In the Afterglow: Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

Roy Andersson’s En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, 2014) is the final part of his “Living Trilogy” and was awarded the Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival. It builds on the rigorous aesthetic and acute sensibility of the two earlier films – Sånger från andra våningen (Songs from the Second Floor, 2000) and Du levande (You, the Living, 2007) – and represents the first time that Andersson worked in the digital realm. Although the limited colour range, temperate look and constant, almost shadowless, late Autumn light of his two previous features might seem indelibly suited to the sensitivity of 35mm film stock, Andersson embraced the controlling capabilities and sharpness of these “new” tools, creating an even more formally consistent, climatically congealed, visually “even” and tonally accretive visual style.

Made up of 39 separate and sometimes interconnected long shots that vary in duration from around two to 11 minutes, Andersson’s film’s characteristically mordant humour, wry observational gaze, stultifyingly precise visual compositions and deeply humanistic concerns help present a study of many things including the inescapable legacies of the past (fascism, colonialism, communism, capitalism, etc.), the discomfort, difficulty and awkwardness of daily human interaction, the impact of the built environment on everyday life and work, the absurdities of the human condition, and the quotidian moments or faintly absurd situations we inexorably find ourselves caught within. But it is difficult to fully place or situate what we are watching and listening to when subject to Andersson’s hermetic opus. Pigeon was made over a period of four years, with each shot or scene worked on and built for an average of one month, with dozens of takes often completed. The film is imprecisely set at some moment in the second half of the 20th century – with a few significant departures – and has the look and feel of dilapidated middle or eastern Europe in the last pangs of communism (or capitalism or social democracy, perhaps). 

Andersson’s compositions are downbeat, weathered but witheringly precise, often quite spare and utilise very careful, controlled and quietly monumental set design, miniatures, costuming, colouring (so many shades of grey, beige, off-white, brown, mustard yellow, institutional green) and staging. It feels like a place we’ve all inhabited but, at the same time, is no specific place or time at all. It has the feel of an institution or purgatory – a modernist office block, a psychiatric hospital, uniform social housing, the edifices of mid-to-late century public utilities – but its points of reference are more universal and pointed. Andersson has spoken widely of the influence on his work of filmmakers like Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica, painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Otto Dix, writers like Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht and, inevitably, Samuel Beckett, and artforms like Noh theatre – signposted by his self-conscious use of “white face” for many of his actors and the specific mode of low-key gestural performance he favours – but his later work, commencing with the hundreds of similarly styled and populated commercials he made from the late 1970s, is also unique and much, much more than the sum of these parts.

Another inevitable point of comparison is the cinema of Jacques Tati. There are many affinities between the two filmmakers in their use of deadpan humour, jokes and non-jokes, spatial awareness, carefully constructed and built environments, largely locked-off framing (more rigorously observed by Andersson) and highly choreographed staging. But Tati’s critique of modernity in a film like Play Time (1967) generates a counterweight of utopianism and playful observation. Andersson’s critique is more existential in nature, highlighting humanity’s inevitable and irretrievable fall into the traps, routines, repetitions, patina and mundanities of daily life and history. Both filmmakers allow us a distanced, contemplative viewpoint from which to observe the absurdities of the human figures they put on display. But whereas Tati offers us opportunities to transform our view of and relationship to this environment, Andersson gives us no way out. While we are very active participants in Tati’s creations, we are captive to Andersson’s. Tati insists on the possibilities and powers of human creativity, adaptability and observation as well as the human ability to transform the built environment and our relationship to one another. Andersson’s is a much more bittersweet, even sour sensibility that highlights and prioritises human precarity and vulnerability.

Andersson begins Pigeon with a kind of illustration of the film’s title. Two visitors to a museum are caught between a series of display cases showing taxidermised animals cruelly positioned in mid-action or mid-flight. The couple themselves are held in the moment between observing these carefully arranged tableau vivants and leaving the room, one of the pair uncertain whether to proceed through the door to the next chamber as her male companion looks quizzically at the space between two of the cases and the contrast between a rising bird of prey and a more nondescript bird forever welded to a branch (with the skeleton of a dinosaur – its ancient cousin – in the background). This opening shot emphasises an affinity between stasis and movement, the present and eternity, the human and the animal, the commonplace and the extraordinary, the profound and the absurd. This shot is followed by a series of three “meetings with death”, each highlighting both the precarity of human life and the profound absurdities visited by mortality. One character ingloriously dies while attempting to uncork a wine bottle as his companion works away obliviously in their kitchen; another hangs on grimly to her fully laden handbag while awaiting her death in hospital; and the last, having expired moments after ordering a beer and shrimp sandwich, lies prone in the foreground of the awkward, pregnant aftermath taken up by a stilted conversation about what to do with his already paid for meal. Each of these three scenes and many after are a little like those museum display cases shown in the inaugural shot, opening out onto a wider field of action but also forever contained within the confining frame and this pregnant, final moment. There is a profound dialogue occurring here between movement and stillness, life and death, cinema and painting. But whereas cinema is often seen as a medium of movement, light and even life, Andersson brings it much closer to the temps mort of photography and painting. His characters move – at least a little – but they also look and feel more than a little cadaverous.

