Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema: Another Sweden

In 1962, the young Bo Widerberg threw a grenade into the complacent waters of Swedish cinema. It came in the form of four articles in the evening newspaper Expressen—followed by a book version titled Vision in  Swedish Film—in which Widerberg castigated the conventions of his country’s film culture. “It was a protest,” he later said. “Every new Swedish film was a disaster; it had absolutely no connection with modern society.” He felt that his national cinema had fallen into a dull, if technically proficient, series of “constructed” studies of modern life, lacking both immediacy and the “observed” realism emerging in Britain, France, and Italy. Even the towering Ingmar Bergman could not escape the lash: Widerberg accused him of nourishing the myths that had developed abroad regarding Scandinavian cinema as a whole—that it was concerned only with spiritual anguish and individual passions. He reproached Bergman for his “vertical films,” in which man is either humbled or exalted in the eyes of a Christian God, and thus removed from the social landscape of the period.

Bergman wrote an open letter to Expressen, responding in somewhat indifferent terms to Widerberg’s tirade, even agreeing that inspiration had run dry in Swedish cinema. “Swedish film is today a ravaged country,” he concluded. “If you want to build something together with us, who have been successful for many years, you are welcome.” From then on, Bergman and Widerberg tolerated each other in a state of armed neutrality.

At the time of the Expressen exchange, Bergman’s friend Harry Schein was about to establish the Swedish Film Institute. Thanks to his persistence, in 1963 the Swedish government would decide to subsidize creative filmmaking with money that had hitherto been levied as an “entertainment tax” on movie tickets, furnishing aspiring filmmakers with sufficient funds to take their first steps in the profession. A new generation of young directors came to the fore in the years that followed. Widerberg was regarded by his contemporaries as a first among equals, alongside Vilgot Sjöman (the I Am Curious films), Jan Troell (Here Is Your Life), Jörn Donner (A Sunday in September), Mai Zetterling (Loving Couples), and Jonas Cornell (Hugs and Kisses). Widerberg’s star rose as the 1960s unfolded, and he would go on to make such warmly acclaimed films as Joe Hill (1971), The Man on the Roof (1976), and The Serpent’s Way (1986), working steadily until his death in 1997, at the age of sixty-six. The films he made in his first decade of directing, however, remain the finest of his career.

Widerberg and Bergman shared one unmistakable trait: both men drew heavily on the turmoil of their private lives for inspiration. By the time Widerberg had embarked on his first feature film, The Baby Carriage (1963), he was already on his second marriage, and he would have various extramarital liaisons in the years to come (one with Inger Taube, who acted in both The Baby Carriage and, two years later, Love 65). Each of these relationships furnished him with dialogue and situations that give his cinema an acutely personal dimension, most notably in Love 65, the story of a frustrated film director seeking gratification outside his marriage. Widerberg’s own youth in the port city of Malmö, in southern Sweden, also helped him bring authenticity to such early works as The Baby Carriage and Raven’s End (1963).

Widerberg had left school early, and worked first in a hospital and then on the night desk of a small provincial newspaper. He yearned to express himself through writing, and in his early twenties published novels and stories like Autumn Term and the best-selling collection Kissing. By the close of the 1950s, he had established himself as a film critic in the pages of Expressen and the literary monthly BLM. He had even tried to collaborate with Bergman, suggesting to him that they should adapt three of the short stories in Kissing. Bergman, then preoccupied with his stage productions at Malmö City Theatre, showed Widerberg’s draft to his friend and mentor at leading Swedish studio Svensk Filmindustri, Carl-Anders Dymling, but it aroused no enthusiasm on Dymling’s part.

