[SOUND] On the threshold to the 1960s, a wave of change went through European cinemas. The new wave in France was certainly the biggest, most varied, and truly influential event around 1960. But new ways of making movies were also seen in Britain, in Germany, in Eastern Europe, and in Scandinavia. These new cinemas had a fresh approach to their stories, to their technique, and to ideas of cinema as such. They used new lightweight cameras and sound equipment and more light sensitive film stocks, which among other things gave new possibilities for location shooting, aligning fiction films, with new modes of documentary films and their claim on reality. However even though some use this, to counterbalance traditional genre styles through realist style, others, were aiming at new forms of stylization. New wave cinemas in general, were also fond of more loose narrative structures and open endings. Traits inherited from the Italian postwar neorealism. Yet they weren't without the melodramatic sentimentalism of Italian Neorealism. Often they adapted a more distant and sometimes ironic attitude to their anti heroes. Instead, the film director became the real and ultimate hero. Not only a simple craftsman, making a script come alive. But a film author or auteur. Writing his stories in sound and pictures through the film medium. A kind of film intellectual star, along with the actors. The film became truly modern, as an art form in the sense that it seemed to be the primary medium in which, which an experience of contemporary sensibilities was expressed and given salient form. Scandinavia also had it's new wave cinemas. Even though the fewest of filmmakers became known outside of Scandinavia. Primarily the Swedish Bo Widerberg, And Jan Troell, and the Dane Henning Carlsen. The Swedish Vilgot Sjoman, may also be mentioned as far as he succeeded in being banned in Sweden for his film 491, and later in the United States for, I'm curious yellow. In both cases for it's explicit depiction of sex. Hm. So Scandinavian. But their were other central figures such as Norwegian Pal Lokkeberg the Dane Palle Kjaerullf-Schmidt. These directors were all typical for the period, as they came from a variety of artistic backgrounds, and engaged themselves in collaborations with contemporary modernist writers. In a sense, the film media became a melting pot for a variety of artists, and artistic aspirations. Widerberg started out as a novelist. Wrote critical essays and made films. Pal Lokkeberg came from the theater, and returned to it when the Norwegian Film Council rejected his third film project, due to his reluctance to follow the official guidelines for film productions. Also Palle Kjaerulf-Schmidt worked in close collaboration with two central Danish authors of the period. Klaus Rifbjerg on his films, and Leif Panduro on a number of television plays. These mixed backgrounds and collaborations indicated how the film medium had the status of a contemporary art form in sync with, or even in some aspects, primary to other art forms of it's time. This was also indicated in the ways that governments in Sweden, Denmark and Norway changed the support to film production. Sweden Film Institute was founded in 1963, and a system of film support was founded in Denmark by a new film Law in 1964. Whereas major changes in the Norwegian film support happened in the early 1970's. In Denmark, the cultural change did not only include public support to films, but also a national film school, in 1966. Also, national film cultures were highly debated in journals and newspapers. However, this did not necessarily mean that these films did well in terms of audiences or money. Actually, few of the central new wave films did well at the box office. As kind of art films. They produced more cultural than economic capital. Further, as in many other Western countries, film attendance suffered from the competition from television, combined with suburban life in which there were no longer local cinemas just around the corner. Nevertheless, the new wave cinema did change the extent, to how the film as a medium and national film production was considered as something of profound cultural importance. [COUGH] Simultaneous with the new wave, highly internationally acclaimed directors such as Carl Th Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman made films. Dreyer made Gertrud in 1964, his last film, and Bergman made many of his central modernist films such as The Silence, Persona and Shame. Whereas Dreyer style may seem almost archaic in Gertrud, Bergman certainly together with European directors such as Fellini Antonioni, Godard and Truffaut, appeared very contemporary and as something new. Nevertheless, he was already in the 50s, an internationally acclaimed director. Bergman's films in the 60s moved the qualities and symbolism of his earlier films into a new realm. By incorporating expressionist and highly self-reflexive modernist forms. That favored subjectivity and ambiguous realities much higher, than the social world of contemporary life. Thus he changed his film's language, in a period where the new wave flooded the screens of Europe and Scandinavia, but he cannot really be considered a new wave director, even though some of his earlier films, especially the Summer with Monika from 1953 do prefigure central features of the 60s new wave cinemas. In a series of articles in the Swedish newspaper Expressen, Bo Widerberg criticised Berman for being too inward directed and having his protagonist grieving the loss of God and meaning, instead of making stories about contemporary people in present societies. Widerberg wanted a cinema that connected directly with contemporary realities of Sweden. [COUGH] So, what was characteristic about the new wave in Scandinavia? First, new wave cinemas was not a single unitary style. Whereas wave may indicate something powerful, new indicates that it was something different from earlier films. Yet this negative demarcation referred to a whole range of different approaches to filmmaking. Even though several films were based on those, it was the cinema of the director, who either wrote his own stories or turned stories of others into his own personal vision anyway. The camera was the filmmaker's pen, it was an auteur cinema, and there was a feeling that cinema was the art form in which an absolute contemporary sensibility came to the fore. The modern world became visible in the film medium and it did so from new styles, new forms of storytelling and a whole new attitude to characters and themes. The metaphor of the wave hints at the powerfulness of these new cinemas, but waves also stir things up and turn them on their heads. [MUSIC]
