Jan 13, 2010
Songs from the Second Floor
Roy Andersson’s 2000 film Songs from the Second Floor is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, a series of interlocking vignettes featuring middle-aged actors in white makeup filmed with a static camera (it moves exactly once in the entire film, by my count). The characters occupy a bizarre Swedish metropolis in which masses of ashen-faced workers whip each other with rope, cars sit in an endless traffic jam, and duos push massively overpacked suitcase carts in an interminable race to the luggage counter. This is a picture of life as an absurdist purgatory, except Andersson goes a step beyond typical leftist observation and includes actual ghosts in several scenes. With their inclusion, one must ask why anyone not in purgatory would want to live such a life — it’s a call to action. In anyone else’s hands, this would be a pretentious mess, but Andersson’s visuals are so inventive and his messages so indebted to the aesthetics that it never feels heavy-handed. One of the few cases where you can use the descriptor “visionary” without sounding like a douchebag. – Eric Freeman
