Arne Mattsson

The career of Arne Mattsson is rather remarkable, not just for a Swedish filmmaker but for any filmmaker. Once he was at the top, making films that were global successes at the box office and critical successes at home, and then he found himself making cheap thrillers in Yugoslavia or Britain with the likes of David Carradine and Franco Nero, and some gruesome sexploitation too. In one sense a mighty fall from making good European post-war art cinema to appalling euro-trash. Yet the early and the late films are still possible to discuss as part of his unique vision and style. Many of his films can only be described as bad, and many of the rest of them are peculiar and a required taste (he made few great films) but this does not negate the fact that he is a fascinating case study. It is strange that nobody has seen fit to properly engage with his films and career as a whole, not even in Sweden. Not just as an auteur study but as a study in Swedish and European genre cinema (always a neglected field) and as a study of broader shifts and movements within European cinema from the 1940s until the 1980s. As an important precursor for the current wave of Nordic Noir/Scandi Noir he is a relevant starting point for much of research on that as well, and this year is the centenary of his birth to boot. In short, Arne Mattsson is a subject for further research for anybody interested in what I have outlined and what I will now explain more thoroughly. But given his long career and the lack of writings on him, it will only be a rough sketch, the aim of which is to entice others to carry on the research.

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Mattsson's most famous film and greatest hit came early in his career: One Summer of Happiness (Hon dansade en sommar 1951). It is made in the tradition of the Swedish summer film, a popular kind of film at the time and of which Bergman made several contributions, such as Summer with Monika (1953). The subject matter is usually a brief and passionate love affair that takes place during the summer, out in the country, and which then comes to an abrupt end when the summer is over. The dichotomy between the city (portrayed as a bad place) and the countryside, or archipelago, (a good place) is a key aspect of these films. Mattsson's film, which has Folke Sundquist and Ulla Jacobsson as the young, doomed, couple, was seen by almost half of all Swedes old enough to watch it and was successful across the world. It also won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival in 1952 and competed in Cannes, where the score by Sven Sköld won an award. The score has a flute chord that bears an uncanny similarity to Ennio Morricone's music for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone 1966). Whether this is a coincident or if Morricone saw Mattsson's film and borrowed from it I do not know, but since it was a success in Italy too it is not inconceivable that he did.

Sundquist and Jacobsson

This is one of Mattsson's really good films, and another is Kärlekens bröd (The Bread of Love 1953). It also has Folke Sundquist in the lead and is an existential drama about a handful of Swedish soldiers fighting in Finland during the Winter War (when Soviet, then allied to Nazi Germany, attacked Finland). The story is powerful but it is especially the style of the film that is magnificent, with one striking composition after another, lit by the cinematographer Sven Thermænius. It too competed in Cannes, and should really be resurrected by Criterion or some other distinguished distributor.

After One Summer of Happiness had been such an overwhelming success the production company Nordisk Tonefilm had given Mattsson carte blanche and Kärlekens bröd is what he chose to do. While an artistic success it was not popular among the audience, which was more keen on watching lovemaking in the moonlight than watching people freeze to death in agony.

Those two films, made at the peak of Mattsson's career, show how he could excel in different kinds of films, that he was ambitious and that he had a distinct and forceful visual style, and he had a good few years at Nordisk Tonefilm. Beside those two mentioned above he made such fine films as the children's film Kastrullresan (The saucepan trip, 1950), the drama För min heta ungdoms skull (Because of My Hot Youth 1952), an adaptation of the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness's Salka Valka (1954) and an uneven adaptation of August Strindberg's Hemsöborna (The People of Hemsö 1955). But then he left Nordisk Tonefilm for Sandrews, after an interlude in Argentina where he made Primavera de la vida (Livets vår 1957), and at Sandrews he switched to thrillers, entering a new phase of his career. He went from a maker of serious art films to becoming "Sweden's Hitchcock" as the critics said at the time, beginning with Damen i svart (The Lady in Black 1958) with Sven Nykvist as cinematographer. Hitchcock was himself aware of Mattsson's work and once allegedly gave him two cigars as a sign of appreciation. Although calling Mattsson "Sweden's Hitchcock" is a superficial comparison, and they are not in the same league.

