This examination of the life and art of August Strindberg depicts the Swedish dramatist as an outsider, an iconoclast who flouted rules and railed against convention and hypocrisy to change the social, political, and economic mores of nineteenth-century society. In addition to examining key episodes in Strindberg’s life, the film deploys a complex structure that reflects Watkins’s deepening concern with the powers of mass audiovisual media. Produced as part of a full-length video production course for Swedish Folk High School, the project took Watkins and twenty-four students two years to complete. The students raised funds, sewed costumes, learned to operate equipment, and carried out all of the functions involved in a major theatrical video production. The film’s layered, spiral structure attempts to decentralize its own authority and suggest ways in which the media of the future might share its power with the public. The film has been boycotted by Swedish television. - From the Harvard Film Archive Website (http://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendars/01janfeb/watkins.htm)
|
