COMPLEX STAGING: THE HIDDEN DIMENSIONS OF ROY ANDERSSON’S AESTHETICS (original) (raw)
Related papers
Roy Andersson's Tableau Aesthetic: A Cinematic Social Space Between Painting and Theatre
https://doi.org/10.1515/ausfm-2018-0004, 2018
The article examines three films by Roy Andersson, "Songs from the Second Floor" (Sånger från andra våningen, 2000), "You, the Living" (Du levande, 2007), and "A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence" (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron, 2014). The Swedish director depicts the human condition afflicted by the loss of its humanity through a personal style that he calls " the complex image, " a tableau aesthetic that instigates social criticism, and is dependent upon long shots, immobility, unchanging shot scale, and layered compositions. The author establishes a connection between artistic and social space and scrutinizes the challenges that this " complexity " poses for the film viewer from an intermedial perspective in which cinema enters into a dialogue with two other art forms: painting and theatre. Four specific issues are discussed: (1) the intertwining of reality and artificiality as a " hyperreality; " (2) the visual compositions which are simultaneously self-contained and entirely open, highlighting a tension between volume and surface; (3) the opposition between stasis and movement, conveying a meaningful social contrast and the characters' angst; (4) the pictoriality of the image. 1
2021
This short piece analyses Pedro Afonso's video essay on Roy Andersson's Complex Image, an aesthetic style based on the tableau shot. It proceeds by scrutinizing the relationship Andersson's aesthetic maintains with painting, slow cinema and political ideology, three aspects connected with realism, one way or the other. By focusing on the operative word "complex", instead of "image", this text claims that the Complex Image is not strictly pictorial; that long shots do not necessarily equate with slow cinema; and that there is a strong political engagement alongside an undeniably creative form.
The paper proposes to focus on the multiple affordances and intermedial aesthetic of the cinematic tableau seen as a performative space resulting in the impression of watching a painting, a theatre stage, a shop window, a diorama, or a photo-filmic installation in which the play between stillness and motion is accompanied by a reflexive emphasis on media and the senses. Such images, described extensively by David Bordwell in his writings on the evolution of film style, are being re-evaluated through debates on the “tableau form,” “absorption and theatricality” in modern art and photography (e.g. Jean-François Chevrier, Michael Fried). In particular, the aim of this paper is to examine inflections of the cinematic tableau in the films of three contemporary European authors, Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania), Roy Andersson (Sweden) and Joanna Hogg (UK), and relate them to the paradigm of the Dutch interior established in seventeenth-century painting. Keywords: intermedial aesthetic of the tableau shot, Dutch interior in cinema, Corneliu Porumboiu, Roy Andersson, Joanna Hogg.
2016
Roy Andersson’s unique surrealist style and the affect it gives rise to, situated somewhere between deep existential dread and the most absurdist humor, are intimately connected to his staging of action in stacked layers of meaning in deep focus, immobile long takes. A formal reading of his films then gives us a greater understanding of the connection between affect and film style.But the tableau which all but evacuates time in Andersson is not only a stylistic choice: this challenge to traditional structures and temporalities is the formal manifestation of his anachronistic conception of history. I argue that cinematic time is here closely tied to historical time: a view of history as layered, instantaneous and made up of incongruous juxtapositions as commentary on a failure of historicism as central to the development of a national Swedish identity marked by passivity, anti-intellectualism, and a lack of historical conscience. INDEX WORDS: Affect, Postmodernism, Sweden, Performanc...
Roy Andersson's Living Trilogy and Jean-Luc Nancy's Evidence of Cinema
Film-Philosophy, 2019
In this article, I explore three films that comprise Swedish director Roy Andersson's "Living Trilogy"-Songs from the Second Floor (2000); You, the Living (2007); and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). My aim is to push the philosophical bearing of Andersson's films towards Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy of art and cinema. How should we understand his cinematic way of looking, intermedial images, and production of sense? First, I trace Andersson's concept of the "complex image" and aesthetic of "trivialism." Second, I outline Nancy's approach to "presentation" and the "evidence of film." Third, I describe Andersson's "axiomatics" of looking and collection of characters. Finally, I consider the ways this co-existential trilogy suggests a realization of a Nancian ontology of being-with and exposure to the sense of a world. I contend that Andersson's style is a praxis and a regard for this world. What his fragmentary films communicate to us can be illuminated by Nancy's idea that some cinema makes evident a sense of the world.
The language of the complex image: Roy Andersson's political aesthetics
Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 2010
Departing from the opening scene of Roy Anderssons’s 1991 short Härlig är jorden/World of Glory, the article gives an overview of the director’s political aesthetics outlined in his book Vår tids rädsla för allvar (‘Our Time’s Fear of Seriousness’, 1995/2009). Through the use of static long shots, stylization and the condensation of time and space Andersson attempts to activate reflection upon existential questions such as solidarity, mutual support and the individual’s responsibility. In this scene from World of Glory Andersson links these ideas with a critique on Swedish passivity during the Holocaust.
Je suis photographe: figures of cinematic narrators
The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, 2017
The Sensible Stage is a collection of essays exploring the use of live performance and moving image in contemporary art practice. It engages with a global phenomenon in which elements from theatre and cinema are integrated into art as forms of archive, questioning the concept of materiality and undermining the boundaries between what we understand as 'live' or 'mediated', the 'body' or the 'image'. Opening with a discussion between prominent philosopher Alain Badiou and Elle During, this book is grounded in the practice it analyses, bringing together a unique mixture of theoretical, creative and discursive reflections on the meeting of stage and screen.
The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, introduction to first edition (2012)
The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image provides a series of individual proposals and speculations on the intersections of what might be termed ‘live-ness’ in moving image and performance art practices today. Unfolding around the concept of ‘staging’, The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image discusses the use of performance and theatre strategies in contemporary art as a means to question the boundaries of stage and screen. Published by Picture This with Bridget Crone / Plenty Projects, The Sensible Stage: Staging the Moving Image contains a mixture of discursive, theoretical and creative texts, including monographs on the work of Yael Davids, Clare Gasson, Jimmy Robert, and Cara Tolmie, and a new text-piece by Beatrice Gibson. The book also contains new essays by Vanessa Desclaux, Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Dominic Andrew Paterson, Lucy Reynolds, and Ian White plus a conversation between Alain Badiou and Elie During on theatre.* 168pp., soft cover with full-colour images. Published by Picture This with Bridget Crone / Plenty Projects. 2012. Distributed by Cornerhouse Books. £12.99 * Badiou & During reprinted with kind permission from Theatre Without Theatre, 2007 (Barcelona: MACBA)