What do we actually mean by a "work"? A work is the long and laborious process whereby a view of life is hewn from the inert and diffuse material made available by one's "inner" and "outer" realities.
The common denominator in such a work, which is then referred to as the "style", is no less than a ceaseless, frenetic striving in a particular direction. The variations in this "style" are quite simply variations in the premises of the work, the resources, the equipment, one's personal state, the surroundings or influences from the" zeitgeist" and other historical circumstances.
Consistency in the work is crucial: however violent the changes in his life and working conditions may be, the artist remains miraculously recognizable in the manifestation of his work. For this to happen, his concept or vision must be clear to him or strongly intuitive, so that the subsequent struggle is to manifest the true spirit of his original inspiration.
As far as he is concerned, "success" is something which is measured not by money or public acclaim, but rather in terms how true the work is to his conception, how close he has come to his vision. Also, he basically despises the critics because they refuse to see beyond the manifestation of the work and perceive the vision which lies behind it.
If we make demands upon the work which are as high as those we make upon the artist (and the more superficial the age, the more important it is that we should do so), the significant works of art within any culture become few indeed, since most of them are not driven by any inner necessity, concept or vision, but are the result of expectations from without and a longing for popularity, money and renown. At the best they are a reflection of the age and therein lies their documentary value.
The situation is more critical in film than in other arts, quite simply becauseri1ore money is needed and it is therefore more vulnerable to the pressures of convention and indulgence. Joris Ivens has quite rightly pointed out that this is in direct propol1ion to the film's budget. The easier the financing, the freer the filmmaker. (This is why Ivens sought his independence in the documentary, with its relatively low costs. For more than fifty years he strove to impel his work ever closer to his concept, until they were miraculously united when he was over ninety years old in A Story of the Wind) .
But the documentary film is still one of art' s most expensive media. Ivens was spared the fiendish process which is currently unfolding, whereby the producers are gaining increasing control over the documentary film and thus engendering ever greater standardization by forcing it in the direction of the feature film' s production methods (while embellishing it with appellations such as "documentaire de creation" and the like).
The very concept of the documentary film implies a ferocious independence, which means that the most powerful of enemies, standardization, has always been marshalled against il. The standardization may be political, social, cultural or conventional, but as soon as a filmmaker capitulates to any one of these forces, his work dies.
As a result, the serious filmmaker is forever waging a war on two fronts: he is contending with his own ability and his inner demons in order to attain clarity of vision while simultaneously struggling day and night against economic and political forces in order that what he sees may become visible for others.
That is how brutal conditions are for the uncompromising documentary film. Few are those in any country's cinematic culture who are able to survive them. There are perhaps a handful in Sweden. One of them is Stefan Jarl.
When Stefan Jarl, together with Jan Lindqvist, interviewed rebellious and marginalized youth in S-Tänk he was 25 years old. In 1991 as he prepares to make a film about the children of The Misfits (who are now as old as their parents were when the first film was made), he is 50 years old. There are 17 productions along a straight line between these two points, whose variety of material and style merely strengthen the impression of a fierce consistency in his ideation.
This theme may be put into words, since "any real film can be summarized in a single sentence". Stefan Jarl's sequence is a question:
"Why does society disown its own children?"
In his generation it is a question asked by the youth revolution and the protest song. It is followed by a statement: "We have the key to another life and our vision is a threat to your petrification!"
Throughout the ages, from Gitta del Sole and Candide to Rabbit run and The Hawks and the Sparrows (Ucellaci, ucellini), this is the truly naive, utopian, cleareyed view of the possibilities offered by the world. Stefan Jarl's contemporary images are based on his knowledge of the history of revolt, from Campanella and Voltaire to Updike and Pasolini: the story of the eternal child and its holy wrath.
His statements are not without problems. He is forever roaming about the outer limits of the documentary. When he openly oversteps these boundaries, as he does in Good People (Goda människor), one can see how arbitrary they are. ("I make fiction" as Fred Wiseman always says when he applies his scissors to the 50 or 60 hours of genuine "Cinema direct" which is his raw material.)
It does happen that violent images such as the final sequence with the axe in A Respectable Life (Ett anständigt liv) and the scenes of destruction in The Threat (Hotet/Uhllidus) contradict the very vision of good people and their language. In the same way, his tendency to use the powerful devices of expressionism in Na(ure's Revenge (Naturens hämnd) or The Soul Is Greater than the World (Själen är större än världen) also seems to contradict his social aspirations (though no more so than Eisenstein or Grierson). One longs for the timely grin in They Call Vs Misfits (Dom kallar oss mods) or the crazy smile in the images from the asylum in Säter. But times have changed. The pressures are greater. Nobody nowadays would think of calling a film Transform Sweden (Förvandla Sverige)...
Suddenly the river becomes calm. The turbulent waters open into a broad, wide current. After 25 years, Stefan Jarl is ready to summarize his experiences of this other life in broad, timeless brush strokes. In Time Has No Name (Tiden har inget namn), the ancient open plains of a landscape whose inspiration is the Holland of van der Leyden or Vermeer nestles in the midst of his impetuous painting.
It is a wonderful film, the first one to which I surrendered unconditionally. Without any reservations I accept the old farmers' knowledge of time and space, work and rest. The pattern of their movements, their relationship to their aching bodies, the way they move along their familiar course with the assurance of the blind, their attunement to the passage of the seasons: all this is concrete and without nostalgia. "Hold up this farming mirror and see your own times" says the film: "Reflect."
This filmmaker of conurbations is in fact a son of the plains. The other facet of his work is naturally taken from the countryside of his childhood and from the nature films of Arne Sucksdorff, a man who is all too of ten forgotten, but who is still one of the three names in Swedish postwar cinema, along with Alf Sjöberg and Ingmar Bergman. His work was also governed by the same paradox: a furious defence of the quiet life. Sucksdorff' s pastoral was called The Wind and the River (Vinden och floden, 1951).
Stefan Jarl thus makes himself part of the Swedish cinematic mainstream: the soulful depiction of Nature. It is possibly still our only original contribution to the history of film as a whole, and of course it is found in Bergman from the black coastlines of The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) to the Lakeland flowers of Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället).
But once every decade Stefan Jarl checks any attempted escape from the times in which we live, by returning to the groups of young people on the fringes of the city whom we label as "mods" .or "punks" or "rappers" for the purposes of classification. It is in his suite They Call Us Misfits, A Respectable Life and The Social Inheritancetemporary title that he is radically different from his predecessors and breaks new ground for the Swedish Cinema. There his work becomes clear, consistent and perfectly contemporary.
CARL-HENRIK SVENSTEDTFilmmaker, writer, former director of the Swedish Cultural Centre in Paris
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Stefan Jarl, född 18 mars 1941, dokumentärfilmare och filmregissör. Stefan Jarl är känd för att göra filmer med ett socialt engagemang. Stefan Jarl
