Director Vilgot Sjöman Screenplay Vilgot Sjöman Director of Photography Peter Wester Editor Wic Kjellin Music Bengt Ernryd With Lena Nyman Lena Vilgot Sjöman Vilgot Börje Ahlstedt Börje Peter Lindgren Rune, Lena’s father Ulla Lyttkens Ulla Magnus Nilsson Magnus Marie Göranzon Marie Holger Löwenadler The King and as themselves: Olof Palme, Jevgenij Jevtushenko, Martin Luther King. Produced by Göran Lindgren Production Company Sandrew Film & Teater AB Runtime 121 minutes

I Am Curious – Blue / Jag är nyfiken – blå
Sweden 1968

Director Vilgot Sjöman Co-director Bertil Sandgren (The Pentecostal Revival Church scene) Screenplay Vilgot Sjöman Director of Photography Peter Wester Editors Wic Kjellin, Carl-Olov Skeppstedt  Music Bengt Ernryd, Bengt Palmers. With Lena Nyman Lena Vilgot Sjöman Vilgot Börje Ahlstedt Börje Sonja Lindgren Sonja Hans Hellberg Hasse Bim Warne Hasse’s wife Peter Lindgren Rune, Lena’s father Gudrun Östbye Lena’s mother Gunnel Broström The woman on the island Marie Göranzon Marie Magnus Nilsson Magnus Ulla Lyttkens Ulla and as himself: Henning Sjöström. Produced by Göran Lindgren Production Company Sandrew Film & Teater AB Runtime 107 minutes

DVD, USA 2003: Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1) Aspect ratio 1.33:1 Sound Mix Monaural Extras Disc 1 Introduction by Vilgot Sjöman. Director’s diary (excerpts). Video interview with publisher Barney Rosset and attorney Edward de Grazia. Videoessay on the film’s censorship and trial. Transcripts of the trial of the film (excerpts). Theatrical trailer with an introduction by Sjöman. Disc 2 Director’s diary (excerpts). Excerpts from Sjöman’s documentary Self Portrait ’92. Deleted scene with an introduction by Sjöman.

I Am Curious – Yellow starts in an elevator. Director Vilgot and starlet Lena are stealing a kiss on their way up to the offices of the production company Sandrew. She stars in his film (in production) about the young and curious girl Lena. In the film within the film, Lena interviews people in the streets of Stockholm together with her friend Ulla. The question “Does Sweden have a class system?” is asked over and over, finally to the Prime Minister to be, Olof Palme. At intervals the framing story intervenes. Vilgot is sulking, jealous of Lena’s flirting. Ensuing interviews treats the military system and the issue of pacifism. Fantasy sequences depict the transformation of the Swedish military forces into an organisation practicing non-violent resistance. Lena and her friends forms “Nyman’s institute” in her bedroom at her father’s flat. It is a centre for research and protest against practices such as tourism in Franco’s Spain and oppression in the Soviet Union. Lena meets Börje. They immediately start a relationship and make love. Lena later finds out that Börje is married and goes away on a retreat in the countryside. Börje finds her there, they make love and fight, and in a dream sequence Lena shoots and castrates him. She returns to the city. Lena and Börje meet at his place of work – he is a car salesman. They fight again and Lena tells him she has scabies. Director Vilgot breaks the action and castigates the actors for their poor performances. At home Lena breaks down and tears her “institute” apart. In the penultimate scene, Lena and Börje undergoes the painful treatment for scabies. Vilgot seems to enjoy the discomfort of the actors. Finally, in the framing story, Lena visits Vilgot in his office. She returns the key to his apartment and leaves. Börje waits outside, and they kiss passionately in the descending elevator.

