A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

They had married in 1876, after a fantastic love affair. She was married to a royal guards' officer who gave her over to Strindberg because he himself wanted a flirtation with his cousin. Strindberg was the knight in shining armor to this woman, also because via him she could get to be an actress, which she couldn't do while married to a guards' officer. A fantastic love affair. The first part of

Madman's Defense

is full of the most amazing lyricism and tenderness, but at the same time, it was

written

when the marriage was falling apart. That in itself sets you thinking. What complex forces were underneath in him?

He also wrote another autobiography,

The Son of a Servant,

in 1886. He called it that because his wifesorry, Freudian sliphis

mother

had been his father's housekeeper. She had given illegitimate birth to the first couple of children before Strindberg was born in wedlock. Part of the film will be based on his writing about his childhood. I'm going to illustrate his life from his birth up to 1875 when he first meets Siri von Essen, which is fantastically romantic. That is where the film will stop. The film will

also

start when he

meets

Siri von Essen and, based on

A Madman's Defense,

will wend a certain course. And I'm also going to center on the period when he wrote

A Madman's Defense

. It's going to be so tremendously complex, and not knitted togetherI'm not looking for the bridges. I've done a script. I just wrote letting things come, jumping backward and forwards between the three periods just to see what fell against what. I've deliberately forced only one meeting of the structures during the body of the film: when he divorces Siri von Essen, his mother dies in his childhood. But the other events will come where they come. It's really exciting; it means that in the editing, when the stuff starts to drop together, there'll be all kinds of complex relationships.

There's another layer I haven't told you about yet. It's an important part of all this, the sociological part. I'm going to trace the development of the increasing rigidity of Stockholm as a city. Now

this

I'm expert on!

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A really fantastic historian is helping me trace the development of the Stockholm press and the way the structure of information

on the page

settled into a pattern by the 1860s, and had become completely commercialized by the 1880s. I'm indirectly laying that against a social tracing of the increasing rigidity of the social pattern of Stockholm, which was never a free city. It was a city ruled by the king. Kings have played an extremely autonomous role in the Swedish society, and the Swedes have rarely looked at that. They always go goo goo over the king, like we do in England. Well, in the film the king is going to emerge as something of a tyrant. Swedish kings interfered strongly in politics, and several were really reactionary.

Stockholm was an agricultural city dominated by the court; there was a large underprivileged class. Very rapidly it was hauled into the industrial eraprobably more rapidly than any other city in the Western world. Within fifteen years, heavy production came in, and so on. And the Swedish soul began to developunfortunately, the modern soul. The city became more and more rigid. The police force developed. By 1879, the city was broken up into zones of control, which interestingly is just about when the press had become spatially systematized. Each zone contained ten thousand people, and there was a guy in charge of registering the population. This was seen as a more sophisticated censor processoops, sorry, another slip

census

process; they registered the birth, death, and occupation of every person within each district. They also listed prison sentences, and other reported irregularities in moral behavior. From this time on, you can look at the way juvenile delinquents are treated, the increasing stress on more penal sentences. I won't bore you, but there are so many things that you can see are part of the development of "modern civilization." The town is architecturally destroyed. Stockholm is a fantastic model for how our society's completely fucked itself up with more and more structures and blocks. And, of course, there's also what the words of the news stories are

saying,

which will add other complexities.