Naturens hämnd

Stefan Jarl partisan and poet

When I think back to that morning, I remember sitting there for the first twenty minutes, feeling a little anxious, almost frightened. I sat there and wondered if I had done something wrong. Had I arrived late? No. Was it something I had said at the beginning of the interview? Had I started it with a sensitive or inappropriate topic? I remember thinking about these things.

Stefan Jarl sat in front of me, spitting and hissing like an angry cobra, in a mess of posters, empty reels and randomly placed furniture. In a small, dark editing room in Gamla Stan, Stockholm's old quarter, he vented his accumulated anger at the film industry like an erupting volcano.

When I transcribed the interview I was a little worried that Jarl might not be willing to endorse all the insults and slurs he had uttered. Most interviewees do that. Saying something in the course of an interview is one thing, but acknowledging it is quite another. So it was with some anxiety that I sent him what I had written. Jarl phoned me the next day. "That's fine, but you've softened it up a bit in a couple of places. If you make it more caustic, it will be clearer and stronger".

I remember a broad smile on my face. This was in the spring of 1985, just after Själen är större än världen (1985) had been presented at the Berlin Film Festival. It was my first interview with Stefan Jarl, the first time I met him. But the impression I got then, that he really had a temper, was later confirmed on numerous other occasions.

It may sound like a simplification, but obstacles and rejections are a driving force for Jarl. They are the source of the anger that bubbled up from him during that interview and also of the struggle that he has been engaged in practically every day for the past 25 years. It is with good reason that he is described, in one of Sweden's most credited works on cinema, as a filmmaker who “always disagrees with the establishment”. It began with the censorship discussions of Dom kallar oss mods (They Call Us Misfits, 1968) and has continued ever since. From this opposition emerged his aesthetics and philosophy on cinema. Apart from a few unhappy months as project manager at Svenska Institutet, Jarl was never attracted to doing anything other than independent filmmaking. One thing he learnt his early conflicts with the television and film industry was that you must have total control over the entire production, from the initial script to the finished film. It was for this reason that Jarl, together with a few other directors, built a kind of platform and tried to take control of his means of expression: the films. The Film-Centrum guaranteed a non-commercial distribution, Folkets Bio gave the opportunity to present their films in commercial cinemas; while a publication, “Film & TV”, ensured that the debate remained alive and prevented the established authorities from hiding behind their desks. But the money that came from distribution was never enough to allow new films to be produced. Today, twenty years later, it must be admitted that cracks are evident in the platform that was supposed to guarantee freedom of expression. More than 75 percent of the films shown in cinemas are American, all four Swedish networks are flooded with American films and Folkets Bio (The People's Cinema) has been rendered more or less inoffensive.

Jarl's films are made in the European tradition of resistance and rebellion. They seek to achieve something beyond what is seen on the screen. They are films that want to make a contribution for change. They are films of struggle. The audience should reflect on what they have seen. They should think: "things cannot go on like this", "I want to know more" or "I have to be involved in this". This is what Jarl wants and he quotes Strindberg: “utility comes before beauty”.

His aim throughout his film career has been to influence others. But anyone who has seen films like Hotet (1987), Tiden har inget namn (1989) and Goda människor (1990), knows that there are scenes of moving beauty, because Jarl is aware of the terms on which he has to compete. If you want to reach people accustomed to the high technical quality of big American productions, then whatever is done must be done extraordinarily well. Another reason is clearly Jarl's relationship with the visual arts. I realised this in the spring of 1989 when I went with Jarl to the “Cinéma du Réel”, the documentary film festival in Paris, where Tiden har inget namn was to be shown. The afternoon before the projection Jarl took me on a tour of shops and art galleries. We browsed for hours and Jarl bought a large number of books on Picasso, Bruegel, Degas, Van Gogh and books on documentary photography. [...] I remembered a conversation I had had a few weeks earlier during an interview with Jarl's cameraman and colleague Per Källberg, during which he told how Jarl, at the beginning of their collaboration during the filming of Ett anständig liv (A Respectable Life, 1979), defined his approach to the image: “He dragged me to art exhibitions. A lot had to do with light and the treatment of light. We looked at Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Roj Friberg and others, whose images had a special expressiveness, while at the same time we walked around the city looking for drug addicts…”. 

All great art has opened the eyes of the public and made them perceive society and the environment in a new way. Jarl is totally convinced of this. He would gladly quote another deity, Walter Benjamin: “Art that begins to doubt its mission and ceases to be 'inséparable d'utilité' (Baudelaire) is obliged to surrender its pride to novelty”.