In 1962, the same year he published Vision in Swedish Film, Widerberg made his debut with a short film for television titled The Boy and the Kite, written and directed in partnership with Troell. The film describes a day in the life of Arild, a sensitive young child whose sixth birthday is disrupted by his father’s forgetfulness and his mother’s impending childbirth. Little Arild embarks on a day of discovery, not least kite flying. Troell’s luminous cinematography, the music by Antonio Vivaldi (undoubtedly Widerberg’s contribution), and the relationship between father and son all offer a preview of the themes that run through the work of both Widerberg and Troell, the two finest Swedish filmmakers of their generation. Soon afterward, Gustav Scheutz, the boss of the Europa Film studio, agreed to fund Widerberg’s The Baby Carriage.

From the outset, filmmaking was a family endeavor for Widerberg. His young daughter Nina appeared in four of his early features; his father-in-law was the production designer on Raven’s End, while Vanja Nettelbladt, his wife from 1954 to 1973, worked as a script assistant. His first son, Martin, appeared in Ådalen 31 (1969). His younger son, Johan, had roles as a child in The Man from Majorca (1984) and The Serpent’s Way, and as a young man in All Things Fair (1995). Obstinate, misanthropic, often irascible, and capricious in love, Widerberg nonetheless remained intensely loyal to his friends and collaborators. He called on a mix of professional and amateur players. The Swedish heartthrob of the time, Tommy Berggren, appeared in six of the first seven features directed by Widerberg. Stalwarts of Swedish theater such as Anita Björk, Keve Hjelm, and Roland Hedlund appealed to him as much as neophyte talents like seventeen-year-old Pia Degermark (1967’s Elvira Madigan), eighteen-year-old Marie De Geer (Ådalen 31), and twenty-one-year-old Evabritt Strandberg (Love 65).

The Social Democratic Party had been in power in Sweden since 1932 (and would only be defeated in 1976), and while this had led to immense reforms and advances in welfare and living conditions, the party’s hegemony had, by the sixties, induced a kind of complacency that infuriated Widerberg and his committed colleagues. Although the first important milestone in Swedish cinema, Victor Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm (1913), had savagely attacked the poor laws then in force, overtly political films had been rare in Sweden, with the exception of Alf Sjöberg’s They Staked Their Lives (1940) and Hampe Faustman’s When the Meadows Bloom (1946) and Foreign Harbor (1948). Escapist drama and, of course, Bergman’s intensely personal world had then dominated Swedish screens until Widerberg made The Baby Carriage, which appeared in March 1963. Here was an angry film, about the plight of a single mother, that responded to the times, in tune with the quest for social justice and political change that distinguished the British cinema of the early sixties.

Like his contemporaries Sjöman, Troell, and Zetterling, Widerberg had discovered the French New Wave. While admiring Jean-Luc Godard, he found him too cerebral, and so he—the most emotional of men—felt a greater kinship with François Truffaut. He also respected the political engagement and integrity of British directors like Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and Karel Reisz. He loved John Cassavetes’s iconic Shadows, which came out in Sweden in May 1962, just before Widerberg agreed to make The Baby Carriage for Europa Film. Widerberg watched it twice in succession, and even as late as The Man on the Roof, he was telling friends how Cassavetes had taught him to film the world as it really was. The jazz sequences in The Baby Carriage pay direct tribute to Shadows.

The films in this set form the crucible in which Widerberg’s passion and commitment were forged. Improvisation and spontaneity represented for him a sharpened reality. In The Baby Carriage, for example, Berggren’s Björn tries to impress Taube’s Britt by getting a prize out of a vending machine on the street, a scene that Berggren developed, while the camera was turning, into a revealing comment on his character’s personality. On Elvira Madigan, Widerberg worked from a twenty-five-page script, without dialogue. He gave Berggren and Degermark their lines just a few minutes prior to shooting, so as to endow them with an immediacy that still seems fresh today.

