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.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50