I Am Curious – Blue starts, again, in the framing story. Vilgot is testing girls for one of the parts in the film. Lena, in the film within the film, takes part in a sex education class for girls. Börje is tested for the part as Börje, lover and car salesman. Paradoxically, defamatory letters to Lena, the real life actress, are inserted. The authors call her a “whore”, referring, one must assume, to the explicit scenes in I Am Curious – Yellow. Interviews by Lena and Ulla pick up the theme of the class system. These are followed by interviews about peoples view on the church and religion. Lena runs into her mentor cum lover Hasse and his wife, and follows them to their home. In a dreamy sequence Hasse and Lena try to make love in the tower at the Gröna Lund amusement park, but he is impotent. Director Vilgot breaks the action and criticizes the male actor for making Hasse such a wimp. At the fashionable Cecil’s Bar the film team and Lena meet Börje in the framing story. Lena and Börje make love. In the film within the film, Lena leaves the city to find her estranged mother, but ends up at a sermon in a Pentecostal Revivalist Church. She interviews a young Pentacostal about his views on sexuality. She presses on to Strömsund where she meets a prison doctor to discuss conditions in Swedish penal institutions. Lena’s friend Sonja, a beautiful single mother, tells her story. After surreptitiously watching two women making love, Lena returns to the city and to Hasse. The scabies is discovered, and once again we return to the scene from Yellow, where Lena tells Börje about the scabies. They go to the hospital for the treatment. When Lena and Börje walk away from the hospital, director Vilgot calls for a re-take. At this moment, Lena’s mother appears, and Lena starts walking out of the set towards her, glowing with happiness.

One eye, her right, in extreme close-up. She watches a harebell, sunbeams refract in beads of dew on the silken flower-cup. Lena sits in a meadow, dressed in a wrap-around Indian skirt, breasts bare. She yawns. “6.15: meditation” appears in the lower end of the screen.

The following sequence takes us through a day on Lenas retreat in the desolate yet beautiful rural landscape. She drinks fresh water from a brook for breakfast and reflects on the wisdom of Martin Luther King before a pacifist house altar – a broken rifle on a chair, King’s picture leaning against it. Her meals are Spartan, three peas for lunch and a carrot for dinner, the latter devoured in an almost obscene frenzy. The day ends in bed, where Lena devotes herself to “sexual theory”, leafing through an illustrated lover’s guide in fascinated disbelief. On the soundtrack: Bengt Ernryds music, starting in the manner of a Swedish folk-song, moving into the musical vocabulary of cool jazz as we go along.

This is a brilliant sequence. It is beautiful and profound, yet funny; Nyman delivers excellent pantomimic comedy acting. It is ironic, but avoids the coldness often present in that mode. It is playful, yet perfectly controlled. There are quite a few gems like this in Vilgot Sjömans diptych I Am Curious – Yellow/I Am Curious – Blue.

The Curious films have certainly made their mark. Yellow caused a virtually world wide stir when it was released internationally. It was debated, banned, boycotted, cut to pieces and reassembled in Tokyo, Berlin, Montevideo and Cleveland, Ohio. It was seized by United States customs on the grounds of obscenity upon its arrival in New York in the hands of the controversial publisher Barney Rosset, head of Grove Press, but when it was declared not obscene by the second circuit Court of Appeals it changed the path of film history. Moreover, it is a fair guess that it is the most widely seen Swedish film ever made. It is said to have grossed over $ 20 000 000 in the U. S. alone, and it held its position as the top grossing foreign film in that country into the 1990s. Why the fuss?

Yellow showed a man’s penis in sexual situations. It was not erect, but it was there. Censors, champions of decency, and legislators all over the world felt that the film crossed a line, and there was no telling where we were going from there. And they were right. Attorney Edward de Grazia defended the film on its first trial in New York. In De Grazia’s and Roger K. Newman’s book Banned Films (1982) he points to the fact that the decision in the Court of Appeals and the successful distribution of Yellow were crucial for changing the legal practice governed by the so called obscenity laws in the U. S.

In terms of film history, Yellow is without a doubt a significant film, one of those watershed movies, similar in kind (but obviously not in scope) to Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) and Rossellinis Roma, città aperta (1945). But where Porter pointed in the direction of the Western and Rossellini spearheaded Neorealism, Sjöman’s film paved the way for hard core pornography.

This undisputable fact is ironic, since Sjöman’s intentions were manifestly anti-pornographic. In the published diary that narrates the making of Yellow and Blue, he defines pornography in terms of voyeurism, and argues that what traditionally make scenes of lovemaking in the cinema pornographic are the veils, the sheets, the slow dissolves, the whole machinery of titillation and innuendo. The naked fact could not and would not be pornography. This is the theory behind the practice in the diptych, and the films bear this out. Many reviewers, along with judges and witnesses in the U. S. trials, actually criticized Yellow for being bad pornography. Lena was lumpy and awkward, Börje was limp, and Sjöman – the pornographer – obviously did not know what he was doing. But what he tried to do was to transcend voyeuristic fantasy and reach the emotional and physical facts of love in all their ordinariness – despite intercourse in trees and outside the royal palace, not to mention a tenuous line of demarcation between different layers of reality in the fictional world of the films. And he did achieve this through intimate camera work and through the occasionally marvellous acting of Nyman and Ahlstedt.