Of course, the film’s title also refers to a painting by Bruegel, “Hunters in the Snow”, that shows a typically busy scene of hunters returning to a snowbound village as several birds (probably not pigeons) look on. Andersson’s film purports to take on the contemplative perspective of these birds in its wry reflection on the nature of being human. As in many of Bruegel’s paintings we see a range of activities taking place, all part of the same moment or plain of action but also compartmentalised and often oblivious to one another. It is the visual perspective or view that brings all of these elements and actions together, along with the common experience or predicament of ongoing life. Of course, by placing this viewpoint with a bird looking on the unfolding scene, Andersson also suggests a distancing from humanity, a merciless view that sees our pettiness, foibles and absurdities for what they are. But this view is also open to challenge. This locked up outlook is itself imprisoning and is also challenged or unsettled on occasions where characters seem to look at or speak directly to the camera and, in turn, us. We are as much a part of this human compact as the often-pitiful figures who are paraded before us. The birds are too.

My description of the film so far might give the impression that this is an overwhelmingly bleak, almost monotone vision of humanity and its environs. But Andersson’s later films also have moments of surprise, levity and what, in other circumstances, might be called “grace”. There are shots of young girls on a grim apartment balcony blithely blowing bubbles into the air, a young mother negotiating the handle of her pram to get more intimate with her gurgling baby, and a chorus or choir of characters occupying a bar rising from within a scene to perform a song (a signature of the trilogy). In this extraordinary moment from Pigeon, there is a cut from an austere contemporary downstairs bar and the staged departure of one of its very elderly, long-term customers to a moment with the same character in the same place over 60 years before. Andersson’s decision to provide a title card that announces the time as 1943 clearly places this moment within World War II and brings to mind Sweden’s questionable neutrality during this conflict (other films in the trilogy also make oblique reference to this as well as the brutality of colonialism). But unexpectedly, this extended scene becomes dominated by the image and voice of “Limping Lotta”, the bartender taking kisses in payment for the shots she has just handed around. The combination of flashback, song, community and real pathos is surprising and strangely bracing and speaks to how the film creates and builds a cumulative rhythm and emotional experience. Its effect is chastening and beguiling, singular and communal.

No discussion of Pigeon would be complete without some mention of the extraordinary 11-minute take that combines the goings-on at a sparsely decorated bar on the outskirts of town with the march towards the battlefield of Poltava (in present day Ukraine) by the army of King Charles XII of Sweden. In one shot, Andersson combines the mundane activities of figures in the present day – including another turn by the pair of hopeless “novelty joke” salesmen who have reappeared across the film – with the history-making actions of that day in 1709. Other filmmakers would probably play this disconcerting and discontinuous moment as farce, but there is little comedy in the exchanges between the soldiers and the unprepared customers. Initially we are unsure whether this is just some form of elaborate cosplay, but as the King’s minions forcibly remove the women from the premises at sword-point we realise that, to quote William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In some ways, this seems to be Andersson’s most audacious attempt to represent what might be called an “eternal present (or past)”. Everything is inescapable here, including the defeats of the past which endlessly return. Of course, Andersson does not leave us with this surreal but grounded encounter in a weigh station on the triumphant march to battle. Later in the film a shorter take shows us – in the distance, outside the panoramic windows of the bar – the remnants of King Charles’ defeated, battle weary army limping home. Stopping off at the bar once again the king is not even afforded the use of the restroom: it’s occupied. This defeat to Russia’s Peter the Great is widely seen as a turning point in the Great Northern War and a sign of the decline of the Swedish empire. Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is illuminated by its very distant, melancholy afterlight.

En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron/A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014 Sweden/Germany/Norway/France/Denmark 101 mins)

Prod Co: Roy Andersson Filmproduktion Prod: Philippe Bober, Pernilla Sandström Dir, Scr: Roy Andersson Phot: István Borbás, Gergely Pálos Ed: Alexandra Strauss Set Des: Ulf Jonsson, Nicklas Nilsson, Sandra Parment, Isabel Sjöstrand, Julia Tegström Mus: Hani Jazzar, Gorm Sundberg

Cast: Holger Andersson, Nils Westblom, Viktor Gyllenberg, Per Bergqvist, Charlotta Larsson, Solveig Andersson