Wandering with the Moon (1945)

You may or you may not have bought my book about Hasse Ekman, The Man from the Third Row, but either way I thought I should post something to give you a taste of it. What follows is copied from the book with a few changes, partly to remove references to other parts of the book so it can stand on its own. It is about what might be my favourite Ekman film.

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Hasse Ekman made three films in 1945 and the best of them is Wandering with the Moon (Vandring med månen), his second collaboration with the writer Walter Ljungquist. This time Ekman was for the first time not working with the production company Terra and producer Lorens Marmstedt but for the rival studio, SF. The reason he was working for SF instead of Terra was that SF owned the rights to Ljungquist’s novel Vandring med månen, and the new head of production at SF wanted Ekman to make it into a film. Ekman agreed to do it on condition that he could give a part to the actress Eva Henning and work together with Ljungquist on the script, to which SF agreed.

Wandering with the Moon tells the story of a young man, Dan (played by Alf Kjellin), who has a fraught relationship with his father and after a heated argument in which Dan says “I can't stand you. I can't stand myself, and I can't stand my office”, he decides to leave home and go abroad. He is walking along a deserted country road, talking to the moon, when a bus with a travelling theatre group comes along and the driver asks for directions. One of the actresses, Pia, jumps of the bus and asks Dan if she may walk with him and, hesitantly, he says yes. For the rest of the film we follow them, walking, talking and meeting various characters on the way over the course of a few days. It is not a film with a clear linear structure but rather an episodic, lyrical narrative. It is also a film about innocence and innocence lost; and, which often goes hand in hand with this, virginity and sexual inexperience. The first night Pia says to Dan: “Do you want to be my lover? I've never been with another man.” He cannot deal with this revelation; the thought of her and possibly himself as sexual beings makes him uncomfortable and even disgusted. But at the end of the film she finally makes him succumb, and they are both in a sense liberated. Their walk together in the beginning is done in one long take and then the sequence is repeated in the last scene of the film - yet another example of how Ekman in his films often links the beginning and the end together, here with Dan walking on a country road, talking to the moon. The difference is that whereas he was alone in the first scene, in the last scene he is with Pia.

Dan and Pia meet many different characters along the way and it is illuminating to look more closely at some of them. On his own Dan first meets a vagabond, played by Stig Järrel. The vagabond has an ironic and open-minded approach to life and misery. A poet and a philosopher, he takes things as they come and argues that nothing is important; that he himself is an insignificant being, one “whose name is written in running water,” as he puts it. However, he praises the youth and is anxious for the couple to get a head start, before they too become cynical. This is the one thing that connects the various characters Dan and Pia encounter: the wish to protect and/or pity the young for the experienced know that the idealism and hope of the young will inevitably give way to the cynicism and disappointment of adulthood and maturity.

They meet a careworn old woman (played by Hjördis Pettersson) who is the keeper of an inn where they spend the night, and she tells them that only those who gamble in life will really live. They also meet a priest (Hilding Gavle) who, when Dan confesses that he is an atheist, says: “Well, I prefer an honest atheist to a dishonest Christian.” But another piece of advice that everyone they meet gives is that in order to get ahead in life, they need to learn to use masks, to hide their true identities, because, as a man played by Ekman says: “Everybody walks around with a mask.” The woman at the inn says that in order to remain sane and be able to function in the world “[y]ou must always try and be something other than you really are” and use irony as an escape mechanism. At one point when Dan is exasperated with all the hopelessness and cynicism he encounters, he demands to know if there is no belief in goodness, to be told: yes, there is goodness, but it is so desperately fragile. Yet despite these sometimes uncomfortable truths, most of the people they meet see something hopeful in the love and idealism that Dan and Pia radiate. It is as if these people become spokespersons for different ideas, for Ekman's view of life, as they speak of the need to hide behind masks, of the apparent inevitability of cynicism and boredom, how experience and conformity stifle life. At the same time there is also hope: the hope of breaking free from conventions and traditions, for example by devoting oneself to the arts, in particular the theatre. These themes, together with the loose narrative and the poetic imagery, are also what make this film a good example of the similarities between Ekman and Jean Renoir, and their shared sensibility.

The poetry of the film remains one of its main strengths and part of that is due to the episodic structure and the lyrical images of the countryside. The cinematographer this time was Gösta Roosling, who hardly ever worked on feature films. His expertise was in newsreels and documentaries of people and nature. It is possible that Ekman chose him for this purpose.

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That was from chapter 4, and the book is available at online book stores and assorted libraries and such. I might add that Jean Renoir is a frequent reference point in the book.

