With
Misfits to Yuppies, whichfollows
They Gall Us Misfits, 1968, and
ADecent Life, 1979, Stefan Jarl has completed a filmproject whose unique character is not confined merely to Swedish cinema.
By concentrating on a handful of young social outcastshe has explored the modern welfare state - this term that has become synonymouswith Sweden - in three films that comprise a time span of more than a quarterof a century. This trilogy provides, among many other things, an opportunity towitness the euphoric, disconcerting and terrifying experience of seeingthe development and human values of whole society reflected in the faces of thepeople in the films as they grow older. At first they are young and in the middleof an unarticulated and provocative rebellion against the adult world, and theypossess a charming innocent openness. Then their lives go on to become cloudedmore and more by desperation and death, until finally - in those cases wherethe participants are still alive - their physiognomies appear to belong toseverely ravaged 40-year-olds who have aged before their time.
Parallel with this, the films show the marginalizationand dec1ine of Stockholm, the main location for the rebellion of these youths andto Jarl- Sweden in microcosm - as the once idyllic inner city is transformedinto a desolate glass-and-concrete nightmare that is reminiscent of theinhumanity in Palle Nielsen's chilling visions of the modern metropolis.
Jarl's method is a variation on the documentary filmthat manipulates and stages reality so as to reach a more penetrating viewof the truth than passive observation of its "objective" surface canachieve. It could be described as a kind of artistic journalism, a creativeinterpretation that molds the images of reality into a testimony ofcriticism, which does not depart an iota from its essence but only makes thisclearer. The method gets its legitimacy from the important investigativedocumentary tradition, which is partly socioanthropological andsociological, that Jarl has thus placed himself in, along with such directorsas Dziga Vertov, Robert Flaherty, Arne Sucksdorff and Pierrault.
However, one may easily count the times when this methodhas produced the politically and socially revealing results of this remarkableand shocking trilogy, and it has also been shown to be an equally sharpscalpel-like instrument for criticism of the society.
– If you look back over the more than twenty-five years that thistrilogy encompasses, what were the greatest difficulties you encounteredin seeing the project through to the end?
"The heaviest and most painful burden has been to witness andexperience at close range the fate of the individuals in the films. From thevery beginning their lives became interwoven with my own life. All the phonecalls and distress calls that I got from them when they were in trouble! LikeBettan, in A
Decent Life: she suddenlyphones me from the street, sounding desperate, and says she has escaped from amethod on cure and is on heroin again, but now wants to get back 'on methadone,and what should she do to get into a new methadone treatment plan quick?
All the things you don't notice or know in a film: phonecalls that never last just two or three minutes - which are repeated four orfive times the same day and are all about the same thing. !it’s been reallytough having this kind of a group and their problems so close all these years:if they should die, or managed to survive; all their private hang-ups andaggressions. Compared to this, the actual shooting of the films was child'splay."
– Why did you adhere to the method that you used in filming thistrilogy? I suppose we can call it arranged documentary film?
"Absolutely, All three films were very highly 'arranged'. Thereason I chose this method is based primarily on my belief that the person whomakes the film is part of the reality that is filmed.
If you walk into a room you immediately become a personwho affects the atmosphere in the room. If you place the camera in a certainposition, you will get a different picture than if the camera position ischanged ever so slightly. In the latter case, the images reproduce immediately,in other words, another kind of reality than the first. You may as well beconsistent from the start then and say that if we’re going to make this film,we'll do it as buddies: all of you in front of the camera and me behind it. Andthis is my photographer and he's a buddy, too, and the finished film willbe the result of what occurs psychologically and socially etc. during a certaintime, between those in front of the camera and us be hind it.
My goal is to find the truth, not a priori to depictreality. The aim is to try to make as true a film as possible, which has nothingat all to do with standing there and filming reality. Unfortunate1y, you mayhave to do some arranging to make the truth clearer. Whatever, as theshooting progressed I had to arrange more and more things during the making ofthe trilogy. More was done and it became more intricate in the last film thanin the first. This method also means that you strike a blow againstso-called objective reporting. There is no such thing here as an allegedlydetached, neutral speaker or narrator, as in the television variant ofdocumentary film. Instead, there is a palpable 'I' who tells the story, it is'I' who comes in and says certain things. And as far as I know, only ArneSucksdorff has worked this way before."
– It could be said of the first two films of the trilogy thatstructurally and dramatically they played into your hands, as it were, morethan the last one. In
They Call Us Misfits thereis a scene where two people make love that forms a small field of tension thatinevitably led to a censorship debate, but also to heightened advance interestin the film, and
A Decent Life is given aparticularly powerful thematic and emotional structure through Stoffe's lasthours and death, which coincides with the film's apocalyptic atmosphere andgives it a 'face'. In the final film you had hardly any similar givenopportunities.
"None at all in fact. The important thing here was to try tomake the de-dramatized daily life visible and interesting. And at the same timemake it deal' to the audience that there were different sides to these peopleand different ways of looking at them. It was hard to find a form for thisfilm. From the very beginning it was obvious that
I, just as you say, wouldn't get anything free. There was no materialaround with which you could create a sensation. The sensational thing about itwas simply that the project could be completed and that the kids survive:against all odds and totally counter to the theory of the socialheritage."
– At the end of your new film Kenta behaves almost like a romanticizedhero. He goes his own way through the alienated crowd into a city under thesame cold commercial lights as in
A Decent Life, and with sharper social contrasts and more notable class differencesthan in any other filmatic depiction of Sweden ever. He still has a rebelliousaura about him and he retains his tramp's integrity. Furthermore, there is agreat deal more warmth from your side than you show the younger generation wehave seen, aside from Jajje's daughter Carina.
"Yes, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for the kind ofyoung men these guys have managed to become, relatively financially successful,against all social odds. Let me put it this way: if anyone had asked me to makea film about these kids without me knowing who their parents were, then Iwouldn't have done it. I find them interesting just be cause they are thechildren of these parents. Of course wanted Kenta to appear as sympathetic aspossible. Even though he has hardly any teeth left in his mouth, what comes outof it should anyway be rather sympathetic."
– As a spectator one feels more than a little ambivalent towards hisson Patric. He seems remarkably well-adjusted to the extreme market-orientedand egotistical Swedish society.
"One should have mixed feelings about Patric. For one of thequestions I wanted the films to pose just blurted out-is this: why do we seeKenta and Jajje, these representatives of the 'mods' (misfits) generation, asless sympathetic individuals than those who survive as good consumers?I am an old Hegelian. The first film was a thesis, whichI call the rebellion; the second was the antithesis, or the strangling of therebellion through the use of narcotics; while the third, synthesis, is aboutsurvival in consumerism. To this extent the third segment of the trilogy is themost tragic. As a spectator you are partly prepared to accept consumerism,because thereby you avoid seeing people lying in the streets, but t, with onlyslight exaggeration, you don't really know then whether those who walk uprightare alive or dead.
by Jan Aghed
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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
