Word: widerberg
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...experience of film becomes process rather than product. The forms for accomplishing this alienation from the sacred reality of art cannot be prescribed: if sacred ones can be exploited, so much the better. . . I am simply leading up in all of this to the spectacle of Bo Widerberg, whose ultimately romantic style descends directly from the painting of Pierre Auguste Renoir, ruling-class lackey and who exists as a radical filmmaker, quite apart from Jean-Lue Godard...
...Adalen 31 combines dazzling Impressionist pastels with political analysis, setting up a disconcerting tension between superficial stylistic beauty and the undeniable gory reality of a massacre. Widerberg tells the story of a working class family engaged in the historic strike at Adalen, in the north of Sweden, where in 1931 troops fired on a peaceful demonstration and the deaths of five people precipitated a general strike that brought to power the Social Democrats, who have controlled the country ever since. The bloodshed dramatized conditions of inequality that already existed, but were obscured before and after by the sweet, hypnotic surfaces...
Americans must surely have the wrong ideas about Widerberg. Elvira Madigan has been the only one of his six features to receive wide distribution here, and its popularity was for all the wrong, reactionary reasons. (Fragile and Iyrical," the critics said.) The film's nihilistic undercurrents are easy (and desirable) to repress, and all the rest is saccharine and tragic, incredibly cathartic, and sets up pure escapism as an ideal. Widerberg, however, in fact emerged in Sweden of the early '60's as a leader of young directors agitating against escapist cinema, for much needed social analysis...
ADALEN '31. Director Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) paints a poignant portrait of people caught in the flux of history and conveys the ineffable quality of a single decisive moment in a man's life...
ADALEN '31. Director Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) paints a poignant portrait of people caught in the flux of history and conveys the ineffable quality of a single decisive moment in a man's life...