Jarl sees no contradiction between art and science, in the time of Leonardo da Vinci (his great idol) they were one and the same. In those days, Leonardo da Vinci stayed up all night analysing bodies and drawing blood vessels and muscles in order to make good drawings of

people during the day. This is where Leonardo da Vinci touched upon the kind of ideal that occasionally encounters in a documentary: the explorer.

But Jarl wants to take the role of art further. It should not only be useful in the sense of influencing people and making scales of values fall before their eyes. It should also, he hopes, be able to change the production situation itself. Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht may have been its forerunners, but these ideas are based on the experiences of its early years and were paid for dearly. It is the terms of production that govern all expressions and it is vital to change them and gain control over them during the course of a film's gestation.

It was also in Paris that I first heard Jarl talk about expressiveness. It is not what an image looks like or how it is produced that is important, but what it expresses. This, too, has become part of Jarl's extremely idiosyncratic working method. For Källberg, "Before every shoot, Stefan comes and talks for quite a while. Mainly it's a philosophical discussion: what he should express overall and what we should do to get it to that point. This is extremely important because even before the shooting starts, I know what atmosphere the images are expected to suggest. It is a prerequisite to understand them globally”. 

During the shooting, Jarl leaves Kallberg to his work. When he knows that Källberg knows what the image has to express, he rarely even bothers to look through the viewfinder. It is almost moving to listen to the dialogue between Stefan and Per during and after a shoot. It goes something like this: "Good, Per? What do you think?". To which Per replies: 'Mhm… yeah, pretty good”. This of course means nothing to an outsider. But from the tone of his voice Jarl can immediately deduce what was wrong and whether it is necessary to shoot again. This is the valuable and fascinating fruits of many years of collaboration. It also shows the trust that they have in each other and that has arisen from the deep relationship of two people with the concept of image. “We simply like the same kind of pictures, that's all”, sums up Per laconically.

Jarl maintains that art is above all about being diligent: diligence and hard work. This is an attitude he evidently inherited from his father, Håkan Jarl. Stefan often jokes about the way he used to finish a day's work (which often lasted 16 hours), with the words: “You never sleep as well as when you have done what you had to do”. So Jarl is convinced that you have to go to your workplace every day at eight o'clock in the morning and get to work. This is necessary even if you sit there, day after day, wondering why you are there. Inspiration certainly exists but it is wasted if you do not go to work. Jarl usually mentions the Stockholm author Stig Claesson as an example, a man who wrote 52 books, painted many pictures and went to work every morning at eight o'clock. "All great works are produced by tight fists," as Goethe once said. 

Art should also be difficult. Basically, art is a manifestation of how one complicates things. Jarl often says to Per Källberg: “We have to make it much more complicated. Why are you filming that? Either we do it completely differently or we come back here tomorrow. Or we do it when there are no suppositions!". Once again we glimpse his temper. If it seems obvious to take a particular path, he immediately puts up a warning sign and goes the other way.

This demanding and difficult relationship with work recurs in all of Stefan Jarl's films. It is evident in Själen är större än världen, a highly physical film about the struggle in which the conflict and the path are more important than the goal. It is also illustrated in Jarl's homage to the farmer in Tiden har inget namn, which is introduced by some words of Pier Paolo Pasolini: “There is no other poetry but that of concrete actions”.

Jarl often says that he learnt seven things from Ingmar Bergman. I don't know what the other six are, but the seventh is the great advantage, artistically speaking, of working with the same team from one film to the next. From A Respectable Life, cameraman Per Källberg, editor Annette Lykke Lundberg, musician and composer Ulf Dageby and Per Carleson, the mixing engineer, form the “Gang of Four” surrounding director Stefan Jarl. With all of them he has developed a personal and stubborn working method in which the key word is “trust”. A working method, or more correctly an ideological face-to-face sought at all levels of a film's gestation, is what Jarl calls “the neutral position”. It means that after shooting the dailies on location, one sits down in the editing room and sees from the beginning what the images express. This job is the most harrowing and destructive to one's self-esteem: being forced to admit that the northern light on this forest or that sea was in fact a flat, lifeless image. Then the self-critical questions arise: what was I really thinking? Am I totally untalented? How the hell am I going to put all this together? All this is about the image having a life of its own. There, in the editing room, together with other images that will precede and follow it, the image expresses itself in a different way. It may be absolutely appropriate when placed in its context, but more often, unfortunately, it is completely useless.

