Human Poems: Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor

In 1970, a Swedish filmmaker in his mid-twenties became an instant critical darling with his debut feature: a lyrical, Czechoslovak New Wave-inflected, romantic drama matter-of-factly titled En kärlekshistoria (A Love Story, presented in Anglophone territories as A Swedish Love Story). This filmmaker, a brash young thing named Roy Andersson, hailed from a working-class Gothenburg background. He was still studying at the Swedish Film Institute’s Filmskolan film school in Stockholm when he was signed to direct A Swedish Love Story, notwithstanding that the school’s managing director, one Ingmar Bergman, took exception to his volubly leftist political views and even threatened to “see to it that [he would] never get to make a feature film.”¹

A Swedish Love Story won Best Film at the 7th Guldbagge Awards (the Swedish Film Institute’s annual awards). People expected great things in the years to come of this Andersson, who duly confounded everyone with his follow-up feature, Giliap (1975) – a bizarre, seriocomic neo-noir set around a shabby Swedish seaside hotel. It was a commercial and, at first, critical flop, notwithstanding its selection in Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.

25 years – a full quarter of a century – would pass before Andersson would complete another feature; that film, 2000’s Sånger från andra våningen (Songs from the Second Floor) would cock any number of deadpan snooks at 20th century Swedish society across 46 thematically connected vignettes, and resemble A Swedish Love Story as much as chalk does cheese.

Unprecedentedly expensive for a Swedish film, at a cost of 50 million Swedish crowns, and taking four years of filming (after percolating in Andersson’s mind for decades), it won the Cannes Jury Prize, despite its premiere being delayed until the final day of the festival. Andersson was indeed now delivering on the promise that he, as much as any other party, had trumpeted 30 whole years earlier upon the glowing reception afforded to his debut. Yet for many it was hard to credit that Songs was the work of the same filmmaker as Love Story – not least by the multitudes who missed Giliap and its introduction of Andersson’s drolly mordant sensibility 25 years earlier, or by those who were oblivious to the literally hundreds of comedic advertisements Andersson had directed in the meantime – many of them award winners. (Even Ingmar Bergman – whom Andersson has long considered overrated and humourless – is apocryphally said to have declared that Andersson directed “the best commercials in the world”.²)

It was in these ads that the key aspects of Andersson’s signature, latter-day aesthetic emerged: the jaundiced palette and interiors lit like morgues with chequered floors and obliquely arranged décor, populated by pallid everymen (embodied by unprepossessing non-actors plucked by Andersson from the streets of Stockholm) in painstakingly rehearsed and choreographed, single-shot skits that are often equal parts joltingly hilarious and bleak, captured by a perfectly static camera. (And necessarily static, at that; else the presence of the ingenious, meticulously crafted trompe l’oeil elements of his ostensibly Bazinian, long take, deep focus mise en scène would be betrayed and the brilliant illusion of his cinematic spaces’ integrity shattered.)

Moreover, various of the performers cast in his ads would later appear in his features, and it was through a controversially, comically misanthropic 1985 ad delivered in his now telltale style for Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, Varför ska vi bry oss om varandra (Why Should We Care About Each Other, 1985), that Andersson commenced an enduring collaboration with cinematographer István Borbás, later to shoot Songs from the Second Floor as well as En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, 2014), the first and third films, respectively, in Andersson’s “Living Trilogy”.³

Two key short film commissions – a bracingly miserabilist 1987 AIDS public information film, Någonting har hänt (Something Happened), which was withdrawn prior to completion by a dismayed Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare, and 1991’s desperately ironic, audacious Härlig är jorden (World of Glory), which opens with an elaborate visual gag featuring saturnine, balding, moustachioed Andersson regular Klas Gösta Olsson in direct address to the camera, baiting Swedish audiences whom Andersson evidently wanted to remind of their complicity in the Holocaust – were also stepping stones towards the now immediately distinctive, Andersson brand of style and satire that Songs heralded to a startled wider world.

The other key development had been in 1981, when Andersson used the proceeds from directing commercials to purchase a five-storey apartment block at Sibyllegatan 24 in central Stockholm. He duly set up “Studio 24” in the storefront on the ground floor, wherein he could ever after exercise complete creative control over his projects, whether advertising commissions or, eventually, brilliant, idiosyncratic feature films, ready for release and acclaim only every seven or so years. He also established his own residence on the floor above the studio – to wit, the building’s second floor.

