Torgny Anderberg

In 1976 Torgny Anderberg played the part of a hapless chief of police when Stockholm is terrorised by a lone gunman, in Bo Widerberg's The Man on the Roof / Mannen på taket. That is just one aspect of his long and diversified career, one that in some respects was similar to the nowadays more well-remembered Arne Sucksdorff, yet also strikingly different. The similarity is that they both made successful documentaries about the larger world, not least Brazil, with a deep love and understanding for the various countries and people they documented. A difference is that Sucksdorff hardly ever made any other kinds of films, whereas Anderberg also had a prolific career at home as a maker of light comedies and was much more embedded in Swedish film culture. Another difference is their approach to their documentaries. Sucksdorff never inserted himself or the crew in the films, but very carefully designed, edited and structured the films. In Anderberg's films the crew is usually part of the whole thing, and are seen going about their business. Anderberg himself appears in front of the camera. But the films are less pre-structured and much less stylish, they instead feel as if Anderberg and his team just went out with the camera to see what might come up. One might say that in Sucksdorff's films the filmmaker is not present in front of the camera but very much apparent behind the camera, whereas in Anderberg's films it is the exact opposite. It is tempting to borrow Victor Perkins's comparison between Hitchcock and Preminger, with Hitchcock for Sucksdorff and Preminger for Anderberg: "Hitchcock tells stories as if he knows how they end, Preminger gives the impression of witnessing them as they unfold."

Anderberg's first film as a director was a feature-length documentary called Anaconda (1954) about a research expedition through the Andes and then up the Amazon river. It is a fine film, shot in black and white. There is a sequence towards the end with a man out in a canoe alone in the night, hunting a caiman in the river, and with its nocturnal light and almost complete silence it is quite spectacular.

Jangada (1958), this time in colour and AgaScope, has a very loose narrative. The first part is an exploration up a river and meetings with indigenous people, another part is about Rio de Janeiro. There is a part about the opera house in Manaus, (famous from Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo (1982)), and finally a sequence about fishermen in Portaleza. While telling stories about then-contemporary life in Brazil, it also deals with the colonialism and the hardships and abuses from those days.

Anderberg also made several short films from Brazil, including one about its capital Brasília, and one about Pelé, often referred to as the world's greatest football player (although Maradona might take exception to that opinion). Esmeraldas - den gröna smaragden (1957) is about a town in Ecuador.

Most of these films, including Anaconda and Jangada, were produced by the production company Nordisk Tonefilm. It is easy to be impressed by, and perhaps nostalgic for, the expansive ambitions of the production companies at the time, financing expeditions to faraway parts of the world. Today such things would not happen unless a large number of various organisations, companies and institutions got together after years of efforts. But the reason why this was happening then was that there was no competition from television. When TV arrived, film companies stopped being interested in such documentaries and Jangada was among the last of its kind being made in Sweden. From then on it would be Swedish television that would make such documentaries, or international co-productions between specialised companies.

Anaconda had been an international success, but Anderberg also directed some very successful fiction films in the 1950s. The first was Lille Fridolf och jag (1956), one of the most successful films, commercially, ever released in Sweden; a domestic comedy written by Rune Moberg about an older couple coming to terms with their daughter's approaching wedding. The film had three sequels, two of which was directed by Anderberg, but each with diminishing returns.

Villervalle i Söderhavet (1963) was a series made for Swedish television about a Swedish family living in the South Pacific, and shot on location. It was a humongous flop, especially among critics, and it is almost without redeeming qualities, except for the fine locations around Tahiti. After that almost all of Anderberg's films are shorts, whether documentaries, commercials or commissioned works. In the 1980s he did several shorts about Peru, and the famine there in 1981-1983. He also made a few features such as Djungeläventyret Campa, Campa / Jungle Adventure Campa Campa (1976), a work of fiction about a missionary in Peru who kidnaps two children. Tåg till himlen / Train to Heaven (1990) is another work of fiction, about orphans in Ecuador. Anderberg's last film, co-directed with Helgi Felixson, was the documentary Kondormannen (2002) from Peru. It began as his film but he died during the making of it and Felixson instead finished it, making it a film about Anderberg. It was released two years after his death.

Anderberg was not a great artist, and little he made after the 1950s are of any particular interest. But his compassion for people around the world, not least indigenous people of South America, was genuine and never left him, and in the 1950s he was an important presence in Swedish cinema. At least two of his films, Anaconda and Jangada, deserve to be remembered. Swedish cinema of the 1950s is today almost only remembered for the films of Ingmar Bergman and of late also, to a much lesser extent, for the films of Hasse Ekman. But there was more going on back then, including films with global ambitions, and Anderberg is an example of that. Other directors who appeared then, or had their major breakthroughs, are Göran Gentele, Lars-Eric Kjellgren, Arne Mattsson and Lars-Magnus Lindgren. Compared to Anderberg they were more interesting artistically and deserve their own posts later on.

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That older couple in Lille Fridolf och jag, Selma and Fridolf, was the centrepiece of a huge franchise with both comic strips and a radio show. Those predate the films and continued, at least as a comic strip, until the 1990s. In the radio show and in the films the couple was played by Hjördis Petterson and Douglas Håge, who had played a couple for the first time in Bergman's It Rains on Our Love / Det regnar på vår kärlek (1946), and later the same year in Ekman's While the Door was Locked / Medan porten var stängd.

My previous article about Sucksdorff here.

The Perkins-quote is from Film as Film.