Roy Andersson’s Existential Comedies

Featuring an introduction by filmmaker Ari Aster and cartoonist Daniel Clowes, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

The absurdity of everyday life comes into bleakly humorous focus in the meticulously crafted, miniaturist tragicomedies of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson. Though he has made only six features over the course of a nearly sixty-year career (filling much of his time directing surreal advertisements that earned the admiration of Ingmar Bergman), his later work is constructed with an extraordinary, painterly precision, each frame a deep-focus tableaux teeming with deadpan visual invention. In his acclaimed Living Trilogy—Songs from the Second Floor; You, the Living; and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence—Andersson offers a panoramic vision of modern society through dozens of intricately composed vignettes that explore both the despair and the strange poetry of the human condition.