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Tag archives for Flickan

Mr Hollywood – Hoyte van Hoytema

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PHOTO: Johan Bergmark

Inspired by Julien Bourgeois’s beautiful post about Ane Brun, a Swedish musican born outside of Sweden, I thought why not write about someone in Swedish film. The person I chose is a man whose parents must have really loved the name Hoyte because they named him that twice. Hoyte van Hoytema is a Swedish cinematographer whose career is a true success story.

Hoyte was born on the 4th of October 1971 in Horgen, Switzerland. He’s a son of an architect and he says that he was a really poor student in school and had to repeat a lot of the courses. When he was 17 years old he applied to the Dutch film school but did not get accepted. He then went to Poland and applied to film school in Lodz instead. In a Q&A with Stina Lundberg Dabrowski he said that the school in Lodz couldn’t afford new cameras. Everything was filmed on 35mm with old Arri cameras that the Germans brought during the war and because of the fact that those cameras made as much noise as coffee grinders that forced the students to put more focus on the image without relaying on sound. After 3 years Hoyte dropped out of school because of work. After some work in Holland and Poland he ended up in Norway where he met the producer Malte Forsell who brought Hoyte to Sweden for the production of  The Return of the Dancing Master (Danslärarens återkomst). Today Hoyte van Hoytema is considered being one of the best cinematographer in Swedish history and Hollywood is already knocking on his door.

It’s not by chance that the Swedish Institute says that the films and shows he has shot is some one the best of the last decade. After national and international successes with the mini series The Laser Man (Lasermannen) it didn’t take long until awards started raining on Hoyte. His remarkable work on the films Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) and The Girl (Flickan) landed him the Guldbagge Award (The Swedish Oscar) two years in a row for best cinematography. The Girl was considered by many being the best Swedish film of 2009 and Let the Right One In is on number 207 on IMDB’s top 250 films of all time.

No wonder Hollywood kept on knocking on his door until he opened. Later this year the world will be able to see Hoytes latest work in a film called The Fighter. A big Hollywood film directed by David O. Russell with big names like Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Amy Adams. A funny remark Hoyte said about Hollywood was that he got annoyed sometimes. Due to union rules he is forced to work with two camera operators and that’s not his thing, he liked to be the guy handling the camera. The Fighter hits US theaters in december but the good people of Sweden will have to wait until February next year. Until then we Swedes can sit back, relax and go see Hoyte’s latest work in the Swedish film Bad Faith (Ond tro).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BlOPYsQQuM

Everybody remembers the directors but seldom remember the little guys but this little guy has a big future. See you at the Oscars soon enough Hoyte. You’ll be on the red carpet, I’ll be on my red couch. Want to trade?

Click here to see more of his body of work.

Chris Gardner - Film

November 7, 2010

Children’s Island

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Kay Pollack’s 1980 film Children’s Island, opens with a shot of a typical, drab Stockholm bathroom. The camera pans in and we see there is a person in the tub, floating fetal-like in the water. The body appears sexless. We don’t even know if the person is alive. The camera hangs over it for a while. Then a boy bursts out of the water, panting, shouting that it’s a personal record for holding his breath under water.

The boy is Reine. He is 11, going on 12, and this, in his words, is his, “last summer as a child.” He performs a daily check for signs of puberty, and when he finds none, states, “One more day to live.” Reine’s mother had planned on sending him to summer camp on Barnens Ö (Children’s Island in English). But she is busy and distracted, so is easily outfoxed by Reine who decides to stay alone in the city instead. There he floats around the empty streets, befriending the freaks and outlaws who are still in town. (Everyone else has gone to the countryside.)

Children’s Island is somewhat similar to The Girl, which screened at the beginning of the film series. A portrait of a child left to its own devices, on the brink of adolescence, amidst a sea of self-absorbed adults. Here too the world of adult sexuality seems sinister and creepy. Reine swears to never become a slave to horniness, which is how he envisions adulthood. Over the course of the movie Reine slips further and further into the outskirts of society and along the way, to his horror, experiences his sexual awakening.

(c) 1980 Thomas Wahlberg

(c) 1980 Thomas Wahlberg

Sarah Clyne Sundberg

May 4, 2010

The Girl

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Fredrik Edfelt, director of The Girl at Q&A

The first film from the “recent” category—that is new movies— to screen was The Girl. The title character is a 10-year-old girl living in rural Sweden. Her idealistic parents and older brother leave for a summer of foreign aid work in Africa, she is left at home with her freewheeling and flaky aunt. (The girl, it turns out last minute, was too young to join.) The aunt soon abandons her to pursue a love affair. Thus, the girl is left to fend for herself, though, truth be told, she may be better at it than the aunt is.

The upshot is, that while the parents are saving starving children in Africa, their daughter is home alone, constipated and dirty, scrounging for stale cereal and rotting sandwich meat, playing the piano naked in black face.

There is an amazing attention to detail in the art direction. Everything from milk cartons, to atlases, to dish racks, are just right; perfectly evocative of Sweden at the juncture of the 1970s and 1980s. The yuppie era is pulling up in a snazzy sports car, the progressive do-gooder ethos of the 1970s still going strong. At the talk afterwards director Fredrik Edfelt called it, “A different time, when there was still more of the old Sweden, in ways that were both bad and good. Things were more naïve in a sense, people were still idealistic about changing the world. It was also a time when children were still allowed to roam free.”

The girl too is on the cusp of a new decade, the world of adult sexuality lurks just around the corner, in shapes she only dimly understands: The lovelorn woman next door trying to entice her husband, their precocious niece from the city, who talks of sex and boys and ruthlessly picks on those younger and weaker than her. The script, by Karin Arrhenius, is loosely autobiographical and will ring true to the pre-teen experience for most, not only those raised in that time and place.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg

April 17, 2010