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.

Arne Sucksdorff

When André Bazin compared Arne Sucksdorff with Luchino Visconti's film La Terra Trema (1948) it was something of an exaggeration (and perhaps Roberto Rossellini would have been a more apt comparison). But it should be said that Sucksdorff was one of Sweden's great filmmakers, and also a filmmaker of some influence on Brazilian cinema and Cinema Novo. Born in 1917, he first made a series of lyrical and suggestive short films shot across Scandinavia during the 1940s and then he expanded, both length-wise and location-wise; making two short films in India and three long features (in Sweden, India and Brazil) that combined narrative storytelling and documentary. He also made one allegorical fiction film in 1961, Pojken i trädet / The Boy in the Tree, shot in Sweden. It is Sucksdorff's combination of beauty and symbolism that makes him one of the great visual poets in film history. In his documentaries he was not content with just recording the natural world, instead he used and shaped it according to his ideas or needs. Much depends on trick photography and props, and his films are often so scripted and directed that it is debatable whether they are documentaries or fiction. But this should not be taken as criticism. Sucksdorff was an artist who, as he put it, was looking for the balance between poetic truth and documentary truth. (Although that is probably true for most documentaries.) As time went by his narrative imagery became self-sufficient to the extent that in some films not a single word is spoken. Some of his short films are shot as if they were horror movies, but more typical are his images of hazy sunlight through blades of grass, mist over water and raindrops on asphalt.

The 14 short films he made in Scandinavia between 1940 and 1950 can be divided into four groups. Films made on commission for organisations or government agencies (in all five films and also his first Indian film), films made about minorities in Sweden (three films), impressionistic, light films about wildlife (four films), and expressionistic, dark films about wildlife (two films). By far the best one in the first category is Människor i stad / Rhythm of a City (1947 aka Symphony of a City), a city symphony about Stockholm that won an Academy Award for best short film in 1949, the first time a Swedish film won an Oscar. The three shorts about minorities, two about the Sami people and a rather questionable one (for its latent exoticism) about Roma people, are not among his best work. From the third category two stand out: En sommarsaga (A Summer's Tale) from 1941, about a fox, which can be seen as a precursor to his first feature-length film Det stora äventyret / The Great Adventure (1953), and Gryning (Dawn) from 1944, his first with no dialogue or voice-over, about a hunter who is unable to pull the trigger and lets the deer live. Skuggor över snön (Shadows over the snow) from 1944 is something of a hybrid, part dark tale of death and part light tale of surviving. The two dark, expressionistic shorts are Trut! / Gull! (1944), a tale of some peaceful birds terrorised by a bigger bird which some have interpreted as an allegory about the Nazis, and En kluven värld / A Divided World (1948). The last one is one of Sucksdorff's best, more a film noir, a nightmare by Fritz Lang, than a documentary. It is almost entirely staged and shot with models and fake sets, about a white stoat, a fox and an owl in a cruel tale of survival. Some of the shots are incredible in their use of depth, shadows and mist. It is close to a masterpiece.

Then Sucksdorff when to India for two films. The 25-minute-long Indisk by / Indian Village (1951), which is the commissioned one, a conventional documentary about a small village and the digging of a well, and Vinden och floden / The Wind and the River (1953). It is a ten-minute-long impressionistic, wordless, depiction of Kashmir, shot with long takes with a moving camera, creating the impression of it floating down the river and quietly observing what goes on along its banks. Some, including Sucksdorff himself, thinks this is his best short. At least it shares that honour with Rhythm of a City and A Divided World.

These films show Sucksdorff skills as an editor and cinematographer (he usually wrote, shot and edited his own films) and they also show his primary interest in the natural world and animals, with a pantheistic view of that nature. Even if he shows the brutality it can hold, it is still a beautiful and awe-inspiring space. The use of editing, not least the recurring shot/countershots of birds (preferably owls) watching over the world and all its animals (including humans) as if they were judging the behaviour of those they observe, is often extraordinary. All of these aspects continue in the 85-minutes-long films that would now follow. He had made most of his short films with funding from Svensk Filmindustri (SF), but now SF's boss Carl Anders Dymling for some reason was not interested anymore so Sucksdorff turned to Sandrews instead, and they helped fund his first two features The Great Adventure and En djungelsaga / The Flute and the Arrow (1957). The first was shot in Sweden and the second in India, but they are somewhat similar. The great adventure the title refers to is life itself, and it shows a year in the life of a fox, an otter and two young brothers. Initially there is a whole fox family but all but one are killed (there is a POV-shot of the last 30 seconds or so of a dying fox), and there are two otters to begin with but one is also killed. The brothers thus come face to face with both the cruelty of life, and the cruelty of humans. One strong scene is with the baby fox screaming beside its dead mother, killed by a human, and trying to wake her up before he gives up. In another sequence Sucksdorff cuts back and forth between humans in a church during Sunday mass and the two otters playing in a river in which a human has laid a trap, which kills one of the otters. (It is not shown, only alluded to.) Since the audience knows the trap is there the sequence is rather suspenseful, like some eco-thriller. While the humans are singing a hymn the animals are in mortal danger because of those very humans. Erik Barnouw has suggested that Sucksdorff makes a distinction between the killings by humans and the killings by other animals: "Both men and animals kill, but animals do so for survival. Only men kill for other reasons and camouflage their reasons, always regarding themselves as instruments of morality and justice." But it is not a simple dichotomy between good animals and bad humans. The one surviving otter becomes best friend with the two brothers, and they spend half of the film together. The surviving fox also comes and play with the otter. And there is also another dark force in the landscape, beside the human hunters. A lynx. The lynx is like an evil spirit, a disturbance in the force, and a threat to everyone else. But in the end it walks away, leaving the area, and harmony is restored.