Jarl is equally ruthless with himself when he begins important and delicate work with music and sound. Another element is added to the totality and new expressions are born. It is a continuous filtering and distilling of new impressions whereby, with any luck, anything that contributes to the finished work and has a portion of the screen is as close to the truth as one can get. Perhaps this is what Jarl's guru and mentor Arne Sucksdorff – who received an

Oscar in 1949 for his short film Människor i stad – called “the right balance between documentary truth and poetic truth”. It is this complex truth, this composite description of reality that Stefan Jarl continually seeks in his images and forms. He completely rejects the myth of cinéma-vérité, partly because there is obviously no one who has an objective relationship with an external reality. The very fact that the camera is placed in a particular place means that a choice has been made. Frederick Wiseman, the person most associated with cinéma-vérité, spends a year in the editing room for each of his films. We can assume that no pretense of objectivity is abandoned during this period.

However, this is something he never tried to deny! But the main reason for the denial is that reality is more complex than filming an event. The farmer ploughing his field, the Sami slaughtering his reindeer, the junkie puncturing himself or the lone sportsman during training, each of them in private expresses only a tiny fraction of reality. When presented in its context, in the times in one's life, reality becomes more like a prism. It is at this point that we come across one of the cornerstones of Jarl's cinema: editing.

Jarl argues that certain things are too irrelevant for a film to describe them, whereas we have seen other things so often that we have become blind. Once again, reality must be made visible. For example, an image may have no value when it is the last in a sequence of three, but when it is placed between the other two, something appears that we had not seen before. With the help of montage, we can make time stand still, let things rip, dramatise reality and thus make the invisible visible. And bring us closer to the truth.

For me, one of the best examples of montage in Stefan Jarl's films are the first eighteen minutes of Naturens hämnd (1983). During those minutes, simply because of the editing, we are introduced to the three levels of the film and already at the beginning we realise, in a terrible way, why little Peter is crying. 

But of course one also thinks of the “paradise of comfort” sequence in A Respectable Life, where we go from the utter squalor of the outcasts to the long fingers of the ladies of good society at the fashionable market in Östermalm. The montage reveals a link, a truth: consumer society is unveiled.

In a more subtle way, in Tiden har inget namn, from the tired steps and toil of the last farmer, we move on to the dead seal on the cliff. This is happening right now, at this moment. The two together want to say something about the times we live in. New bonds, new truths. Complex reality is made visible.

It is in this tireless hunt for truth that I believe Jarl's films reach out and touch me. I must confess that I feel the greatest admiration and respect for this passion, this endurance that Jarl tirelessly carries after all these years. What is right and what is wrong is written somewhere on the Stone Tablets of Moses, that is the main driving force in Jarl's cinematography. I remember , when I was interviewing Bo Widerberg (another of Jarl's gods), I asked him what the abused word “morality” meant to him. Immediately, without a trace of hesitation or doubt, he replied: “Everything. It is the beginning and the end”. For him, morality meant respect for life, not hurting anyone.

Morality is almost synonymous with Jarl's films. They are born out of a deep compassion for life that has been violated, be it a junkie who sticks his last needle into a vein, a two-year-old with cancer, a poisoned lake, the Sami who suddenly discover the radioactive rain of Chernobyl laying all around them or a lonely farmer whose way of life is disappearing. With self-mockery and at the same time with seriousness, Jarl usually simplifies everything by saying: “All my films are about the same thing, they are all compassion films”.

In his unfinished film Förwandla Sverige (1966-74), Jarl takes his critique of civilisation to its highest point and says: “We are occupied by a foreign power”. He returned to the idea of society as a prison in all his subsequent films, but probably never in such a definitive, gloomy and resigned manner as in Förwandla Sverige. Even in Naturens hämnd, that intensely dark analysis of humanity's self-assigned role as “nature's gardener”, we are able to glimpse a ray of light.

This compassion is the prominent impulse that “protects” Jarl's films. It is what determines that a completely commercially impossible film such as Tiden har inget namn can come into being, and it is what motivates him to finish, virtually penniless, a 35-minute portrait of a 12- year-old Sami boy in his short film Jåvna - Renskötare år 2000 (1991).

The act of finishing these films is also a means of acknowledging, rather than suppressing, this impulse. The sense of compassion is kept alive. But Jarl also emphasises the importance of never confusing the immediate, quantifiable success of a work art with what is far more vital: its value over time. Art is eternal, and perhaps in 2050 someone will see Hotet and think: "So this is how the Sami and their culture were erased!", or consider the value of Tiden har inget namn when the last peasant is gone.