Thrillers with a touch of the macabre came naturally for Mattsson, this was where he most easily could express his view of humans as cruel and deceitful, driven by greed, hatred and jealously, and this is where his visual experimentation was at its most extreme. He worked with some of Sweden's most prominent thriller writers such as Stieg Trenter, Dagmar Lange (writing under the pseudonym Maria Lang), Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall and made his first pure thriller already in 1947, Det kom en gäst (There Came a Guest), written by Trenter. Unfortunately, it is a film that fails on every level except for being mercifully short, 68 minutes, apparently cut down by the studio, Svensk Filmindustri. His next film Farlig vår (Dangerous Spring 1948) is excellent and among his best; both a thriller and a vivid depiction of student life in Uppsala. After his years at Nordisk Tonefilm, Mattsson would from 1958 onwards do almost only thrillers (often starring Anita Björk and Karl-Arne Holmsten) and he quickly expanded on his own style with long, tracking camera movements, subjective shots, extreme close-ups, cramped compositions, staging in great depth and abrupt and unconventional editing patterns. The films also became more and more strange, or estranged. A film like När mörkret faller (When Darkness Falls 1960) is so stylised and the acting a sort of expressionless affect that the distancing effect resembles something like early Fassbinder. It is difficult to know, or understand, how to approach these films. Is it a satire of detective films? Is it a deliberate attempt to do just what they appear as, a Brechtian art thriller? Or is it a failed effort to create something genuinely engaging and thrilling? Another intriguing one is Nightmare (Nattmara 1965), which ends with a long closeup of the face of the killer looking directly at the audience while a voice-over reads a police statement warning the public to stay clear of him. Critics at the time compared Nightmare to Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Clouzot's Diabolique (1955) and assorted Hitchcock films, although those comparisons will only go so far. Mattsson said himself it was Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1946) who inspired him but that is not apparent.

Some of these thrillers are bad, including Ryttare i blått (Rider in Blue 1959) and Vita frun (White Lady 1962), sometimes they are mystifying as some of those mentioned above, and some rather good such as The Doll (Vaxdockan 1962), a provocative drama about a lonely friendless man who brings home a mannequin doll whom he treats as a live, human being. But from the mid-1960s most of his films are in various ways abysmal. This is also when Mattsson began looking for funding abroad and when his career becomes interesting on another level.

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I mentioned above the similarity between the music of One Summer of Happiness and The Good, the Bad, the Ugly. Another link to Leone/Morricone is that the killer in Nightmare plays a harmonica, much like Charles Bronson's character in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). But the Italian connection most people have made is between Mattsson's 1958 fashion house thriller Mannekäng i rött (Mannequin in Red), shot in garish colour by cinematographer Hilding Bladh, and Italian giallo films, not least Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (6 donne per l'assassino, 1964). It might also be a coincident but either way it points to the interconnections and modes that guides and influences films across borders. It also suggests how Mattsson was doing his own thing in Swedish cinema. Even though thrillers were popular then, both domestic thrillers and cold war thrillers (such as Mattsson's weird Den gula bilen (The Yellow Car 1963) or Rolf Husberg's Främlingen från skyn (Stranger from the Sky 1956)), Mattsson's contributions are unlike all others and had more in common with other European genre traditions. It is therefore not a surprise that he eventually began making films abroad.

