Songs from the Second Floor: Roy Andersson

This review is a reprint of a short essay that I wrote for a film class.

Swedish auteur Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor was heralded upon its release in 2000 as one of the best films of the year. Winning several international prizes, including the Cannes Film Festival’s Jury Prize, the film announced the return of one of Europe’s most fascinating and daring filmmakers after a twenty-five year absence since his last feature length film. Heavily inspired by the work of Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Songs from the Second Floor is a triumph of what Andersson refers to as “trivialism.” Ursula Lindqvist explains, “In [Songs from the Second Floor], Andersson, with the help of Vallejo, creates a cinematic tableau vivant of ordinary people in mundane moments.” Through the use of 46 individually crafted and independent scenes, Andersson creates a portrait of a city upon the brink of complete social and economic collapse. Each scene features similar characteristics: a fixed camera, wide-angle lens, and microscopically detailed mise-en-scène. In addition, each scene is filmed in a single, unbroken take. The subjects of these scenes include a conflicted middle-aged man who burned his business for insurance money, a foreigner who is brutally assaulted by a pack of businessmen, a young girl who is sacrificed in an attempt to placate the economy, and a parade of salaryman flagellants.

After making waves throughout the world cinema community, critics and scholars scrambled to interpret Andersson’s film. One of the most traditional interpretations is that the film is a spiritual embodiment of the work of the aforementioned Vallejo. A Marxist poet who spent many of his years in exile in Europe, Vallejo’s work can best be described as containing an “Heideggerian sense of metaphysical abandonment...of being thrown into the world, into language, and into a body that entraps and fails him.” This is translated by Andersson into a stinging critique of capitalism that examines the disillusionment, disconnection, and alienation felt by those trapped within the system. In his four-star review of the film, Roger Ebert summarizes the world created by Andersson as “a city that has simply stopped working, has broken down and is cannibalizing itself. It is a 20th century city, but Andersson sees it as an appropriate backdrop for the plague or any other medieval visitation. And its citizens have fallen back on ancient fearful superstition to protect themselves.” And yet, the idea that Andersson would create such a stinging critique of capitalism reeks of irony. If it wasn’t for the machinations of capitalism, Andersson would not have been able to make Songs from the Second Floor in the first place.

Although Andersson’s first film, A Swedish Love Story, opened to great commercial and critical success, his follow-up, Gillap, was a massive flop that soured his taste for the industry. However, Andersson found sanctuary in the realm of commercial advertisements. Andersson’s work in creating commercials, which were described by Ingmar Bergman as the greatest ever made, were done for such varying clients as the candy company Fazer, the insurance company Trygg-Hansa, and the Swedish Social Democratic Party. It was during this time that, as Lindqvist describes, “Andersson matured as an artist, developing a distinctive method of using a fixed camera and a carefully composed, moving image to tell a story.” And yet, as soon as Andersson managed to secure finances and creative control for a new film, he crafts one that is merciless in its persecution of the capitalist system that depended on advertisements the likes of which he had created. Critics noted that with Songs from the Second Floor, Andersson was biting the hand that fed him. They should have also realized that the hand in question partially belonged to Andersson.

9/10