About Endlessness

1. Anecdotes

The other day, I don’t know if it was in Stockholm or London. Pouring rain. I saw a little girl, about seven years old, holding an umbrella. I couldn’t see her face. The umbrella was colorful and had little ears, maybe cat ears. Her father, a tall man, was bent low, tying her shoes, getting wetter and wetter as she stood there. That’s enough of a scene to be in a movie.¹

This anecdote from Roy Andersson in 2015 is the type of short story that has appeared as a self-contained scene in his most well-known films, Sånger från andra våningen (Songs from the Second Floor, 2000), Du levande (You, the Living, 2007) and En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, 2014), and it was later included as one among many memorable segments in his most recent feature Om det oändliga (About Endlessness, 2019). There is no plot to speak of in About Endlessness. Instead, we get fragments of life, windows into worlds and glimpses at people. As Megan Ratner noted about Andersson’s features in general: 

Incident, not plot, anchors the scenes […] Characters central to one scene may surface in the background of another, as multiple vignettes move toward an idea rather than a resolution. Compositionally, the scenes resemble figurative paintings. They distill action to its essence […] By isolating and exaggerating what viewers usually take for granted, Andersson sets a slightly offbeat pace that subverts the inevitability of conventional cinematic linearity. He designs scenes as if they were entire segments, closer to paintings than episodes.²

Andersson brings this painterly, unconventional cinematic approach to About Endlessness, as outlined by Mark Kermode: 

The deadpan tones of a Scheherazade-like narrator lead us through a string of vignettes, ranging without inflection from the mundane to the monumental. “I saw a woman who had problems with her shoe,” says our drily omniscient guide (Jessica Louthander), as we watch a pathos-laden nameless subject do silent battle with a broken heel and a pram. “I saw a man who wanted to conquer the world and realised he would fail,” comes the same monotone drawl, as a morose Hitler and his drunken bunker cronies stare into oblivion. Elsewhere, a man has trouble with his car; a defeated army marches towards frozen prison camps in Siberia; girls dance with gaiety by a cafe; a father ties his daughter’s shoelaces in the rain; and a priest recoils in horror from the absence of God.³

Why depict these types of apparently throwaway moments? Superficially, these scenes might seem unremarkable in isolation and perhaps even insignificant as described here. When asked by James Mottram about the way he constructs his scenes, Andersson explained his reasoning succinctly: 

Every scene is a story. A very short story. And I like that very much. For me, it can give you a very rich view on existence, to see all these sides, how to be a human being. Most of the time in features they have maybe two or three scenes from life. But in this case, we have 32, 33, with different characters. There is no main character. Almost no one. The dentist is one. The man in the stairs we see twice.⁴

Nick Pinkerton commented on how the film’s vignettes “almost all [play] out in a single take, viewed by a locked-down camera with a static frame that holds its human subjects in the philosophical distance of a deep-focus long shot.”⁵ We know the types of things that the film sees and the manner in which these things are seen, but what can the viewer interpret from these scenes?

2. Observations

Collections of small stories woven together are nothing new, but Andersson’s projects diverge significantly from something like the multicharacter epics of Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993) by Robert Altman. Unlike the overlapping dialogue and characters tracked by zoom lenses in Altman’s work, camera placement and composition in Andersson’s films are notable for their stillness, along with minimal movement of the actors within a scene and clearly enunciated dialogue from one person at a time. Despite the apparent inactivity of Andersson’s scenes, we are held in a kind of suspended animation cinema, like tableaux in stasis, allowing the viewer to observe the world in detail. 

Does this observational stance lead to a certain remoteness? This possibility is raised in a review of About Endlessness by Darragh O’Donoghue, who summed up Andersson’s features thus: 

A series of meticulously staged scenes are filmed in long shots and long takes with a static camera. Humans, solitary even in company, are as apparently devoid of humanity as the image is drained by digital technology of color. The settings are transitional public spaces or bare private spaces as anonymous as hotel rooms. Discrete scenes are structured like gags without the punchlines…⁶

An extraordinary exception to the prosaic nature of most scenes is the presence of a man and a woman (Anders Hellström and Tatiana Delaunay) soaring through the sky together, who are first seen before the main title appears. This flying couple are the only characters not subject to the rules of the everyday that keep most of the other characters firmly on the ground and preoccupied with quotidian concerns. Only flocks of birds (glimpsed at the start and end of the film) and the unidentified narrator share a similarly roaming, almost omnipotent view of the world. Glimpsed again later, the pair float over a cityscape devastated by war, surveying the remains below. 

David Bordwell recognised that “war is a recurring motif in the film,” and noted how “the minor miseries and absurdities of modern life sit along a continuum of death and destruction.”⁷ Scenes of war and peace are given equal weight here and are reflected in the film’s style, as David Ehrlich explained: 

Andersson’s signature aesthetic – each gray sequence is built from scratch on the filmmaker’s massive soundstage, and shot as a deep-focus tableau without any camera moves or cuts – endows every vignette (and every part of the frame) with the same weight, so that Hitler’s downfall is depicted with similar urgency as a man tying his daughter’s shoes in the middle of a rainstorm.⁸

Religion is also present throughout the film, most notably in scenes with a priest (Martin Serner) who is racked with guilt and despair, an element stressed by Armond White: 

The street scene of a modern crucifixion provides a startling comic through line: The victim who cries, “What have I done wrong?” turns out to be a priest who has lost his faith, but the scene of his torture still carries the power to shock (“They drove nails through my hands!”). Andersson enlarges its meaning into the history of inhumanity, of individuals carrying their own burdens. Judeo-Christian ethics may have passed in recent history, but guilt, fear, and torment remain. It’s a nightmare image that can belong to any one of us, to all of us.⁹

