Film Adalen 31

CINEMATIC RADICALISM offers such endless varieties of possible forms that it will always resist the elevation of a single possibility- "militant cinema." for example- to the status of dogma. What matters most is not the particular form, but the necessity of creating the awareness of form, and, from there, of pointing out the limitations of content, and, finally, of generating criticism. Film remains film (not dogma: truth and lies 24 times a second), and the experience of film becomes process rather than product. The forms for accomplishing this alienation from the sacred reality of art cannot be prescribed: if sacred ones can be exploited, so much the better. . . I am simply leading up in all of this to the spectacle of Bo Widerberg, whose ultimately romantic style descends directly from the painting of Pierre Auguste Renoir, ruling-class lackey and who exists as a radical filmmaker, quite apart from Jean-Lue Godard.

Adalen 31 combines dazzling Impressionist pastels with political analysis, setting up a disconcerting tension between superficial stylistic beauty and the undeniable gory reality of a massacre. Widerberg tells the story of a working class family engaged in the historic strike at Adalen, in the north of Sweden, where in 1931 troops fired on a peaceful demonstration and the deaths of five people precipitated a general strike that brought to power the Social Democrats, who have controlled the country ever since. The bloodshed dramatized conditions of inequality that already existed, but were obscured before and after by the sweet, hypnotic surfaces of everyday life.

Americans must surely have the wrong ideas about Widerberg. Elvira Madigan has been the only one of his six features to receive wide distribution here, and its popularity was for all the wrong, reactionary reasons. (Fragile and Iyrical," the critics said.) The film's nihilistic undercurrents are easy (and desirable) to repress, and all the rest is saccharine and tragic, incredibly cathartic, and sets up pure escapism as an ideal. Widerberg, however, in fact emerged in Sweden of the early '60's as a leader of young directors agitating against escapist cinema, for much needed social analysis, and was one of the first to attack the metaphysical hokeyness of Ingmar Bergman. He criticized Bergman's social aloofness and practice of "vertical cinema." in which the select existential few grapple with the narrow prospects of exhalation or degradation. Widerberg sets up an impressionist. ethereal lightness as the direct antithesis to symbolic heaviness and stark religiosity. Bergman's artificial lighting comes almost invariably form on high to dramatize each Meaningful Truth (or Mystery) revealed by a superior Creator, and, for all the virtues of this kind of film (and there are, I suppose a few), it "expresses an "apolitical." i.c. elitist sensibility. Renoir-like democratic luminosity contrasts quite strongly, conveying a more horizontal conception of relationships between men, and whereas Widerberg realizes that this impressionism is just as mythical, he chooses to work on it and expose it. because, far more than Bergman's this style applies to the currently accepted myths of equality in Swedish society.

ADALEN 31 becomes a commentary on the class nature of its own images, on the political repression of signs and symbols with vertical, class implications for the benefit of pure representation, appropriation, fetishism of objects. Kjell learns about the pleasures of pure aesthetics from the liberal, cultured wife of the factory owner. The joyous pronunciation of "Pierre Auguste Renoir" becomes a sign for irresponsible privilege and political obliviousness in a sequence intercut with familiar images of Kjell's mother doing washing for the rich. Widerbeg demonstrates the duplicity of his own horizontal aestheticism in a context of social inequalities a hierarchy of wealth and power. The opening shots of the film reveal the beauty of life rooted in material realities, ironing, shaving, dressing, playing, the aesthetics of routine. A working-class family preparing for the day. Until certain tensions begin to appear in faces, the intrusion of a political reality: they are on strike. The spectre of vertical economic structures lurks beneath the beautiful surfaces of every frame. Widerberg leaves nothing in the film unchallenged, nothing existing in and of itself.

Levi-Strauss makes a connection between the increasingly representational tendencies in Western art (culminating with the Impressionists' pseudoscience of "capturing" light) and the elite system of distribution, the "individualization" of culture consumption. (The "art lover" syndrome is unique to modern societies.) Primitive art, by contrast, is for everybody and performs a social function, possesses a sign-value. Language is by nature a group phenomenon, an device versa. It follows that, in the chance of historical signification's surrounding the events at Adalen in 1931, without a clear definition of group relations, social depth-perception, class-consciousness, etc., you are going to run into problems of language. And from problems of language to problems of political clarity.

Widerberg maintains a constant ambiguity between surface and sign, opposing the artificiality of political rhetoric to the down-to-earthiness of human detail. The organic symbol of blood seeping into a white shroud mocks the high drama of red banners at the same time it confirms their political justification, as it pierces the pastels. And still its truth is only transitory: waving the bloody shirt gets Sweden into the mess of Social Democracy. "Equality has not been achieved," Widerberg comments in the final credits, and open end to a negative political critique.

Adalen 31 leaves a question: how to deal with the linear and vertical drama of history when men are so ultimately diffused, like the light in a Renoir, in sensibility and vocabulary, in pure material, in space and time. Nobody has any conception of what's happening during the massacre sequence, product of missed messages, delayed comprehensions. "The bastards are using real bullets," someone shouts, but the band keeps playing, the people keep marching, and afterwards everyone is sorry. With their anti-climatic attempts to assimilate still going on, the general strike is declared in far away Stockholm, and a mistaken historical clarity begins shaping the future.

WIDERBERG leaves us with Kjell's resolve, "We must acquire knowledge. To get power we must have knowledge." We are given no false solutions, no catharsis, but are left to sort out the contradictions, surfaces and symbols of everyday, material life, truth and lies. Twenty-four times a second, a million times a day: truth and lies. The cinema must help us.