Swedish experimental film classics and forgotten 80s film at archive festival

Studie III bya Peter Weiss

The world’s most prestigious heritage festival, Il cinema ritrovato in Bologna, takes place June 25-July 3. In this year’s edition, a section of the programme is dedicated to writer and filmmaker Peter Weiss, which include the director’s feature Hägringen / The Mirage (1959) as well as nine of his shorts from 1950’s, considered to be among the classics of Swedish experimental cinema.

– It’s very rewarding to show that Swedish cinema is not just silent classics and Ingmar Bergman, says Jon Wengström of the Archival Film Collection of the Swedish Film Institute, who has curated the programme in Bologna. Weiss was a pioneer in Swedish art and experimental cinema, and his visually striking films are as modern today as when they were first released. Several of the films have been digitally restored by the Swedish Film Institute.

German-born Peter Weiss (1916-1982) fled Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of WW2, and became one of the pioneers in Swedish experimental cinema in the beginning of the 1950s in and around Arbetsgruppen för Film, later to become Filmform the Art Film & Video Archive. Multi-artist Weiss was also an author and playwright, and his most famous literary work is the manifesto novel The Aesthetics of Resistance, published in 1981.

The festival’s section devoted to rediscoveries and new restorations includes the rarely screened Avskedet / The Farewell (1982), directed by Finnish filmmaker Tuija-Maija Niskanen (1943-2019). The film, produced by Ingmar Bergman’s studio Cinematograph, depicts a young girl’s upbringing in an upper-class Finnish-Swedish family, and was recently restored by the Swedish Film Institute. The script was written by legendary stage director Viveca Bandler, and in a leading role we see Stina Ekblad, who made one of her first screen appearances in Avskedet / The Farewell.

Contact: Jon Wengström, Senior Curator, jon.wengstrom@filminstitutet.se +46-8-665 11 24.