Bo Widerberg’s “New Swedish Cinema”: Revealing a New National Image (Preview)
by Adam Bingham

In the annals of Swedish cinema, once one has seen beyond the island-unto-himself that was and is Ingmar Bergman, there are comparatively few directors who have managed to carve out a canon and commensurate international reputation. Only in recent years (and only arguably) have the likes of Lukas Moodysson, Roy Andersson, and Ruben Östlund developed something like a cinematic name and international reputation. As often as not, these directors have variously inscribed, investigated, or otherwise inferred a sociopolitical import in their work, reflecting a civic engagement with their country that is, critically, constructed from the bottom up. Their visions of everyday life are usually situated outside urban cosmopolitan centers; and this trend—sober and dramatic in Moodyson, faux-documentary in Östlund (at least in early films such as Gitarrmongot [2004]), exaggerated and comic in Andersson—presents insular, often small-town communities in which domestic tensions reflect wider concerns. Solipsistic lives seem entrenched in cycles of action that are circumscribed by immediate concerns of simply marking or passing time. The world for the typically young men and women at the center of these works is a house, a room, or a tentative relationship. It is, without melodrama or magniloquence, a romantic dalliance, a random tryst, or the steady persistence of familial tension, all played out within the confines of a world in which these narrow horizons form deceptive borders and boundaries.

It is with this in mind, indeed for this very reason, that The Criterion Collection’s new release of a collection of works by a director whose importance to Swedish filmmaking is even more marked than Bergman’s is especially significant and welcome. Bo Widerberg represents a model of cinema that contravenes that of his illustrious forebear and that delineated for the first time in Sweden’s national cinema the concerns of everyday people, a director who arguably thus influenced Moodyson, Andersson, et. al, more significantly than any of his fellow countrymen. Described by the noted Swedish film critic and Bergman biographer Peter Cowie as the most mercurial of the post-Bergman Swedish filmmakers, Widerberg was adamant in his belief that the national cinema promulgated coarse myths of Sweden that could be packaged and sold around the world, something akin to a quasi-Orientalism in which the lives of spiritual pariahs were eulogized. These commodified narratives could be overturned only to the extent that secularism—stories especially of professional, class, and familial struggle—predominated. As such, a wholly contrastive viewpoint emerges that defies the austere art cinema of Bergman and instead presents a picture of the animating impulses of the enquiring mind and developing body rather than the tormented soul.     

Best known for the lavish period drama Elvira Madigan (1967), which is presented in this box set alongside hitherto unreleased shorts and features from earlier and later in the director’s career, Widerberg was from the outset a vocal and forthright critic of the cinema of his native land—including four controversial articles published in the national newspaper Expressen in 1962, followed later that year by his book The Vision in Swedish Film—and in his own films. When making those films, he took particular care to avoid what he perceived as spiritual solipsism and to situate his work within the contemporary sociopolitical climate of his country. Even in ostensible genre films, he inculcates his characters in webs of relations in which there is an inextricable sense of how micro and macrocosmic forces and actions interrelate to shape everyday lives.    

If there is an animating impulse behind Widerberg’s (ostensibly) disparate films, then it is his emphasis on different dimensions of familial relations as they pertain to both individual selfhood and communal identity. No unreconstructed social realist—at least not in the sense as it is commonly understood—he instead interrogates models of realism as they apply to film and representation. It is as though simply documenting, talking about, or filming any reality is fundamentally about creating that reality. His work is instead apt to underline the impossibility of this project—that is, to examine the extent to which any (perceived) reality is in fact a construction, a point of view on a reality rather than reality per se. The four films in the Criterion collection form the spine of this director’s output in the 1960s. The Baby Carriage (1963), Raven’s End (1963), Elvira Madigan (1967), and Ådalen 31 (1969) show a director in some ways attempting to untangle himself from the morass of existential—moral and spiritual—crises so central to Bergman and so problematic for Widerberg.

“New Swedish Cinema,” the label for these Blu-ray releases, is thus especially apt. They represent a new national—or perhaps that should be transnational—model, since the first work in this collection, the director’s feature debut The Baby Carriage, is awash with stylistic tics and tropes that reflect the New Wave cinematic techniques then taking hold throughout much of Europe. That it does not feel like a facsimile or a parody of early Godard or Louis Malle, Jerzy Skolimowski or Juraj Jakubisko, is remarkable, a testament to the clarity of Widerberg’s vision and the attendant applicability and receptivity to it within a film industry that was during this period buttressed by the twin pillars of international acclaim for Bergman and by the scandalous notoriety of Vilgot Sjöman’s perceived quasi-pornographic 491 (1964), I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967), and I Am Curious (Blue) (1968)… 

“Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema” Blu-ray box set is available from The Criterion Collection.

The Man on the Roof region-free Blu-ray is available from Radiance Pictures.

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Adam Bingham lives and works in the U.K. where he teaches film studies.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 2