Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema

Infused with a jazzy, nouvelle vague–inspired energy, Bo Widerberg’s feature debut has the freshness of youth. Building on his film criticism’s call for a socially relevant Swedish cinema, the writer turned director offers a vivid portrait of a young factory worker (Inger Taube) finding her way toward independence as she weathers unexpected pregnancy, learns hard lessons from relationships with two very different men, and leaves behind the only home she has ever known. Abetted by fellow filmmaker Jan Troell’s coolly beautiful monochrome cinematography, Widerberg takes a bold first step in his mission to create a cinema that is both engaged and engaging.

A period piece that forgoes nostalgia in favor of a stark examination of working-class struggle, Bo Widerberg’s second feature unfolds in 1936 in the director’s hometown of Malmö. It’s there, in the poor district of Raven’s End, that young Anders (Widerberg’s regular collaborator Tommy Berggren) chases his dream of becoming a writer while growing increasingly disillusioned with the dead-end world that surrounds him: an alcoholic father, a toiling mother, and the ominous specter of Nazism. Delivering a bracing jolt of kitchen-sink realism to Swedish cinema, Widerberg paints an unsparing portrait of youthful idealism bumping up against economic despair.

Bo Widerberg reached new heights of visual lyricism with this sublime retelling of a real-life nineteenth-century romantic tragedy. Bound by their all-consuming desire, a young circus tightrope walker (Pia Degermark, winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress prize) and a lieutenant (Tommy Berggren) with a wife and children forsake everything to be together and escape to the countryside—only to see their lovers’ idyll gradually give way to poverty and desperation. With its painterly, sun-dappled images and indelible use of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21, this 1960s art-house sensation is the most ravishing expression of Widerberg’s recurring theme of the tension between individual freedom and social responsibility.

One of Bo Widerberg’s most explicitly political works imbues the true story of a 1931 labor strike with a powerful contemporary resonance. In the industrial district of Ådalen, in the north of Sweden, a peaceful demonstration takes a tragic turn, leading to a historic general strike. Amid these events, the teenage Kjell (Peter Schildt) experiences sacrifice and strife, love and loss, and the consequences of this shocking violence. Working once again with Elvira Madigan cinematographer Jörgen Persson—who captures shimmering, light-filled images in graceful widescreen—Widerberg entwines a stirring portrait of resistance with an intimate coming-of-age journey for a vision of history that feels vibrantly, urgently alive.