About the programme:

The incipit is the 1950s educational Disney-style animated film by Billy Klüver, where the motion of the electrons is explained for a wider audience. The film was produced as a substitute for Klüver’s doctoral thesis at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology of Stockholm. Animation is further developed in Edy Fung’s speculative visual and sonic fiction concerning silicon-based lifeforms and their evolution. Fung understands silicon not only as a physical material, but as a catalyst to pose ethical and existential questions, such as the role played by our (post)human bodies in a machine-dominated world.

Bringing the spectator back to human scale environments – from the lunar winter landscape of Kiev’s countryside to fossils – Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut by Lina Selander presents multiple layers of narrative, starting from the 1986’s nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Selander explores human life intended as a mechanism of social structures and ideological systems. In contrast, Katarina Löfström’s immersive, hypnotic works A Void and Chronos investigates the physical experiences of space (or lack thereof) and time through colour animation, sound and abstraction. To follow, the black & white Visusomatic – a film by Lars Siltberg shot in a laboratory for physical research – offers methods of intense observation. The film focuses on an ultra-high vacuum (UHV) system used to clear the air in the small chambers in which various tests on substances smaller than air particles take place. The slow, almost-surgical investigation of this technology goes from the macro to the granular, particles becoming pixels.

The programme concludes with Annika Ström’s poetic piece All My Dreams Have Come True, where the repeated trial and error mixes with the warmth and intimacy of personal relationships, perhaps alluding to the limitations and complexities of human nature.

What images of Sweden exist beyond the major canonized names whose radiance and international fame have forced all other images to the side, as in so many other countries with small film production histories? This program moves between formal experiments, activist documentaries, and animated films focused on kinetic research, investigating some of these hidden traces, broken narratives, and alternative histories.

The selection includes amateur filmmaker Reinhold Holtermann’s Stockholmsbilder (1930), which can be considered as the first Swedish experimental film due to its imaginative and suggestive camera editing; films made in the context of different movements and groups – such as Arbetsgruppen för film (later Filmform), Svenska Filmligan, and FilmCentrum – and works displaying, in one way or another, connections between Swedish experimental film culture, international avant-garde films, and art.

The program is dedicated to Gunvor Nelson and Staffan Lamm, both of whom recently passed away. They are very different filmmakers: Nelson is the most famous Swedish experimental filmmaker, Lamm a hardly known documentary and essay filmer. Yet, their different aesthetic approaches reflect the breadth of Swedish avant-garde film culture and also encompass the various political methods which are gathered in this program. (Stefan Ramstedt, Martin Grennberger / Translation: Ted Fendt)

With Stefan Ramstedt and Martin Grennberger in attendance.

Amos Vogel (1921–2012), an Austrian-born Jew, became one of the most important figures in international film culture after his emigration to the United States. The Amos Vogel Atlas is a series dedicated continuing Vogel’s oppositional legacy alongside the study of his literary estate, which is deposited in the Film Museum. Rarities from the collection represent key focal points.