20 years and 250 000 visitors

Spring of 1997 was a pivotal time for me in several respects. I moved out for the first time, leaving my parents to move in with some friends instead. I went on my first trip abroad by myself (to Rome) and found it so simulating I often wish I did nothing else. I sent my very first email. And, more relevant for this blog, this was also the year I had my first film article published, in the Swedish film journal Filmrutan. The article was about Alexander Mackendrick, and I have been writing for Filmrutan ever since. So I have been writing about film professionally, more or less, for 20 years as of now. I felt this was cause for a self-celebratory post. In addition, I just had my 250 000th visitor at this particular blog, and although these statistics are not exactly foolproof (how many of these visitors are bots or web crawlers?) they still mean something. So I figured I could celebrate that too.

Curtis and Lancaster, directed by Mackendrick in Sweet Smell of Success (1957).

For the first couple of years Filmrutan was the only place for which I wrote, but then I began writing for a now defunct journal called Cinema, published by Stockholm International Film Festival. That was around 1999-2001, and it was great fun. I wrote reviews, both long ones and capsules, did some more journalistic assignments and also several interviews with interesting filmmakers, for some reason primarily from the eastern parts of Europe, such as Jiří Menzel, Jasmin Dizdar, János Szász, Milcho Manchevski and Pantelis Voulgaris from Greece.

Now I write, and have written, for several different outlets, published a book, and contributed chapters to edited collections (the latest one is about Budd Boetticher). To keep track of it, both for myself and for anybody who might like to read stuff I have published outside this blog, I have made a page with a list of everything I can remember, and with links to those pieces that are available online. The page is to be found at the right, upper corner of the blog, above Rue du cinéma, and here is a link too:

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.se/p/journals-and-books-and-other-writing-by.html

My statistics also tell me which of my posts here are the most popular ones. This is the top ten (or 11) as of writing:

1) About Robert Warshow
2) About Tokyo Story
3) About Henry Hathaway
4) About trains in paintings (a very short post)
5) About deep focus
6) About growing old in the films of Ozu and Hawks
7) About teaching
8) About Bergman's favourite films
9) About André Bazin as a TV critic
10) About W.G. Sebald and Franz Kafka
10) About Maya Deren

As you can see that is a very disparate collection. I have been blogging since 2005 (first a Swedish film blog and then this one from 2009 when I moved to Scotland) so that is 12 years of almost uninterrupted blogging, yet I never know what will turn out to be popular and what will not, and I am usually surprised.

I wonder if I will still be writing 12 years from now. But first I must think of something to write for next week. This post does not really count.

Objectivity and elitism

Having written film criticism for some 20 years I can remember many conversations over the years with people about just that, film criticism. Often with guys persistently arguing that “the critics” are just elitist snobs who have no idea what real people like. Sometimes I try to counter these thoughts by using simple facts and statistics only to be met by angry outbursts about it being arrogant of me to use my knowledge against them. Sometimes they talk as if they believed that stopping a random person on the street and ask which film to watch is better than listen to a film critic.

I often think of these discussions because such views have, coming both from a right angle and a left angle, become fairly mainstream, and not just about film criticism. Such views are also common among Brexit and Trump supporters, and other similar people, parties and movements around Europe and the US. I felt then, as I feel now, that these unsettling positions and outbursts, the apparent belief that actually knowing something about whatever it is you speak is a flaw, proof of elitism and arrogance, come from a sense of low self-esteem and also, to some extent, from an awareness of them being wrong but rather than accepting that, lashing out at the person who they know is right. (What I am talking about is not differences of opinions but first the anti-fact attitude and then the habit of, instead of engaging in conversation or arguing for a position, just lash out and attack.)

To be called elitist these days does not take much effort. You only have to have an opinion which is either different from somebody else's, or to think for yourself and not accept whatever corporations proclaim. Even to assign value to things often infuriate people. Disliking The Avengers is considered elitist. If, for example, you complain about wrong aspect ratios on Netflix there will always be people who scream "Elitist!" even though it does not make any sense. If a big corporation is showing a film in such a way that part of the image is hidden, or the image is distorted, and you are elitist if you point this out, the only logical interpretation is that the people who scream elitist believe that the corporations are always right and we should unquestioningly accept whatever it is they provide, no matter in what way they provide it. It is in the same manner that Trump or Brexit supporters are saying that people should just shut up and accept whatever is happening. Aspect ratios are not as politically calamitous of course but everything that happens in a society, whether a local or global one, matters, and feed into everything else that happens. Screaming "elitist" is usually a sign of weakness, not awareness.

