the midst of an economic crisis. Outside the city where a procession of flagellants in business suits march through the doomsday traffic, Kalle encounters the walking dead on a wasteland, including a boy hanged by Germans during World War II. In the foreground, a merchant of religious paraphernalia shouts at the arsonist: “How can you make money with a crucified loser?”
THE TRIVIAL AND THE PROFOUND
Andersson calls his style of filmmaking “trivialism,” referring to his embrace of the trivial elements of everyday life through which serious questions come into focus. His characters, typically caught in mundane situations, are mostly played by non-professional actors, who the director finds in a bar, restaurant or Ikea.
“What I want to reach is intensity. Most importantly, the actors should [have presence]… My philosophy is that everyone can be an actor in a movie, given patience, time and resources to work with,” the director says.
Andersson’s creatures might be real, but their habitat is a series of intricately realized tableaux, each as visually rich and complex as a painting. Apart from cinema, the director often cites Otto Dix and George Grosz, German Expressionist painters active between the two world wars, as his inspiration.
“[Their] experiences with the wars greatly affect their paintings,” Andersson says.
Thirty years after he relinquished realism, Andersson says he will continue to push the limits and explore the abstract side of cinema.
“After I left realism, I also accepted the ability to dream… Dreams are fantastic. You can do whatever you want in dreams. You are free. That is what I want to do more in the future.”
The Swedish director also reveals that his next project will be based on One Thousand and One Nights.
“It is a fairy tale. A woman tells things about human beings.”
There is probably no filmmaker other than Andersson who can do just that.
Andersson’s living trilogy is currently playing at Spot — Huashan (光點華山電影館), while movie-goers can also catch A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence at Wonderful Theater (台北真善美劇院), Ambassador Theatre Spring Center (國賓長春影城) and Eslite Art House (誠品電影院) in Taipei.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built