Chief among the promises of the golden age of DVD– beyond the enhanced picture quality and the ability to contain an entire season of Family Guy inside a single volume– was the concept of “film school in a box.” The additional space afforded by the format, as well as the possibility of multiple programs within a single disc, allowed distributors to include not just a feature film, but also enough commentaries, deleted scenes, and other special features to turn a casual viewer into a de facto expert. Unsurprisingly, the chief innovator in this realm was the Criterion Collection, the home video branch of legendary arthouse distributors Janus Films, who presented each of their offerings as a tastefully curated “course.” Save up for Criterions, and any teenage movie dork– your narrator included– could burnish their bonafides as a true-blue cineaste.
Times have changed, of course. DVDs gave way to blu-ray, which begat streaming, which slouched toward watching context-free clips on Tiktok or whatever. But even as they themselves have branched into streaming with the truly excellent Criterion Channel, the Criterion Collection continues to fight the good fight, releasing exhaustive “lessons” on cinematic subjects to surprise even the most seen-it-all denizen of the arthouse. It’s been more than 20 years since I picked up my first Criterion disc (during which time I’ve attended actual film school), yet their releases continue to take me by surprise.
Such is the case with Criterion’s excellent new box set Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema. I’ll admit that I had never heard of Widerberg prior to this set’s release, and was only passingly familiar with his most famous work, the 1967 arthouse sensation Elvira Madigan. Now, having delved headlong through the set’s contents, I feel like I’ve taken a crash course in Widerberg 101– and have come to understand and appreciate the director’s case in the world cinema canon.
Like many of his counterparts in the French New Wave, Widerberg began his career not as a filmmaker, but as a firebrand film critic. He burst onto the scene with the 1962 manifesto Vision in Swedish Film (initially serialized in a string of articles for the tabloid Expressen) which excoriated the current state of his home country’s cinema: vapid technicolor farces on one end of the spectrum and, on the other, the stoic and distant films of Ingmar Bergman (of Bergman Widerberg wrote, “One waits with mounting impatience for this brilliant technician and director of actors to move on, to weary of his role as our painted Dala horse to the world”; it has been suspected that Bergman’s own foray into the new wave, the 1966 masterpiece Persona, was made at least in part as a response to Widerberg’s critiques). Widerberg believed in film as a means of conveying social truths and capturing spontaneous beauty outside the stodgy confines of a soundstage. He took inspiration from the Nouvelle Vague (particularly Truffaut, with whom he shared occasional correspondence), as well as the kitchen sink dramas of the UK and the American experiments of John Cassavetes, but his films take on their own, decidedly wily character.
The set begins, naturally, with Widerberg’s first feature, 1963’s The Baby Carriage, a slice of life about a young factory worker (Inger Taube) saddled with an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy and faced with the not-great choice between the baby’s father, an itinerant rock-and-roller (Lars Passgård), and a free-spirited drifter who captures her imagination (go-to Widerberg leading man Tommy Berggren). Understandably at this stage in his career, Widerberg wears his influences on his sleeve– Godardian jump-cuts, Truffauvian freeze-frames, Cassavetic improv– but it is a sterling example of the new wave sweeping the globe in the early 1960s, with an infectiously jazzy score from Jan Johansson and crisp black and white cinematography by Jan Troell (who would go on to direct such landmark films of his own as The Emigrants and The New Land). Already, Widerberg’s defiantly working-class ethos shines through. Unlike in a traditional melodrama, Britt’s plight is shown as far less shameful than the society that marginalizes her or the men who treat her like dirt. Her ultimate triumph– bittersweet triumph, but triumph nonetheless– is truly radical; it would take decades for American film to catch up.
Raven’s End, also from 1963, finds Widerberg going full-bore into kitchen sink territory. Set in 1936, the film finds Berggren at center stage as Anders, an aspiring novelist struggling to make it out of his dirt-poor community, at odds with his alcoholic father (Keve Hjelm) and exhausted mother (Emy Storm). As in life, the film’s story is more episodic than linear, with more setbacks than victories, portraying a warts-and-all look at the hardscrabble existence on the bottom rungs of society. Here, Widerberg’s left-leaning politics are even more unmistakable; throughout the film characters idly listen to the 1936 Berlin Olympics and Hitler speeches over the radio, and the emotional climax comes as Anders begs his mother to take time off of work so she can vote to keep the Nazis out of power in Sweden. Widerberg recognizes that the struggles of the working class are not confined to the Raven’s Ends of the world; their concerns are those of the world.