The Flute and the Arrow is also focused on children, and their interactions with animals, and around the Indian village there too is a dark force, but here it is not a lynx but a leopard. They have a similar function in the two films, but the leopard plays a larger role than the lynx, and is deadlier. The Flute and the Arrow, which took three years to make, is set (and shot) in the region Bastar in central India and is about life in a Muria village. Their lives and rituals, and the coming of age of the boy in the picture below, Chendru. It was Sucksdorff's only film in colour and it is shot in AgaScope, a Swedish version of CinemaScope. It looks spectacular, and has a fine score by Ravi Shankar. It has a stronger, more focused narrative than The Great Adventure and is more about the humans than the animals. It also pushes the boundaries for how far a documentary might go towards pre-planned staging until it stops being a documentary. Whereas the first half is more traditionally like an anthropological documentary it then takes a turn towards fiction, albeit inspired by real events.

The Great Adventure had been a major success, both financially and with the critics, but The Flute and the Arrow was only a hit with the critics. It was also very expensive. Sucksdorff's next film would be his only work of pure fiction, The Boy in the Tree, which is about a teenage boy who prefers the animal world to the human world but gets mixed up with some juvenile delinquents during a few days one summer. It does not stray very far from Sucksdorff's other films, besides the fact that it has regular actors and stars and a jazz score especially written for the film by Quincy Jones. But the film did not do particular well and Sucksdorff would never again make a film in Sweden. Instead he moved to Sardinia, and then to Brazil, where he remained for some 20 years. In Brazil he taught at a film school connected with Rio de Janeiro's Museum of Modern Art, and this is where his connection with Cinema Novo appears because some filmmakers associated with that group had Sucksdorff as their teacher. Among them was Antonio Carlos da Fontoura, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade and Eduardo Escorel. The latter became a distinguished editor during the 1960s and in the 1970s began directing as well. (Nelson Pereira dos Santos's film Vidas Secas (1963) was edited on Sucksdorff's equipment.) Sucksdorff also made a documentary in Rio de Janeiro, his fourth feature-length film Mitt hem är Copacabana / My Home Is Copacabana (1965). It is a very moving, and uncomfortable, film about orphans living on the streets. The focus is on two of them, Jorginho and Rico, and their efforts to find food, earn some money and just stay alive. The most horrid sequence in the film is when Rico has a bad toothache. First he welcomes the ache. "It makes me forget how hungry I am." he says. But then the pain becomes so unbearable that a friend pulls out the tooth with pliers borrowed from a construction worker, while Rico screams and screams. The film, which might be Sucksdorff's best, did cause some upset since it did not portray Brazil or Rio in a flattering light. But it did get made and was shown around the world. It won several awards, although it got a mixed reception at the Cannes film festival.

Sucksdorff had won in Cannes before though. Skuggor över snön won for best documentary short in 1946, as did Rhythm of a City in 1947. An Indian Village won the Prix special de jury in 1952 and The Great Adventure won Cannes's International prize in 1954, as well as an honorary diploma. It also won the Silver Award in Berlin. He has also won several awards at the Venice film festival and other places. For a period of some 20 years he was one of the most celebrated of documentary filmmakers, comparable to Robert Flaherty. But still, after My Home is Copacabana he never made a film again. His style and some themes instead lived on in the films of Jan Troell and Stefan Jarl.

Sucksdorff instead got involved in local environmental issues, especially the struggle to save the Amazon rain forests, and he made a four-part television series for Swedish television which aired in 1972. (It seems most Swedes watched it.) For his environmental activism he was awarded a medal by the Brazilian government after the fall of the military dictatorship in the mid-1980s. During the previous years Sucksdorff had not only fought for the protection of the Brazilian wildlife, he also lived in it for several years, in the wetland Pantanal in Mato Grosso. That is also where he made the TV-series, På jordens baksida (On the far side of the world). It is not particularly good or educational, but it does have a certain appeal. The first two parts are mainly about him and his third wife, the Brazilian Maria Graça de Jesus, and their day-to-day life in the wild. The appeal of the episodes comes from the joy that stems from the fact that Sucksdorff has so clearly found his own paradise, living and working among the animals, and interacting with them as if they were all one big, happy family. To see him and his wife swim around with an otter (apparently a favourite animal for the Sucksdorff family) or a tapir, or feeding a baby jaguar whose mother was killed by a hunter, is immensely moving and satisfying, as it is a depiction of a man who has found his dream fulfilled.

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It was in his review of La Terra Trema that Bazin mentioned Sucksdorff. It had "a profoundly original style of image, unequaled anywhere (as far as I know) but in the short films which are being made in Sweden by Arne Sucksdorff." The review is reprinted both in What is Cinema 2 and André Bazin and Italian Neorealism.

The quote from Barnouw is from the 1993 edition of his book Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, page 189. Barnouw thinks The Great Adventure is a masterpiece, and is in general appreciative of Sucksdorff's films.

Sucksdorff was also involved in one additional film, a British from 1971 called Mr. Forbush and the Penguins (aka Cry of the Penguins). It seems Sucksdorff was only responsible for the penguins. Alfred Viola and Roy Boulting took care of Mr Forbush. John Hurt played him and Hurt claimed the penguins were "a real pain in the arse."

While Sucksdorff spent decades in Brazil, he did return to Sweden late in life and he died in Stockholm in 2001. But the longest Wikipedia entrance for him is the one in Portuguese.

Contemporaneous with Sucksdorff was another Swedish filmmaker with a particular interest in Brazil: Torgny Anderberg. He might appear in a later post.