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 film humoristically ‘documents’ an excursion into a wooded Andalucian landscape, under the guidance of an elderly female mystic and artist, Maria Larrañaga, in search of a prehistoric monument that she had witnessed in her youth. While this pathfinder expedition is apparently futile, the filmmakers later – the year after Maria’s death – stumble onto the stone monument, just a stone’s throw from where she had originally led them to look. Perhaps this monument, then as now, represents a timely switch to a solar cult after generations of underground reverence? Ultimately I view El Monumento as pathfinder of the future respective the past.
Håkan Dahlström, born in Sweden (1952) has dedicated himself to art since his childhood in Málaga (Spain), he spent some ten years there and studied at Picasso’s Art School. A lot of his youth he travelled extensively with his family, both his parents were artists (writer Sture Dahlström and painter Anna-Stina Ehrenfeldt).
They lived for a year in the Arizona desert, to which he years later – in 1974 – returned and filmed the 16mm film “Mirror Movement”.
His understanding of Nature and Cosmos is vital, observing plants and animals that are present in his work since his beginnings.
He started out as a filmmaker when he found his father´s camera at the age of 14 and in 1967 won the gold medal at Unescos 5th International Contest for Young Filmmakers (Paris). The following years in California, (San Fransisco) he lived and worked among other artists in the avant-garde circles and participated in the underground film movement, showing his work amongst other places at the Berkeley Film Archives. Back in Sweden he won prizes from Swedish Television in 1967, 1968 and 1969. His work has been shown in cinemathéques and art centers in Scandinavia, Paris, London as well as on television.
Today he continues filming on video, using different media and also ways to achieve interaction between film, photography and 3-dimensional work.