In this context it is natural to consider another of Jarl's major sources of inspiration, the painter Pieter Bruegel: “I always wanted my films to have the same effect as his paintings. He managed to make great art out of his allegorical comments on contemporary life. I can sit for a long time and look at his paintings. Without Bruegel we would not know everything we know about life in the 16th century”.

I hope that one day in the future, we will be able to look back at the cinema of Robert Flaherty, Joris Ivens, Santiago Alvarez, Arne Sucksdorff, Peter Weiss, Eri M. Nilsson and Stefan Jarl (to place it within a tradition and context) and see images that offer us great insight into our short time on earth during the last half of the 20th century. I am absolutely convinced that Stefan Jarl's films, not only from a sociological, but also from an anthropological and ecological point of view, will then be indispensable testimony and a vital contribution to future research work.

(Mats Nilsson, Stefan Jarl – Partisan and Poet, The Swedish Institutet, Stockholm 1991)

«The takings of A Respectable Life gave Jarl the opportunity to work as he and Jan Lindqvist would have liked to do for Förwandla Sverige: to travel all over Sweden and research contemporary life with the help of a camera. This time there was no producer to stop the project. The scientific documentary had a green light. Jarl had a clear idea of what kind of film he wanted to make. He wanted to portray the catastrophic role that mankind has assumed, without having the right to do so, as nature's gardener. He wanted to show what humanity does to nature and nature's relentless response. He had the money, he had the freedom and he knew what his film meant. The only question that remained was: how would he do it?

From an original script (which he had already discarded), called The Poisoning, Jarl had kept a small fragment about Kenyan partisans who were known as Mau-Mau. But little did he know at the time that this would become one of the three themes in Naturens hämnd. The money and the original film had been used up and there was nothing more to show on the subject. Jarl and Källberg tried for months to capture the harmful effects of lead and cadmium in the film. But it did not work. There was nothing they could show, despite the cooperation they received from researchers and scientists alike.

The exaltation of freedom began to be overshadowed by frustration.

It was then that Jarl, at an environmental conference, met Nisse Nilsson, a farmer from Jämtland. He was a man who had done some thinking and was prepared to fight for his opinions. An “anti-researcher”, an honest enthusiast who had studied a little chemistry and that was that. Nisse Nilsson had an in-depth knowledge of a subject that interested Jarl: the mould infestation of cereal crops (a result of the use of nitrogenous fertilisers). Moreover, Nisse Nilsson was someone who, like Kenta and Stoffe (the protagonists of A Respectable Life), represented the people.

Shortly after that meeting Jarl came into contact with the parents of a two-year-old boy from Gothenburg who had cancer, and the structure of the film suddenly began to take shape in his mind. Jarl knew that certain researchers claimed that around 90 per cent all cancers could be caused by environmental factors. At that moment he realised that he would have to make a film in which he would put together three stories that were different expressions of the same thing, like a prism whose three sides were three aspects of the same problem: mankind's destruction of the environment. Nisse Nilsson represented someone who is a guardian of nature, a defender of its purity, but who is at the same time a partisan: a kind of fighter in a continuous guerrilla war in the service of nature. On a philosophical level he became parallel to the role of the Mau-Mau. Peter, the two-year-old child with cancer, became the third level.

Most members of the 'Gang of Four' consider Naturens hämnd to be their favourite film. [...] As with A Respectable Life, the structure of the film, with its three distinct levels, came to be based entirely on the principle of editing. And it was probably no coincidence that Jarl and cameraman Per Källberg, during the shooting of the film, developed what was called “the Picasso principle”: a unique way of considering images. During the barren initial months, they decided to record at least one image per day, whether it had something to do with the original concept or not. This was a logical consequence of Jarl's idea that an image can express something completely different when it eventually finds itself in the editing room.

If new and fertile ground was tilled with A Respectable Life, then it can be said that with  Naturens hämnd the earth began to bloom and many plants to grow.

Jarl's goal of being able to fully express himself had suddenly come closer. The short autobiographical sequence, filmed in black and white, shows the director at the age of five running through a paradise landscape. It is a declaration that  Naturens hämnd is, to date, his most personal film». (M. Nilsson)

Mats Nilsson is film critic and author of the book Rebell i vekligheten - Stefan Jarl och hans filmer, Filmkonst no. 7/Filmbiblioteket no. 1, 1991.