Yellow and Blue are crucial films also in the context of Sjöman’s work as an auteur in the European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. He was a renowned novelist in Sweden already in the late 1940s and Ingmar Bergman’s protégé. From scriptwriting and a book on the making of Bergman’s Winter Light (1963), Sjöman went on to direct his first film, The Mistress (1962), shot after Winter Light, but released the year before. That film, as well as the other three he released before Yellow, was firmly in the vein, even the jargon, of directors like Bergman and Antonioni, visually as well as thematically. The diptych was an attempt to break away from that, and especially from the “father figure” Bergman.

Sjöman, much inspired by Jean Rouch’s work, wanted to improvise, to use cinema vérité techniques, and to make a film that would matter politically, a portrait of contemporary Sweden, hence the Yellow and Blue, the colours of the Swedish flag. In this he was a pioneer, at least in Scandinavia, of the politically “conscious” filmmaking in a documentary-like style that became a major current in the late 1960s and early 1970s, blending politics, sexuality and existentialism (cf. Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, 1969, and the work of Dusan Makavejev).

Crucial, important, a watershed, pioneering: definitely the stuff that screening lists in university courses in Film Studies are made of. The Curious films are required viewing for any historically minded film buff or scholar. The Criterion Collection release is a true cultural achieved become too radical a call to revolutionary action to be effective as a union-organizing tool among the working class. Even before the final cut, the LA Black Panthers had become distressed that L A Newsreel’s focus on its role in the liberation struggle had shifted toward the industrial proletariat in general; and now that the LA branch of the Black Panther Party had been effectively destroyed, no agency or focus for organizing was immediately available. Since the political vision that had fueled Repression—that is, of the Black Panther Party as the domestic vanguard of a global revolution—no longer had an objective existence, the film no longer had a function. Repression was abandoned, left as a work print along with the original negatives in cardboard boxes that were shuffled from one ex-member to another but not opened for more than a quarter century.^xxii

The formal dissolution of LA Newsreel was announced to the other branches at the end of 1970, though the political study group described earlier continued until May 1971.^xxiii Some members drifted away from political movements while others became avowed Communists; some of these joined the Watts-based California Communist League, taking jobs at General Motors, Union Carbide, and other local factories and committing themselves to the long-term strategy of organizing among the most exploited members of the industrial working class.

The resignation earlier that spring of Waxman, an artist and one of the LA Newsreel’s earliest members, exemplifies the group’s aesthetic impasse at that historical moment. Scheduled to lead a discussion of Mao’s “Talk On Literature and Art at the Yenan Forum,” she concluded that his imposition of a rigid, party-dictated, political line was inimical to a fully human art practice. She consequently felt obliged to drop out of an organization which, as completely as any in the western world, had attempted to follow Mao’s principles that artists should integrate with the working class, simultaneously teaching them and learning from them.

Repression’s aposiopesis articulates its historical moment, telling the story that the film itself could not bring itself to tell—that neither did the real possibility of armed insurrection exist in the United States, nor did the immediate possibility of a working-class film culture. The LA Newsreel experienced essentially the same cinematic possibilities and contradictions generated by the national and international political developments of the period that gave rise to the other branches. It also followed roughly the same overall itinerary, one that Bill Nichols justly characterized at the time as a “barometric” reflection of the progress of the New Left in general.^xxiv

The group’s vision of cinema as an interventionist political practice and its attempts to displace the passive, aestheticized, consumerist responses to culture inculcated by the corporate entertainment industry challenged the fundamental mechanisms of bourgeois culture and forced the development of new social relations within the filmmaking group,^xxv new relations between the filmmakers and their constituencies, and new relationships between cinema and other political activities. The specific history of LA Newsreel—its rapid politicization, its close working relationship with the Black Panther Party, its failure to complete and distribute Repression, and the core members’ move into factory organizing—must be understood within the history of the national Newsreel movement as a whole and within the international wave of early-1970s guerrilla cinema, the “Third Cinemas” for which it was partly the inspiration.^xxvi

