(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
"It is human to scream," says Norwegian visual artist Arne Bendik Sjur, but it "is not something we do in our society". We are at the start of Anja Breiens My siblings, good day: a movie about Arne Bendik Sjur's graphics (1974). An important issue for this artist is what he calls man's "schizophrenic situation": a gap between the feelings man wants to show and the feelings society allows him to show. The up-and-coming, rational man should not scream. "When you are greedy, you can scream… because then… it is because you are greedy."
Sjur talks about himself in the third person when he comments on his self-portraits – while Breien fills the screen with the artist's charcoal drawings that stare at us with fear and something waiting in his eyes. Sjur reveals that he not only feels a sense of alienation from society, but also towards himself: «What you see here in these pictures now, this alienation… How he is constantly trying to get hold of himself; he looks at himself, but then suddenly he experiences that he is unable to grasp the experience that he is – that he is so eat people. "
Anja Breien's films have often had a similarly self-reflexive and socially critical attitude – a critical look at liberty-depriving social systems, and a subjectivity that tries to "get hold of itself". Breien may have a "controlled temperament" to lend a description of film historian Gunnar Iversen, but there is always something that burner in her movies. Is it perhaps a demand for more freedom, more elbow room? As in the movie most often associated with her name, Hustruer, where in a cafe scene she seems to reflect on Albert Camus's depiction of modern, bourgeois routine, which has made everything a pattern: “Get up, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram. Four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday in the same rhythm. ”
They neglected. At Breien, this existentialist critique of limiting societal norms goes hand in hand with a social commitment about those who are overridden by society. In movies like Walls around the prison (1972) The innkeepers (1973) and Old (1975) she portrays the unworthy of human life situations – how society carves out the freedom of people it no longer needs. Breiere's closeness to and respect for those she speaks to allows her interview subjects to emerge with an integrity and humanity that "speaks" across the decades.
What makes Breien's "historical work" still feel so alive and relevant? Yes, a mixture of her playful, self-reflexive and active subjectivity, and the fact that social conditions have not changed much. As Breien wrote to me here during the day, the hostelist's situation is reminiscent of today's drug addicts. And does not recall the retirement of pensioners in Old about today's situation for the elderly? A more time-independent problem that remains in the films is the aforementioned gap or "tension" between human desires and the norms of society – between human freedom and forms of coercion. The word "claim", which I used earlier, really feels too heavy in a description of Breien's films. They often have a lightness and agility in them – a humorous and playful sense that gives the films an elastic and open form. This seems to be a hallmark both within individual films and through filmography as a whole. As in Solvor (1998), in which Breien examines his own past and the still and revealing function of the still image. At the end she is far from finished; it is as if the film was just a small start, a small draft of a critical-lyrical examination of a reality that remains ambiguous. Or take May 17 – a movie about rituals (1969), where she looks at National Day with an ironic-critical look. IN Hustruer one has the familiar ending, where the words "We can't stop now!" becomes an urgent request for audience participation and further thinking outside the cinema.
"When you are greedy, you can scream… because then… it is because you are greedy."
The poetics of Breiens films relate to an idea the film critic Amédée Ayfre talks about in connection with Vittorio De Sicas Umberto D. (1952): After watching the movie, we have to let the images continue to "work" in us – they have to interfere with how we focus on it outside the hall.
Breier's films don't feel like it requirement about more freedom, but like unconfirmed drafts where something is at stake. It's like the works stands glowing, characterized by something unmasked and a thorough and seeking devotion to other people and realities. The power-critical sting of the films often has the solidarity of friendship, which is reflected in a committed collaboration with other artists and a dialogue with other expressions – such as in faces (1971), which is based on a poem by Poul Borum and is a montage of Edvard Munch's portrait paintings, edited by Jan Garbarek.
In this open approach to works, the world and artistic collaboration, Breiens films have something in common with a filmmaker like Chris Marker – who also blended personal and political, a diverse-poetic and critical-intellectual approach to the world that often found its form in it. unfinished story – a form that always hints at a greater reality.
Kristian Skylstad wrote an excellent text about Marker in October. He talked about "the slightly cool distance in his hot pictures" in "a film reality that has been constantly in conflict with itself in terms of how to produce something that has effect, but which at the same time makes people think". The same seems to be the case in Breien's filmmaking, and can be related to something Ingrid Synneva Holtar writes in her master's thesis on Hustruer: The film "is not about breaking free," she writes, "but about the constant attempt to break free." The story is "a process that must continue, rather than an attempt to reach an ideal and final state."
It's just here, in it unfinished the wonder and problematization of her contemporary, that Breien's films have their continued power. As long as there is "a gap between the feelings that man wants to show and the feelings society allows to show", as Bendik Sjur put it, there is a strong vitality in Breien's films – which is just a troubled representation of this gap .
Eidsaa Larsen is a film critic in Ny Tid.
endreeid@gmail.com