Young or middle-aged, rich or poor, women in Widerberg’s world live in the shadow of a male-dominated society. Some, like Britt in The Baby Carriage, Hedvig in Elvira Madigan, and Anna in Ådalen 31, find their innocence exploited—though Britt rejects convention and does manage to take control of her life, with a newborn baby at her side. Widerberg’s depictions of the struggle to cope with abortion, pregnancy, and even desertion in these early works are a comment on both patriarchal and class structures in Swedish society. Other women characters, such as the mother in Raven’s End and Karin in Ådalen 31, have difficulty in escaping the relentless routine of working-class existence. As Anders, the son, says in Raven’s End, “If you shout loud enough, someone’s bound to hear you. But they won’t understand what you’re saying.” Like other romantic artists, Widerberg sometimes painted his women in tender, Pre-Raphaelite terms. The female personalities in later works, such as The Serpent’s Way and All Things Fair, are more nuanced and sturdier in their struggle against masculine domination.

The Baby Carriage

The main character of The Baby Carriage, Britt, is a heroine of the sixties, shorn of the puritanism and superstition that generally characterized Swedish cinema up to that point. She finds herself with two boyfriends. Robban (Lars Passgård) is a pop-music bandleader who has no compunction about sleeping with Britt and is at a loss when she becomes pregnant. Björn is shy, kindly, and inhibited. Not since Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953) had a Swedish film addressed so well the pace and strain of contemporary life. As Björn reflects, “Sweden is like a fur hat with moths in it.” Cheeky-looking yet phlegmatic and swept by melancholy, Björn hovers just beyond Britt’s grasp, and in the end she must opt for Robban and his clumsy sympathy.

Widerberg’s men and women find themselves continually faced with a moral choice, but their morals are not necessarily those of conventional society. They are more fundamental, arising from the pressures of proletarian life. Björn’s mother, for example, embraces another man in the sight of her son, but her infidelity seems at odds with her routine of returning each day from work, donning her housecoat, and beginning the round of chores—with a resignation that Widerberg clearly abhors. Britt manages to rise above this subservience to social convention, despite the risks that her courage entails and despite an abiding need to interact with her community. Widerberg may at heart have been an individualist, but he recognizes the need to live and function within some kind of fellowship. He once confessed that “morals are highly important to me. In my novels, I was a terrible moralist, and even if I no longer want to judge, I’m still worried by sharp and unexpected differences of opinion.”

The prewar period could not be better described. One believes immediately in the despondency that hangs over the community. The tenements stand in an austere circle round a patch of bare ground. Anders, his father, and squabbling neighborhood kids regularly appear in long shot like prisoners at exercise. A propaganda broadcast from Nazi Germany booms stridently over the radio as Anders walks home in the opening sequence. A reference to “the war in Spain” prompts a neighbor to ask only if the Christmas supply of oranges will be affected. Wintry games of soccer in the fields and visits to the amusement park break the monotony of working life.

Despite Berggren’s charisma and Hjelm’s drunken yet sympathetic bluster, Storm’s up-close-and-personal portrayal of the mother has a rich, rounded quality that steals the film. Fearful of growing old, still haunted by the memory of an abortion had because she and her husband could not afford a child, she remembers the Great Strike of 1909. “They held out for quite some time,” says her neighbor. “Thanks to their women,” retorts Storm’s character.

Elvira Madigan

After the triumph of Elvira Madigan at Cannes in 1967—where Pia Degermark won Best Actress—Widerberg was all at once the flavor of the month in Sweden as well as in art houses around the world. The film is based on the real-life nineteenth-century story of Sixten Sparre and Hedvig Jensen, which had passed into legend in Denmark. She, a circus tightrope artist performing under the name Elvira Madigan, had met the Swedish nobleman Count Sparre while on tour. According to the lore, they succumbed to a coup de foudre, but their affair proved stillborn, for Sixten was married and the gulf between their social classes unbridgeable. They committed suicide together on the Danish island of Tåsinge. Like the doomed lovers in Japanese Bunraku, Hedvig and Sixten make this decision when they realize that their feelings, and the life they want to experience, are irrevocably at odds with social convention.

