Roy Andersson’s Living Trilogy and

Jean-Luc Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

Bob Hanke, York University

Abstract:
In this article, I explore three films that comprise Swedish director Roy Andersson’s
“Living Trilogy” – Songs from the Second Floor (2000); You, the Living (2007); and
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). My aim is to push the
philosophical bearing of Andersson’s films towards Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of
art and cinema. How should we understand his cinematic way of looking,
intermedial images, and production of sense? First, I trace Andersson’s concept
of the “complex image” and aesthetic of “trivialism.” Second, I outline Nancy’s
approach to “presentation” and the “evidence of film.” Third, I describe Andersson’s
“axiomatics” of looking and collection of characters. Finally, I consider the ways this
co-existential trilogy suggests a realization of a Nancian ontology of being-with and
exposure to the sense of a world. I contend that Andersson’s style is a praxis and a
regard for this world. What his fragmentary films communicate to us can be
illuminated by Nancy’s idea that some cinema makes evident a sense of the world.

Keywords: Roy Andersson; complex image; trivialism; Jean-Luc Nancy; evidence of

cinema; sense of the world.

In this article, I explore three films that comprise Swedish director Roy
Andersson’s living trilogy: Songs from the Second Floor (2000); You, the
Living (2007); and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014).
Based on an auteurist mode of art film production and tableau form,
this film trilogy has a distinctive style that expresses what it means to be
human. It mobilizes a gaze that invites the spectator to look at human
being as such. Abandoning narrative, the films’ aestheticism belongs to a

Film-Philosophy 23.1 (2019): 72–92

DOI: 10.3366/film.2019.0099
© Bob Hanke. This article is published as Open Access under the terms
of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (http://www.
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use,
distribution and reproduction provided the original work is cited. For commercial
re-use, please refer to our website at: www.euppublishing.com/customer-services/
authors/permissions.
www.euppublishing.com/film

72
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

cinema of seeing that is poised between the arts. These three films span
the mundane and the absurd, combining daily concerns and quotidian
unhappiness with deadpan comedy and unexpected shock-images of
inhumanity.1
How should we understand the director’s novel cinematic way of looking
and production of sense? By staging an encounter between Andersson’s
film making-thinking and Nancy’s thought, my aim is to push the
philosophical bearing of Andersson’s late films towards Nancy’s philos-
ophy of art and cinema. Nancy thinks of art as “fragmentary and fractal,” as
presentation of being (of existence) that is, in the first instance, “multiple in
materials, in material fragmentation of sense: sensible existence, fractal
existence” (Nancy, 1997, p. 128, p. 132). In a lecture on contemporary art
in 2006, he explains art makes us feel a “certain formation of the
contemporary world, a certain shaping, a certain perception of self in the
world” (Nancy, 2010, p. 92). For Nancy, “world” means a certain possibility
or circulation of meaning where there may be limited, ready-made,
repeated, elementary signification or an absence of signification.
Andersson has such a world in his sight and his film trilogy enacts
attentiveness to ordinary existence and turbulence. Like Nancy, he is
sensitive to the sensible qualities of art and poses ontological questions.
Both Andersson and Nancy are “indebted that the world presents itself,
that being is there to be attended to, regarded, gazed on” (Colebrook,
2009, p. 18). Andersson’s conspicuous gaze can be understood as a
regard, a guarding which “calls for watching and waiting, for observing,
for tending attentively and overseeing” (Nancy, 2001, p. 38).
Andersson’s trilogy is appealing because it is uncategorizable
and yet aligned with “cinematic poesis” (Sinnerbrink, 2014) and the
contemporary “slow cinema” movement (de Luca & Jorge, 2016). In the
landscape of global art cinema, Brodén (2017) highlights his old-school,
high-modernist sensibility. Andersson’s tableaux vivants invite closer
examination of their sensual mode of perception. Pethő (2015) argues
that observing characters within a tableau “may paradoxically heighten
both the sensation of reality and artificiality, producing the effect
of an artification or exhibition of an everyday experience” (p. 43).
Furthermore, Andersson’s sensibility and film style isolates the sense of
sight “so as to force it to be only what is outside of signifying and useful
perception” (Nancy 1996, p. 21). Nancy’s philosophy gives us a wider
angle on art, the senses and the production of sense. To detach sense from

1. The author would like to thank David Sorfa and two anonymous reviewers for
constructive feedback that contributed to the development of this article.

73
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

the signification of determinate meaning, he traces the etymology of the

French term “sens” to the German “carrying-oneself-toward-something”
(Nancy 1997, p. 12). Contemporary art, he argues, puts into play “a
certain possibility of signifying, pain, suffering, the human body and also
the gesture of the artist himself” (Nancy, 2010, p. 93). Arguably, what
Andersson’s fragmentary films communicate to us can be illuminated by
Nancy’s idea that cinema “makes evident a conspicuous form of the
world, a form or a sense” (Nancy, 2001, p. 12).
In what follows I describe how Andersson’s concept of the “complex
image” and aesthetic was created, his film praxis and the intermedial
density of his images. Turning to Nancy’s philosophy of film, I draw upon
his analysis of Abbas Kiarostami’s films to describe Andersson’s
axiomatics of looking and space of being-with. What is striking about
his collection of characters is how they are figured and their coming and
going. In the last section, I map Nancy’s thinking about structures of sense
onto Andersson’s co-existential trilogy to delineate their sense of a world.