Mannekäng i rött

In 1964 Mattsson made the musical Sailors (Blåjackor), which was a Swedish/Yugoslavian co-production. It is horrible. It was followed by the even worse Här kommer bärsärkarna that might be described as a farcical Viking epic, and also a Yugoslavian co-production. Bamse (1968) was a Swedish/Danish production, which had a lurid poster but was still a respectable relationship drama, which some compared to the films of Claude Lelouch. Ann and Eve (Ann och Eve - de erotiska 1970) on the other hand, another Swedish/Yugoslavian production, is ugly and nasty. While a tale of two young women on holiday, having plenty of consensual and non-consensual sex (including a gang rape), it is also an attack on film critics and shows how bitter Mattsson had become on the way his films were treated by Swedish critics. I would not say that the critics were unreasonable; they liked several of his films and Mattsson himself admitted at the time that some of his films were indefensible. But he felt that the criticism of both the thriller Mördaren - en helt vanligt människa (The Murderer 1967) and Bamse were unfair, and the failure of both films drove him to such despair he almost committed suicide he said at the time. So, fairly or not, he felt that he was being tormented by the critical establishment and Ann and Eve was a result of this, as well as being a sexploitation film.

Another Swedish/Yugoslav production is the political thriller/sexploitation film Black Sun (Mannen i skuggan/Crno sunce 1978), set in Spain, while the next film, Sometime, Somewhere (1983) was apparently produced in Monaco. (I know little about the film and have not seen it.) Mask of Murder (1985) was an English/Swedish production with Rod Taylor and Christopher Lee, shot in Sweden but set in Canada for unknown reasons. It is what was once referred to as a straight-to-video film, of little quality. The Girl (1987) was a British production with Franco Nero in the lead, as well as Christopher Lee again. Sleep Well, My Love (1987) was another British production but without known stars. And then finally The Mad Bunch (1989), a Swedish production in English with David Carradine in the lead and co-directed by Mats Helge Olsson, a hardworking filmmaker who in the 1980s and 1990s made a series of absurd and incredibly bad action films, made with little money but a lot of enthusiasm. Mattsson and Olsson also directed The Hired Gun the same year, which might be Mattsson's last film.

From the mid-60s only one of Mattsson's films is of any real value, but it is on the other hand one of his best: Yngsjömordet (The Yngsjö Murder 1966). It is based on a real murder that took place in 1889 and written by the actress Eva Dahlbeck. It has a bold narrative structure, is much more restrained than his other films around this time, and well-acted. An achievement.

Ingrid Thulin in Yngsjömordet

While Mattsson's career and oeuvre is remarkably uneven and sprawling it should be of great interest for those studying European genre cinema, or Nordic Noir, or are working with psychoanalytical feminist film theory, or transnational cinema. As an auteur study it too is of considerable interest as his career is, as the liner notes for a Mattsson DVD-box says, "as if Bergman went from Summer with Monika to directing Dolph Lundgren". The comparison is apt.

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There is little to read about Mattsson in English but in Swedish Cinema and the Sexual Revolution: Critical Essays (2016), edited by Elisabet Björklund and Mariah Larsson, there is at least an essay about him, written by Bengt Bengtsson.

For those who know Swedish, here is Leif Furhammar's famous review in the daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet of Mattsson's Mördaren - en helt vanlig person: "Per Wahlöö och Maj Sjöwall har skrivit filmen, Arne Mattsson har regisserat den. Och den som sen minns 'Pensionat Paradiset' (1937) som den svenska filmbotten, han följer helt enkelt inte med sin tid."

More for those fluent in Swedish: there is an interview with Mattsson, Furhammar and a few others in the film journal Chaplin; the third issue of 1991. There is also a candidate thesis about Mattsson written in 1986 at Stockholm University by Bengt Bengtsson which is pretty good. But that is about it.

Both The Mad Bunch and The Hired Gun are available on YouTube so knock yourself out. Or not.

