Read More: The Funniest Movie of the Year is Also Painfully Tragic Roy Andersson's "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence," which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last fall, concludes the Swedish director's "Living Trilogy" of movies, all of which are as hilarious as they are melancholic. Andersson's collage-like portraits of surreal characters and bizarre scenarios, which begins with "Songs from the Second Floor" and continues in "You, the Living," marks one of the more prolonged comeback stories in recent cinema: After his breakout debut "A Swedish Love Story" in 1970, Andersson ran afoul with his sophomore effort "Giliap" and spent the next several decades mainly directing commercials. "Songs From the Second Floor" was his first bonafide feature-length narrative in 25 years. Now in his early seventies, Andersson recently came to New York for the U.S. opening of his new movie and sat...
- 6/4/2015
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Only a few living directors have achieved status in world cinema as Roy Andersson did. Calling him a cult director seems like a huge understatement, even though we are talking about a rather narrow body of work consisting of three features by the now 71-year-old Swedish master (Swedish Love Story and Giliap belonging amidst the "youthful" missteps before the director´s artistic rebirth). Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007) can simply be considered timeless, having their proper place not only in the Swedish cinematic trove for the easily identifiable and inimitable Andersson's singular poetics. His latest addition, under the ridiculous English title A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, doesn't differ from the fragmented narrative form he established in his prior...
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- 6/2/2015
- Screen Anarchy
Only a few living directors have achieved status in world cinema as Roy Andersson did. Calling him a cult director seems like a huge understatement, even though we are talking about a rather narrow body of work consisting of three features by the now 71-year-old Swedish master (Swedish Love Story and Giliap belonging amidst the "youthful" missteps before the director´s artistic rebirth). Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007) can simply be considered timeless, having their proper place not only in the Swedish cinematic trove for the easily identifiable and inimitable Andersson's singular poetics. His latest addition, under the ridiculous English title A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, doesn't differ from the fragmented narrative form he established in his prior...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...
- 1/28/2015
- Screen Anarchy
Robert here, with another installment in my series on directors who define our times. The difference between this series and the Directors of the Decade is subtle. Yet the change allows me to feature someone like this week’s Maestro, whose exposure may be too small to have impacted the decade, yet is one of the most imaginative directors currently working.
Maestro: Roy Andersson
Known For: Vignette filled films, examining the tragic-comedy that is life.
Influences: He claims Van Gogh more than anything. But there’s also some Fellini, Gilliam and Bergman (who Andersson believes to be overrated).
Masterpieces: Songs From the Second Floor
Disasters: his 2nd film Giliap was a commercial and critical disaster. But that was 35 years ago, not relevant to a series focused on the “modern”.
Better than you remember: Still, those who trashed that film were misguided.
Awards: Some awards here and there in Berlin and Cannes but never the Gold.
Maestro: Roy Andersson
Known For: Vignette filled films, examining the tragic-comedy that is life.
Influences: He claims Van Gogh more than anything. But there’s also some Fellini, Gilliam and Bergman (who Andersson believes to be overrated).
Masterpieces: Songs From the Second Floor
Disasters: his 2nd film Giliap was a commercial and critical disaster. But that was 35 years ago, not relevant to a series focused on the “modern”.
Better than you remember: Still, those who trashed that film were misguided.
Awards: Some awards here and there in Berlin and Cannes but never the Gold.
- 1/22/2010
- by Robert
- FilmExperience
Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson has a completely distinctive way of making movies -- which translates to, he's fortunate enough to have happened on a visual vocabulary that's at the same time unique and deadpan and invigorating. Famously, Andersson has made only four features in over 40 years; after the failure of his second, 1975's "Giliap," he "retired" and spent over two decades going gangbusters as a commercial director, and developed his distinctive style, a kind of full-frontal, cold-blooded Beckettian art-comedy. Only in 2000, with "Songs from the Second Floor," did Andersson decide the dry one-shot trope that was so funny in TV ads could work differently, mordantly, at length, and could build a feature.
Shot in wide angle from a personal-space-respecting distance in a fluorescent-lit world of moldy green pastels and ashen-faced zombie-humans acting out the absurd machinations of modern life, Andersson's mature films make his dyspeptic Scando-brother Aki Kaurismäki look like Baz Luhrmann by comparison.
Shot in wide angle from a personal-space-respecting distance in a fluorescent-lit world of moldy green pastels and ashen-faced zombie-humans acting out the absurd machinations of modern life, Andersson's mature films make his dyspeptic Scando-brother Aki Kaurismäki look like Baz Luhrmann by comparison.
- 1/12/2010
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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