Roy Andersson: Shorts & Commercials

Before you embark on Andersson's Living trilogy, see how he developed his approach through a series of blackly comic adverts.

Advertising provided the foundation for Andersson’s development as a filmmaker, not just financially but also creatively. The deadpan sketches in these one-shot commercials for insurance, saucepans and yoghurt are often clear prototypes for the tableaux in his later work, and the money they brought in helped to establish Andersson’s Studio 24 in Stockholm, where the vast majority of his shooting is done.

In 1987 the director took on a more ambitious commission, to produce a public information film on the AIDS virus. The result, Something Happened, was rejected by the Swedish Health Authority and went unseen for years afterwards. It was the first flourishing of Andersson’s signature style, with pasty-faced figures battling absurdly under the gaze of a camera that hardly ever moves, an approach next used to devastating effect in World of Glory (1991). Narrated by an impassive but haunted salaryman, it employs incongruity and surreal humour to probe at creeping commercialisation and Sweden’s complicit role in the Holocaust. It could well be the best short film ever made.

A Roy Andersson pass is also available for £25. This bundle gives access to all of Andersson's 'living' trilogy as well as this screening of his shorts and commercials.