Creating the Complex Image and Trivialism

Andersson’s creative process and technique is situated within Studio 24,
a production company and studio he set up in Stockholm. His local
mode of relatively autonomous feature film production and shooting style
are centered on designing and building sets rather than writing scripts.
He begins production “by painting, with watercolor, over sketches, for
each scene” (Andersson quoted in Indiewire, 2015). In 1984, he started
working with Hungarian-Swedish cinematographer István Borbás. The
features and qualities of their work are part of a collective, hand-crafted,
operation. Together, they approached the frame as a canvas:
The space tells something about us and determines us at the same time.
The space is often telling more about the characters than the lines… We did
not have any script but we did have drawings. We would practice in front of
the camera… so we worked as painters not as filmmakers. (Borbás, 2015)

Everything is built on a 1:1 scale around the camera and what is

seen through the viewfinder, and then put together in editing. Rather
than using green screens and digital compositing, Andersson uses the
technique of tromp l’oeil to enlarge the studio space and shoot exterior
locations. He only resorts to camera movement or computer-generated
images in rare circumstances. “What you see is what there is” (Renfors
quoted in Carlsson & Arte, 2011); what there is to see is what Andersson
(2010) calls the “complex image.”
This concept was created over many years. Through the necessity of
producing commercials to make a living, he made a virtue out of this

74
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

compressed form. By regarding them as short films, he realized

the advantages of using fewer images within a given amount of cinematic
time. In 1985, he made a commercial for the Swedish Democratic Party,
titled Why Should We Care About Each Other, which experimented with
abstract and absurdist elements (Lindqvist, 2016a, p. 559). He discovered
an affinity with Bazinian realism and developed Bazin’s sequence shot to
the point where shot and scene become one. Rather than classic montage,
multiple camera angles and action images, he and his cinematographer
design sequences of wide-angle, still images that combine long
takes, depth-of-field, and multiplane movement. The “complex image”
is not merely a technical image but a normative definition of a good
image – one that affirms a cinematic image that impresses and lingers.
The “complex image” must be “demanding and provoking”; the “viewer
must analyze the image on her/his own, without any suggested
interpretation” (Andersson, 2010, p. 277). We look at his film-world
from an immobile point of view, without close-ups or editing between
shots within scenes to direct our seeing and guide interpretation.
For Andersson, “[p]hilosophy and art belong together, as art is very
philosophical and arguably philosophy is an art itself” (Andersson in
Jakobsen, 2016). He found philosophical allies for his aesthetic in Albert
Camus, Martin Buber and György Lukács. Echoing Camus’s idea of the
absurd, his films gesture towards the here and now, where the futility of
life can coincide with images of beauty and moments of joy. The first Nazi
concentration camps at Dachau, Buber’s formulation of existential guilt
and Lukács’s analysis of Nazi ideology led him to question what “one can
and should do” in the field of representation. “How,” he asked, “can these
events be represented with dignity and responsibility?” (Andersson, 2010,
p. 277). How could one avoid using “close ups or use the suffering in
an attempt to achieve effects” (Andersson, 2010, p. 277). Such question-
ing can be traced to Jacques Rivette’s article On Abjection, which criticized
Gillo Pontecorvo’s depiction of historical horror in Kapò (1960).
Andersson’s short film World of Glory (1991) opens with a scene of
naked men, women and children being loaded onto a van to be slowly
gassed in front of passive bystanders. As the van circles in the distance,
one of the witnesses to this atrocity turns to look directly into the camera.
The rest of the film is composed of bleak, static vignettes of this
bystander – a middle-aged, estate salesman – and his banal everyday life.
This film introduced his style and political aesthetic (Brunow, 2010); ever
since, moral culpability for crimes against humanity remains an ethical
horizon in his work.
In The Evidence of Film, Nancy explores the look and nature of
Kiarostami’s films and the uniqueness of cinema as an art form. In

75
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

response to Through the Olive Trees (1994), Nancy writes: “capturing

images is clearly an ethos, a disposition, and a conduct in regard to the
world” (Nancy, 2001, p. 16). Drawing on this formulation, how has
Andersson’s way of looking been set up in these terms? In the tradition
of “modernity critics” (Larsson, 2010, p. 272), Andersson sees himself
combining “artistic tools of expression” with “great responsibility […] in
the service of humanism” (quoted in Nagy, 2015). At the same time, his
film style is a praxis that communicates across the incommensurability
between humanist philosophy and the neoliberal form of reason that
has configured “all aspects of existence in economic terms” (Brown, 2015,
p. 17). His mediation on our existential mode of being corresponds
with the unravelling of the Swedish social democratic welfare state, the
financialization of the global economy, and the rise of racial-nationalist
third parties in Europe. In this conjuncture, he articulates film and
existentialism in these terms:

