The Signature Cinema of Roy Andersson

“A slapstick Ingmar Bergman” is how the Village Voice described Swedish director Roy Andersson, while the Washington Post name-dropped Jacques Tati, Monty Python, and even Andrei Tarkovsky to sum up an aesthetic that combines formal rigor with anticapitalist critiques, bizarre human caricatures, and sight gags. “Andersson has earned our lasting gratitude. Few living directors beget work that carries so clear and so immediate a signature” (Anthony Lane, New Yorker).

After graduating from the Swedish Film Institute in the late 1960s, Andersson debuted A Swedish Love Story, but he later abandoned its humanist, Czech New Wave–style approach for one of long takes, deep-focus imagery, and a fixation on the abnormal. Casts of Fellini-esque grotesques and visions of societal collapse—both absurdist and horrific—haunt our clean modern world in Andersson’s films, but an unshakable beauty arises from the intoxicating stillness from which these visions emerge. No camera movement, no cutting within scenes: Andersson works like a portrait artist more than a director. “Editing is banal,” he wrote. “You can look at a painting many times and remain fascinated. That seldom happens with the movies.” Seething with a tranquility as riveting as it is unsettling, Andersson’s “motion pictures” present still lifes of modern catastrophe. “Andersson continues to make films that desire to capture no less than a grand sense of human existence—and that somehow achieve it” (Alison Willmore, New York Magazine). —Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer

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