Widerberg’s “hit,” as it were, is 1967’s Elvira Madigan, which won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for the luminous performance by first-timer Pia Degermark. The film is based on the famous real-life tragedy of a pair of star-crossed lovers– a wayward tightrope walker (Degermark) and an AWOL soldier (Berggren)– on the run through the wilds of Denmark. But the story here is less important than the mood of the piece, of the doomed romanticism of these beautiful young lovers (Widerberg’s screenplay reportedly spanned all of 25 pages and contained no dialogue). The villain is once again society itself, here painted more obliquely as an all-consuming force of hopelessness. But Widerberg’s real ace in the hole here is the gorgeous, sun-dappled cinematography of Jörgen Persson. Far from the austere black and white which characterized “serious” filmmaking at the time, Persson’s lush colors and soft-focus photography at once recall the paintings of the great impressionists and anticipate such swoony landmarks as Badlands and Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s easy to see how Madigan captured the imaginations of the young romantics of the ‘60s, and I would not be at all surprised to see it rediscovered by the “vibes cinema” crowd.
The set rounds out with 1969’s Ådalen 31, and while Widerberg would continue making films into the ‘90s, it’s hard not to view it in this context as a culmination. All of the threads from the set’s previous three films– the working-class humanism, the anti-establishment politics, young love in the face of harsh reality– combine to tell another true story, this time of a 1931 workers’ strike which gave way to a massacre at the hands of the military. Ådalen is a furious (and, it must be said, grimly timely) film, contrasting the hardscrabble vitality of Sweden’s poor with the smart-suited plutocrats who dispassionately agree to raise their rent. It is an excellent and rousing slice of cinematic agitprop, and it rings just as true today as in 1969 (or, I suppose, in 1931).
Of the special features (which are, of course, generous), the most substantial is The Boy and the Kite, a 1962 short film Widerberg co-directed for Swedish television with Jan Troell (who provides a brief introduction), which feels like a concise, if a bit rough-edged, pilot for Widerberg’s films to come. Disc one includes an extended interview with perhaps Sweden’s most successful contemporary filmmaker, Ruben Östlund (which, despite being billed as an “introduction” to Widerberg, primarily concerns Östlund’s own connections with the director), and subsequent discs include newly shot conversations with Berggren and Persson. Widerberg himself died in 1997, but he is represented by a number of archival interviews. These clips, though brief, are both informative and decidedly unique: one finds him struggling to contain his three-year-old daughter on his lap while answering questions; another pits him against a roundtable of children asking him questions about Elvira Madigan (amusingly, they seem mostly interested in the scene in which Degermark vomits on camera); and a televised press conference for Ådalen sees him fielding questions alongside survivors of the actual Ådalen massacre. The set is rounded out with a few minutes of behind-the-scenes footage from Madigan and a booklet featuring lengthy liner notes from film historian Peter Cowie and some excerpts from Vision in Swedish Film.
It’s tough to know what else might have gone into this set, though I do find myself curious at the absence of Love 65 (1965), which is mentioned a few times in the interviews and would seem to bridge the gaps between the 1963 selections and 1967’s Elvira Madigan. Still, I approached the set with the goal of educating myself on a new-to-me subject, and to that end the set can only be considered a resounding success. Bo Widerberg, I now realize, was just as pivotal as his better-remembered contemporaries from the various global new waves, and his work holds up just as well– perhaps even better, as they have not been nearly as exhausted by decades of analysis and curricula. His relative lack of modern recognition likely boils down to lack of stateside availability as much as anything else, which Criterion, as they have done for so many filmmakers in the past, has now rectified. It is comforting to know that, even after all these years, there are still fresh cinematic avenues to explore. Though the world has moved on to streaming, I remain happily enrolled in the Film School in a Box.
Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema is now available from the Criterion Collection