But the LA branch’s geographical specificity must also be recognized and considered within the history of difficulties faced by the city’s anticapitalist cinemas generally. The historical impossibility of Repression’s completion, then its own lost history are part of that larger repression. The fact that LA Newsreel failed to complete a film of its own is underscored by the presence of UCLA’s film school, where many of its members had studied, and situates this defeat within the historical and geographical contradictions of Los Angeles itself. The failure reproduces the historical tension between the city’s heritage of hostility to working-class self-consciousness (otherwise apparent in the ongoing record of notorious police brutality against the poor, saliently exemplified by the destruction of LA Black Panther headquarters) and the history of attempts to confront this repression by militant acts of working-class self-assertion.

Geographically, LA Newsreel’s trajectory reflects the city’s spatiality; its decentered urban structure and the consequent isolation of ethnic and other identity groups allowed local cultural enclaves to flourish clandestinely but also inhibited the formation of a common front across them. Spatial segregation split the LA Black Panthers from the working-class Chicano community’s Moratorium Against the War and other barrio uprisings of 1970–72, for example, and facilitated the LAPD’s strategy of isolating then destroying them separately. In this context, the white LA Newsreel members’ work with the LA Black Panthers was a remarkable achievement: it was testimony to both the Panthers’ ability to see beyond the immediacy of their own repression and the racial issue to the fundamental exploitations of capitalist society, and second to Newsreel’s ability to mobilize across the city’s spatial divides and collaborate with different ethnic groups.

The coalition demanded a bridge between Venice, the beach town where (before gentrification transformed it into a colony for mid- and upper-echelon bourgeoise) bohemians and working-class minorities lived side by side, and South Central Los Angeles, the inner-city neighborhood that was still as ghettoized as it had been in the mid-1960s when riots broke out in Watts. The core members’ move from one to the other, and then to the factories, indicates the transformation in LA Newsreel’s awareness of the changing terrain of its own political possibilities. The original Venice–South Central geographic connection was also important in what it excluded or circumvented: the spaces that were traversed in the drive from Venice to Thirty-Ninth and Broadway but could not be incorporated into a radical social movement—Beverly Hills, the liberal west side, and Hollywood. Hollywood’s repressiveness, more than any other, frames the history of LA Newsreel. The group’s small size, its extreme politicization, its singular focus on the most exploited Americans, and finally the abandonment of the film all signify the absence of any broadly liberal, reformist film culture in the city at that time.

In the summer of 1969, just as LA Newsreel was getting under way, the film Easy Rider was theatrically released. Appropriating all the innovations of underground film yet canceling their utopian implications, Easy Rider showed Hollywood executives that if the countercultures were cynically distorted, their failures could be exploited and marketed. A swarm of exploitations quickly followed, many directly plagiarizing Newsreel’s own films. While LA Newsreel was photographing LA Black Panther breakfast programs, for example, Michelangelo Antonioni was shooting Zabriskie Point (1970) at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, lifting entire scenes from San Francisco Newsreel’s San Francisco State: On Strike (1969) to elaborate a dystopian fantasy about (as the male lead sardonically remarks) “a white man taking up arms with the blacks.

In the alienated commercial hollowness of Zabriskie Point—as in the international bourgeois art film generally—the social creativity and interracial unity of the New Left at its best is usurped by a spectacle of fucking and destruction; it reaches its climax in the dynamiting of a desert home, an ecological outrage presaging the firebombing of the Philippine jungles in Apocalypse Now (1979), the most obscene apology for the invasion of Vietnam and the most obscene appropriation of sixties aesthetic and political radicalism yet produced. Apocalypse Now was initially written by John Milius and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) and UCLA film schools, respectively, just a few years before some of the original LA Newsreel members.

Though Hollywood learned to tap the youth cultures, and though “youth pix” played a role in the New Left’s imagination,^xxvii the possibility of the industry playing a positive role in specifically working-class political movements was no greater in the 1970s than it had been in Harry Potamkin’s day. As the cinematic avant-garde became entirely preoccupied with feminism and then other forms of identity politics, the working class ceased to be the subject of history or movies of any kind. Yet in Los Angeles, in the gloomy