About Endlessness has bright spots that shine through the gloom, though, like the dance sequence mentioned by Kermode. Carson Lund highlighted this musical moment and suggested that the dancing young women represented:  

…the kind of youthful vigor often missing from Andersson’s work. Indeed, the film’s constant toggling between fleeting glimpses of different people we barely come to know might be seen as Andersson’s bemused response to the TikTok generation, with the obvious and profound wrinkle being that the film’s deep-focus compositions, and its all-seeing perspective, offer a degree of aesthetic beauty and observational freedom rarely present in your average user-generation social media video.¹⁰

Similarly, Ratner compared the director’s approach to a viewer briefly parsing clips on television: “Watching his films […] resembles thoughtful channel surfing. Andersson alights, then moves on, the segments (forty or more) of his films accretive rather than consecutive.”¹¹ The individual moments in Andersson’s features allow us to contemplate the action on screen, with the disparate stories building towards a singular purpose. As Pinkerton declared: “Andersson seems increasingly with each new work to be trying to convey a unified philosophy of everything.”¹²

3. Aesthetics

On a purely aesthetic level, About Endlessness is a feast for the eyes, which are allowed to roam around and into the frame, marvelling at the various hyperrealist milieus on show, the ordinary environments rendered extraordinary by the precise compositions and depth of perspectives. As Bordwell illustrated: 

What makes Andersson’s cinema so fascinating is his effort to design intricate, gradually unfolding compositions that harbor powerful emotional expression. Dialogue is at a minimum; objects are arranged with the precision of still lifes. His people are often doughy and plodding, with hangdog expressions and complexions like pumice, living in a world dominated by grays and pastel browns. His movies reveal how many shades of beige there can be.¹³

Bordwell went on to demonstrate how the style comments on the characters: “The grandeur of the distant framings accentuate the impotence of the characters. These sad creatures are caught in strict, unsympathetic perspective, all sharp angles and endless vistas. They stand exposed by flat, minimally sculptured lighting.”¹⁴

O’Donoghue seems more sceptical of the director’s vision than Bordwell, though: “with their long takes in long shot of people apparently reduced to instinct and bare movement, watching Andersson’s films can feel like looking through an entomologist’s microscope. A notably sadistic entomologist, watching his pinned specimens flutter through their death throes.”¹⁵ While critical, O’Donoghue acknowledged Andersson’s “perfectionist tableaux” and the reasoning behind it: “This aesthetic is doubtlessly intended ethically as a material embodiment of a spiritual malaise.”¹⁶ Alternatively, Peter Bradshaw praised the “unmistakeable compositional sense” in the film: 

I call it the Anderssonian Depth of Field. Striking images and poses happen under the camera’s nose, but the audience’s eye is led, as if on a rail track, out into the distance, to eerily mesmeric background scenes whose pin-sharp definition you find yourself inspecting for signs of independent life. In a church, on a bus, in a huge railway station concourse, there is enormous subsidiary pleasure in just noticing the background, which is as vividly alive as a waking dream.¹⁷

As an exercise in style alone, the visuals are striking. Style is content here, though, as evident in Bradshaw’s assessment of About Endlessness as:  

…another of Andersson’s superb anthologies of the human condition: people with a zombie-white pallor enclosed in enigmatic tableaux, populating his utterly unique world of unreality and artificiality, scenes of tragicomedy inspired by Tati and Python and created with masterly model work and green-screen effects in the studio. He shows moments of all too human weakness, weariness, gentleness, bewilderment, despair […] Yet there are also scenes of hope, compassion and love. A wizened old man in a bar, whose windows show a glorious vista of snowfall, declaims to a roomful of strangers that it is ‘Fantastic … fantastic!’ He’s right, though his rapture isn’t enough to convince the dentist we saw in the earlier scenes, slumped over the bar, his surgical mask now pulled down to his chin in proto-Covid exhaustion and misery.¹⁸

Although the film was produced pre-COVID, there is a rather prescient feel to Andersson’s intimate epic endeavour, as if the film predicted the societal unease of the 2020s, a sense that peoples’ certainties about their homes, jobs, relationships, governments, cultures and histories have been upended, with individuals simultaneously interconnected yet alienated. While this feeling is not unique to About Endlessness (as Andersson’s three previous features displayed similar sentiments), this film nevertheless captures an uneasy contemporary mood, presenting a series of brief slices of life that are encapsulated in 21st century slow cinema form.

 As Bradshaw suggested, however (and as has been demonstrated earlier), things are not all doom and gloom. Andersson’s survey of the human condition displays a generosity of spirit, defined by Kermode as the director’s “typically humanist compendium of human frailty.”¹⁹ Andersson may not be sentimental, but he recognises the humanity in humans, throughout the good times and the bad, on ordinary days or during lifechanging events. About Endlessness has cosmic-like concerns as well, with its title recalling the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), and Andersson crafting a series of stories that, when combined, journey “Beyond the Infinite”. As Ehrlich stated, About Endlessness “adopts the same qualities of life itself: it’s both short and infinite. It’s over in a heartbeat, and yet it feels like it could go on forever.”²⁰ 

About Endlessness (2019 Sweden, Germany 77 mins)

Prod Co: Roy Andersson Filmproduktion; 4 1/2 Film; Arte France Cinéma; Essential Filmproduktion GmbH; Film Capital Stockholm; Parisienne de Production; Société Parisienne de Production; Sveriges Television (SVT), Goteborg; ZDF/Arte Prod: Pernilla Sandström, Johan Carlsson Dir: Roy Andersson Scr: Roy Andersson Phot: Gergely Pálos 

Cast: Martin Serner, Jessica Louthander, Tatiana Delaunay, Anders Hellström, Jan Eje Ferling, Bengt Bergius, Thore Flygel

Endnotes