Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes.
The Man in the Background is a story about the paradoxical role of the couple Josselson in the post-war western cultural battles and the exploitation of culture during the Cold War.
A sequence of Super-8 footage from 1958 shows a couple travelling through Western Europe. The couple is Michael Josselson and his wife Diana on their way to Rhodes to meet with friends and colleagues from around the world. These scenes of a seemingly innocent holiday are repeated seven times, yet each time the voice-over tells a contrasting narrative about the Josselsons and the fact that they were living a double life for almost two decades as Michael Josselson was not only the director of the so-called Congress for Cultural Freedom, but also a CIA-agent.
Interspersed with the archival footage are clips from a video interview with Diana Josselson, shot some 50 years later in 2003. She is now an elderly woman, reminiscing fondly about her husband and their life together. Her recollections both support and contradict the narratives presented, and the film therefore illustrates the blurred lines between fact and fiction.
Lene Berg, born 1965, is a Norwegian film director and visual artist based in Berlin and Oslo. Her main media is film and moving image, but her artistic praxis also includes installation, collage, photography, and text; and she has produced a number of projects in public space. She studied film at Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm and has directed four independently produced feature films as well as a number of short films and mixed-media artworks and installations for galleries, museums, and public spaces. Berg’s autobiographical film False Belief premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019 and was nominated for the Amnesty and Teddy Award. She represented Norway in the 55th Venice Biennale with the film Dirty Young Loose (2013). In 2022 she did the Festival Exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, which is considered the most important solo presentation of a Norwegian artist in the country. In 2023 she published her first novel, Fra far/From father at Kolon.
Berg’s work has been shown at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Art in General, New York. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions and biennales such as Manifesta; the Biennale of Sydney; the Taipei Biennial; Contour Mechelen and Transmediale Berlin.