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“Älskade vare de som sätter sig”: “Beloved be the ones who sit down.” This line appears atop a dedication to Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938) pursuant to Songs from the Second Floor’s opening vignette, in which a stooped, beige businessman visits a colleague who doesn’t emerge from under a solarium while they discuss existential matters of a blandly mercantile nature. The line is taken from Vallejo’s poem “Traspié entre dos estrellas” (“A Stumble Between Two Stars”), published posthumously in 1939 in a volume aptly entitled Poemas humanos (Human Poems).

More benedictory lines from this poem are uttered in vignettes that follow, constituting one of a number of connective threads spanning the film’s runtime. The bulk of the lines are recited by one brother to soothe another who’s been committed to a psychiatric hospital, notwithstanding that, according to their irascible, arsonist father, it was “poetry [that] made him nuts.” While there are characters such as these three who make multiple, intermittent appearances, suggestive of a degree of continuity, the film overall plays as a post-modern surrealist mosaic. It builds an allusion-filled, witheringly (yet occasionally transcendentally) banal world through a series of not so much tableaux vivants as, one might say, tableaux mort-vivants – like so many lumpen variations upon Paul Delvaux paintings in which the dead and living dead blankly commingle.

Songs is at once the work of an avant-gardist who is appreciably presenting a confrontingly unique vision of what cinema can be and that of a primitivist utilising techniques pioneered by Georges Méliès at the art form’s very dawn (and later refined by Karel Zeman) in illusionistically, seamlessly suturing, in-camera action performed upon a sound stage with laboriously built 3D miniatures of city- or street-scapes.

And just as Songs from the Second Floor looks back, aghast at and haunted by, aspects of the very recent and wartime 20th century alike, it is also hugely indebted to countless art movements and artists – painters, especially – of that same turbulent century. Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity artists – Otto Dix and George Grosz, in particular – inform the economical orderliness of his set design and the unsentimental grotesquerie of his dramatis personae. There’s also much in the bizarre juxtapositions of objects and frequently inert businesspeople that smacks of René Magritte. And the lonely bar scenes in Songs, as in so many other Andersson films, are uncannily evocative of the work of Edward Hopper.

From the world of film, it’s easy to detect the influence of the “Great Stone Face”, Buster Keaton, and not for nothing did David Bordwell declare Andersson “a sort of dystopian [Jacques] Tati.”⁴ Andersson is surely also the heir to Luis Buñuel’s anticlericalism in both tone and substance; Songs is riddled with imagery of blithe mass self-flagellation and mockery of (the commercialisation of) Christ’s crucifixion. One might also wager that Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) sung to Andersson, with its famous, interminable traffic jam…

Among literary artists, the influence of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and August Strindberg are often noted.⁵ But what of music –of the “songs” of the title? Well, there is an often-perky score warbling throughout the film in galumphing waltz time, rhyming humorously with the cod lugubriousness of the action, composed by none other than ABBA’s Benny Andersson (no relation). Roy Andersson is, himself, a musician – a jazz-loving trombonist who “kept a 1964 white Fender Stratocaster electric guitar plugged in near his desk to cut loose from time to time” during Songs’ lengthy filming.⁶ But songs?

Barring the one extraordinary sequence, wherein commuters burst into blankly rapturous choral singing on a train in accompaniment to a score that had, hitherto, been purely extradiegetic, there are no songs in Songs from the Second Floor, per se. But is not the entire film an episodic ballad for the human condition, a secular hymn, a lament and a paean, as jocose as it is morose, for what it is to be, to become and to remain human? And to do so in a world of profoundly purgatorial glory?

Sånger från andra våningen (Songs from the Second Floor, 2000, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, France and Germany, 98 min) 

Prod Co: Roy Andersson Filmproduktion, Sveriges Television, Arte France Cinéma Prod: Lisa Alwert, Roy Andersson Dir: Roy Andersson Scr: Roy Andersson Phot: István Borbás, Jesper Klevenås Mus: Benny Andersson Sound: Jan Alvermark Ed: Roy Andersson

Cast: Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson, Bengt C. W. Carlsson, Torbjörn Fahlström, Sten Andersson, Rolando Núñez, Lucio Vucina, Per Jörnelius, Peter Roth, Klas Gösta Olsson

Endnotes