Hemsöborna

Death of a Cyclist (1955)

In Spain in the 1950s, although a dictatorship under Franco, there was something of a cinematic revival. An important event was in 1951 when the Institute of Italian Cultures organised a festival with new Italian films, which obviously included several neorealist films. The festival, or film week, took place in Madrid and in the audience were many students from IIEC (Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias de Cinematografia), a recently opened (1947) film school. Among them were Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis García Berlanga and Carlos Saura, and Bardem and Berlanga also started a film journal, Objetivo. In 1953 the international film festival in San Sebastián opened (which was where Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) had its international premiere). In 1955 there was a conference in Salamanca for filmmakers and critics where they discussed the future of Spanish cinema. This was a time when the Franco regime was (comparatively) more open-minded, and even Luis Buñuel was invited back to his home country to make Viridiana (1961), produced by the closeted communist company UNINCI (founded in 1949), on which board J.A. Bardem now sat. Viridiana was Spain's contribution to the Cannes film festival (where it won the Palme d'or) but the Catholic Church disapproved of the film and Buñuel was not allowed to make any more films in Spain. But the more liberal period in Spanish cinema lasted for the rest of the 1960s and this later period is sometimes summed up with the acronym NCE, Nuevo Cine Español, or New Spanish Cinema, which was to some extent a reaction against the cinema of the 1950s too. (The 1960s was also a time when many big international co-productions were made in Spain, such as 55 Days in Peking (Nicholas Ray 1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire (Anthony Mann 1964), Doctor Zhivago (David Lean 1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone 1966).)

Berlanga's second film, from 1953.

Perhaps the most well-known film from the 1950s is J.A. Bardem's Death of a Cyclist (1955). It is sometimes called a Spanish neorealist film but it is unclear why since it is a tale of adultery, emotional blackmail and anomie among some well-to-do families. A man and a woman, both married, are having an affair and the film opens with them driving on a country road. By accident they hit a man on a bicycle and, afraid of being found out as lovers, they do not report it or call for an ambulance. When they read in the newspapers that the man died they are consumed by guilt, and act out in various ways, while an unpleasant acquaintance seems to know what they have done and is teasingly suggesting he will tell all and destroy their marriages.

Death of a Cyclist is quite brilliant. The storytelling and pacing is precise and smooth, the acting is magnificent and the visuals are powerful and often beautiful. The film is like a combination of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Michelangelo Antonioni. The milieu, ambiance, dialogue, storytelling and imagery create this interesting mixture of the two. The actress who plays the lead is Lucia Bosè, who also played the lead in Antonioni's excellent Story of a Love Affair (1950) and this obviously strengthens this connection. One aspect where it is different from Antonioni is the ending, which is a neat re-imagining of the opening and this makes the film circular rather than open-ended like Antonioni. This is closer to Mankiewicz.

Today Spanish cinema before Almodóvar is relatively underexplored, globally speaking. There are a few well-known films, like Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), but there is a lot more to explore and treasure. (I am told that Berlanga's El Verdugo / The Executioner (1963) is especially good.) Death of a Cyclist is also a reminder of how strong and universal this kind of film style was at the time. There is a tendency to see Hollywood films as generic and European cinema as expressions of personal artistry but this has always been a mistake; most of European cinema is generic mainstream, like Hollywood, and there has always been a lot of personal artistry in Hollywood too. Death of a Cyclist is both typical for its time and place while also being artistically specific, and could be said to exemplify generic artistry.

Pauline Kael wrote an essay in 1963 with the title "The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe-Parties" in which she discussed (critically) then contemporary European cinema with a focus on Fellini, Resnais and Antonioni, and she might have included Death of the Cyclist in that sick-soul-of-Europe genre. (Although Death of a Cyclist is not mentioned in that article, Kael disliked it.) This is what I meant by the film being generic to some extent. But that is no contradiction to it being a brilliant film, one among the many highlights of the cinema of the 1950s.

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There were two Palme d'or winners in 1961. Buñuel shared the award with the French film The Long Absence, directed by Henri Colpi.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

The morning on the day after Krzysztof Kieslowski had died (in March 1996) a friend called me up to express his sense of loss. I shared his pain, because Kieslowski had by then become a part of our lives, with his films and his chain-smoking presence in interviews. He had a deadpan delivery and a certain ambiance, or amused boredom which was, and still is, very appealing. Once when he was about to be interviewed the journalist was unable to get the recording machine to work. He was becoming more and more stressed. Kieslowski sat on his chair, cigarette in mouth, and waited. Finally he said "Why don't you try to plug it in." (I was not that journalist but I have been told about it.)