In the 1970s and 1980s academia was full of people who claimed that there was no such thing as knowledge or objective facts, and there are many who still claim to believe this. Such articles are still published, and such conference papers are presented. I have also met people under more informal circumstances making that same argument, that truth is a fantasy, or an elitist idea, and that all we have are subjective interpretations, even of such things as history. What is striking though is how rare it is for them to accept the consequences of their arguments, or to even actually be able to defend what they proclaim to believe. A Foucault-quoting scholar once tried to explain to me his position that there are no facts or truths by pointing to a candle and saying that if we were to describe it later we would not describe it the same way. I said that we would probably not but was it not an objective fact that there indeed was a candle on the table? And was not its molecular structure independent of our presence? He said that he had perhaps chosen a bad example. I did not point out that according to his line of thinking there could be no such thing as a bad example, as all arguments were supposedly equally valid. Instead I suggested he give another example. He took the American Civil War. Well, I said, was that not a conflict between one side led by Abraham Lincoln and another side led by Robert Lee.* He said that yes, this was true, and maybe this too was a bad example. Then he left. At least, unlike the Trump administration, he had some shame.

Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford 1939)

Arguing that there are no facts or objective truths used to be a very fashionable thing among left-wing intellectuals, and now it has been appropriated by malignant right-wingers. But the problem with such positions was obvious long before Trump. It is also ideas like this that has turned schools in some places (not least in Sweden) into places were teachers are not supposed to teach but let the pupils teach themselves, and the important thing for a school is supposedly to make children creative and engage in critical thinking or some such. I have even heard people argue that teachers should not know more about the subject than the students because this would make them more equal. The ridiculous stupidity of such a position should be self-evident. What is even the purpose of teaching or schools if there is no actual teaching or transfer of knowledge? Behind this, again, lies the contempt for "elitism," against facts and figures, and instead an elevation of subjective feelings above all else. A student might take the lesson to heart and go looking for her own facts and by using her critical thinking decide that the Sandy Hook massacre was fake and 9/11 was an inside job, if it did indeed even happen. This is not how society prosper or move forward.

Those are extreme examples but another contemporary problem that is also about subjective feelings at the expense of facts and knowledge is the disappearance of nuance and complexity, in the public debate at large. If we keep to film, just look at the endless parade of think-pieces and hot takes in which a person has seen a film (or sometimes just the trailer) and then proclaim that there is only one way to understand that film, their way, and if that understanding is that this film is, say, terribly racist then anybody who disagrees is brandishing her privilege and is most likely racist too, or at least not woke enough. Many of these pieces are so bad that they become indistinguishable from parodies, for example since they are frequently so hyperbolic ("This is the most misogynistic film ever made!"), and so desperately lacking in historical context ("This is the first time ever that women have been allowed to be funny!").

The idea that such a complex object as a film or novel can only be understood or interpreted in one singular way, and anybody who sees it differently is a suspect character, is clearly wrong. Is the work racist, or is it about racist characters? Is it sincere or ironic? What was the context in which it was produced? Is it a well-meaning but perhaps failed work, or is it from beginning deliberately racist? These are some of the questions you need to wrestle with. Analysing films and books, art in general, is hard work unless you are arrogant. It takes time and knowledge to be attuned to all the nuances in a given work, and often you need to watch a film several times to understand it. But for many that is an elitist position; if a person feel something that is the end of it. Another reason has to do with economics; in this age of temp jobs and freelancing you might have to quickly write stupid columns or else you will starve. It is a Faustian bargain.

The position that there is only one correct interpretation is of course different from the "there is no truth, all is relative"-position. It is however related to Barthes's idea of the death of the author. According to him any meaning a text, such as a book, might have comes from the interpretation of the reader/viewer, and has nothing to do with any authorial intent, which does not exist. That too is a dubious position but the difference is that for Barthes any interpretation is potentially equally valid whereas the position in all of these pieces in assorted journals and websites is that there can be only one true interpretation. But there is no shortage of takes, or "correct" interpretations, however wildly inconsistent, as any given film is usually found to be problematic by someone. After all, Moonlight did not pass the Bechdel test.

The political climate in the world is increasingly fragile, and one might be forgiven for feeling that everything is getting worse by the hour. The constant updates, live feeds, the need to be first, to create new content, to keep one's brand sizzling, all conspire to make it very difficult for there to be a rational public conversation about anything. Instead we get pieces that proclaim that an Oscar win for the wrong film will be a disaster for us all. But fortunately that is not the whole picture. There are thoughtful, intelligent and knowledgeable people out there, participating in the discussion. There are still long-form essays, nuanced books and complex films. The problem is not that they are not there, the problem is that everybody seems to be so busy getting outraged that they do not have time to engage with these works, or to distinguish between what is important and what is not. Sometimes the proper, or even radical, thing to do is not to be outraged.

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This piece is related to one I wrote two years ago. This one.

In a Twitter discussion I observed, but did not participate in, a film critic was accused of having said something racist. When the critic replied that he had never said that line he was accused of having said, the response was "Do not try to make this to be about facts."

2017-03-14
*To clarify, Lincoln and Lee were not equivalents. Lincoln was president, and Lee a commanding general. Lincoln's Southern equivalent was Jefferson Davis.

I also rewrote a few sentences in the second paragraph.