A fascination with the discord between pastoral bliss and emotional anguish is something that Widerberg shared with Truffaut, Jacques Demy, and Agnès Varda (notably in her Le bonheur). Throughout his career, Widerberg sought beauty in both urban and rural settings, and beauty was indeed the criterion by which he judged life. He finds many metaphors in the natural world in Elvira Madigan, such as the raspberries and cream that signal an intensity of delight, and the gurgle of spilled wine that prefigures the final loss of blood and vitality. Sixten (Berggren) cannot see beyond the blade of grass directly before his eyes. But, he tells a friend, “I believe one blade of grass can be the entire world. And the world is nothing without grass.”

In the United States alone, Elvira Madigan earned nearly ten million dollars. It opened there only two months after Bonnie and Clyde, and the individualism of Sixten and Hedvig, and the determinism of the film, was also in sync with the mood of 1967. The romantic, utopian aura of the film barely disguises the story’s relevance to sixties mores. “Perhaps the time will come when one can choose more than a single life,” says Sixten, whose desertion from the army seems in sympathy with opponents of the Vietnam War. Hedvig expresses her thoughts shyly but with more lucidity. “War is not fancy parades,” she tells Sixten. “It’s the smell of burnt flesh.” And then later, to a friend, “There are times when you don’t question the cost.” Toward the end, she exclaims, “Don’t talk to me about love, Sixten. Can we butter our bread with it?”

Elvira Madigan marked a significant advance in Widerberg’s mastery of his medium. He revels in the love affair’s sensuality, and Jörgen Persson’s cinematography catches the breath with its gorgeous, shimmering palette derived from the Swedish summer. The use of natural light and handheld cameras accentuates the lyricism, and also the naturalism, of Hedvig and Sixten’s doomed affair. Widerberg adored Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s paintings and would pay homage to him in both Elvira Madigan and Ådalen 31. The director draws attention to the qualities of bread, cheese, wine, grass, and Hedvig’s skin and dresses. The soundtrack is a wondrous meld of pastoral sounds, such as the buzzing of bees and the soughing of wind in the trees, and Widerberg’s use of the Andante from Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21 in C Major matches the dreamlike melancholy of the tale.

He denies Sixten and Hedvig the romantic flourish of the suicide they were intending. The bleak struggle for subsistence has flawed their passion with bitterness. During their planned final picnic, Sixten cannot shoot her in cold blood; he must wait until Hedvig, chasing a butterfly through the long grass, smiles with joy as she did during their first careless days of rapture. As Sixten fires his pistol, Widerberg freezes the image, with Hedvig’s hands releasing the butterfly, and proves himself, not for the first or last time, an authentic screen poet.

Ådalen 31

Shot during the summer of 1968, Ådalen 31 marked an aesthetic advance in Widerberg’s career. He opted for Techniscope, the widescreen process developed by Technicolor in Italy, to film this depiction of a tragic historical event, affording himself more screen space in which to present a glorious early Swedish summer, bitterly contrasted with the riots and strikes that occurred in the Norrland region in 1931 and the bloodshed that ensued when soldiers opened fire on a cortege of striking sawmill workers, resulting in five deaths and numerous injuries. Persson shot some sixty thousand meters of film stock with the three Arriflex cameras at his disposal, of which just 5 percent was used for the completed feature. As he had on Elvira Madigan, Widerberg himself edited the material, an additional task he came to relish more and more.

Ådalen 31 echoed the mood prevailing in Europe and the U.S. in the turbulent spring and summer of 1968, even if Widerberg’s lyrical depiction of rural villages like Marma and Sandviken in the thirties seemed on the surface far removed from the upheavals in Paris and Prague. But 1931 proved a watershed year in Swedish life and politics as well. The indiscriminate massacre described in the film was just one of many reasons why, in the elections of the following year, the Social Democrats came to power. Unemployment had risen dramatically during 1931, and the collapse of Ivar Kreuger’s match empire in early 1932 triggered a wave of protests throughout Sweden.