He was very Polish, and worked exclusively in Poland for the first 24 years of his career. But he was also very European. As soon as the iron curtain came tumbling down the European in him burst out. The Double Life of Veronique (1991) is set in Poland and France, as is Three Colours: White (1992). Three Colours: Red (1994) is set in Switzerland and Three Colours: Blue (1993) is set in France and is partly about the creation of a symphony to be played at the day of Europe's unification.

There are some differences between the Polish ones and the European ones, in terms of the look of them, with the Polish ones being more gritty. There is little obvious beauty in the images of, say, A Short Film About Killing (1988) whereas Three Colours: Blue has beauty written all over it. That is not meant as criticism of one or the other, in both cases the look of the film is appropriate for the story that is being told, I just mean that there is a difference. And the style of his films evolved over time, there are no clear breaks. Thematically the films are consistent, about how people are interconnected, whether they know it or not, and how events in the past and the present are linked, how things are repeated. Even though chance and luck seems to be what governs our lives it is all apparently part of some master plan.

I have not seen any of his early documentaries, the first of his films that I have seen is Camera Buff (1979, original title is Amator), which is excellent and is from when Kieslowski was part of the Polish film movement called "cinema of moral anxiety", in the late 70s and early 80s. Camera Buff is about a man who is an amateur filmmaker and whose camera is always with him. He is also making films for the Communist Party, who of course censors his work and criticise it. He becomes more self-absorbed in his filmmaking, leading to the breakdown of his marriage, and in the end he starts to film himself. It is as good an introduction into the world of Kieslowski as one could hope for, filled with irony, passion and philosophical ideas. Also excellent is his next film, which is probably the most celebrated of his early films, Blind Chance (1981). It is popular among philosophy scholars since it shows how fate trips up the life of a man, with the narrative a three-forked path. We get three alternative versions of what this man's life might be like.

A key film is No End (1985), because it was the beginning of his collaboration with writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz and composer Zbigniew Preisner. It is especially Preisner who is important for from now on the music is one of the pillars on which Kieslowski's films stands. It is a perfect collaboration of filmmaker and composer, images and music, and one of the most remarkable artistic partnerships in film history. The music is not only complementary to the images but is also often a part of the story, including characters who are working in music as composers, musicians or singers. At the very least they can be seen in record stores looking for the music of the film. When they were making The Decalogue (1989-1990) Kieslowski and Preisner even created a fictional composer from the Netherlands, Van den Budenmayer, who lived in the 18th century. They claimed he wrote some of the music for the later films, and in The Double Life of Veronique there is a lecture given about the life and work of this Van den Budenmayer. But there is no such man. (This can be seen as an example of the irony and humour that has always been an important part of Kieslowski's films, their occasional playfulness.)

I am not sure if I have a particular favourite among his films, but I have a special feeling for Blue. Julie (played by Juliette Binoche) looses her husband and daughter in a car accident, and although badly injured she survives. But she does not want to. She succumbs to depression and suicidal thoughts, yet something holds her back. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the will to live, to live on, gets stronger and she connects with the world again. It is beautiful, and moving, and very uplifting. The music is part of that.

I said that she connects with the world again. However, the feeling of Kieslowski's films is that, although set in the real world, they really belong to a Kieslowskian world, which is like our world, but only just. An absurd world, strange, cruel and beautiful.



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I should perhaps add that "cinema of moral anxiety" was a loose movement in the late 1970s (ending more or less with general Jaruzelski becoming prime minister in 1981, and declaring martial law) which told stories about political disillusion and moral corruption, as well as domestic strife. Among the most well-known participants were Kieslowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland and Andrzej Wajda.