I hope that through my films I am able to open up our sensibility towards

each other and show that we are existentially very vulnerable beings.
Plus, we just have so little time in our lives. There is no happy ending to any
of us [laughs]. But that’s exactly why we should be more responsible with
the time we have left. (Andersson quoted in Jackobson, 2016)

This philosophical thought of opening up sensibility towards human

being and finitude is indissociable from his praxis.
Andersson’s disposition toward contemporary cinema comes across
in various interviews and writings. In Our Times’ Fear of Seriousness
(Vår tids rädsla för allvar) (1995/ 1997, rev. 2009), he declared his
belief that existence at the end of the twentieth century was “marked by
extreme fearfulness of seriousness and a hatred for quality” (translated by
Lindqvist, 2016a, p. 561). The identity between dominant film style and
society is at the core of Andersson’s thinking-filming. He has been a critic
of the Swedish film industry in these polemical terms:

It feels like the Swedish film industry is almost collapsing. They don’t know
what subjects to treat. There are some exceptions. They are so marked by
“To write a selling script […] to make a selling movie.” […]according to a
template. The whole Swedish film community is bred in that spirit. That
has created a vast impoverishment. Impoverished imagery for example […]
also the ideas are impoverished. Mankind has so many important issues
[…] and Swedish films don’t even come close to these subjects. They deal
with relationships and personal problems. The filmmakers don’t regard
themselves as part of a bigger political context. They don’t believe those
things affect our destinies. (spoken in Carlson & Arte, 2011)

76
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

He has also critiqued fast filmmaking and “story-telling movies without

visual qualities” (Titmarsh, 2014). As he explains:

Nowadays it is possible to work very quick and fast, due to fewer technical
restrictions and hurdles. There is a lack of patience. Yet contemporary
directors are wondering why their films aren’t as impressive as the films
from the 60s. However, in the 60s it was necessary to work with great
patience. When I ask myself what contemporary cinema is lacking, it is
quite simple: it is a lack of patience, a lack of talent and a lack of money.
(Andersson quoted in Jakobson, 2016)

His conduct of film is known for rejecting conventional, narrative,

bourgeois, commercial cinema. In another interview, he asks: “Why aren’t
we making films like Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour or Buñuel’s
Viridiana anymore?” In answer to his own question, he says:

Just give me a little bit more time and I will show how we can make films
like in the 60s again [laughs]. It is actually my ambition, to find the limits of
the cinematic medium. I want to create films that contain philosophical and
poetic dimensions in life. I want to save cinema or at least bring it back to
being art. (Andersson quoted in Jakobson, 2016)

For Andersson, what are at stake are the film medium’s artistic status and
the visual qualities of the moving image. He seeks to make cinema as
visually rich as painting by incorporating some of its elements and
diverging from Bazin’s ontology of cinema based on the photographic
image. His affirmation of film as “art” is also in contrast with Godard’s
pronouncement that “film is over” and the “auteur is dead” (Godard in
Gibbons, 2011).
After the success of A Swedish Love Story (1970) and the failure of Gilap
(1975), Andersson made a transition from European realism – which was
influenced by Swedish director Bo Widerberg, Italian neorealism and the
Czech new wave – to what he calls a more “abstracted style” (Andersson
quoted in Macfarlane, 2015). Some residual elements of neorealism
remain; sequences of encounters, non-professional actors, class con-
sciousness, and the indiscernibility of real and imaginary. Tiring of
“realism” and “naturalism,” he was also inspired again by the history of
non-realistic, abstract painting, especially 20th century symbolists and
expressionists. Lindqvist (2016a) describes how his painterly control over
the visual elements of a scene diverged from von Trier and Winterberg’s
Dogme 95 Manifesto and Vow of Chastity. As he characterizes how
his optical and sound image has withdrawn from representation: “It looks
real but it’s purified and condensed. I’m fascinated by how life’s

77
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

grandness, smallness and mortality appear much clearer this way”

(Andersson quoted in Dagliden, 2015). His discipline of the cinematic
image follows Matisse’s rule for colorist painting: “Take away everything
that is not your intention” (quoted by Andersson in Aftab, 2015).
To account for his focus on existential questions, he and his production
team coined the term “trivialism,” which he then used in interviews and
commentaries:

One describes the world and our existence in their little trivial
elements, and in that way I hope that one can also get to the big, enticing,
philosophical questions. But how life is, life is of course trivial, we must
button buttons, we must zip up zippers, and we must eat breakfast. It is
exceedingly concrete and trivial, the whole of our existence. Even for those
who are in positions of power. I like this very much, emphasizing this
triviality, because it pushes people down to earth to that place where one
actually belongs. (Andersson quoted in Lindqvist 2016b, pp. 23–24)

“Trivialism” opens cinema onto the everyday fact of existence and

thematizes a shared ordinary world of mortal beings as a ground for
awareness. In the banality of this everyday mode of being and petty
details, both human foibles and sublime moments of beauty in the here
and now become apparent. His scenes of everyday life range from
personal misfortune to social malformation to the inhuman within the
human world. They are stretched between two poles: the all too human
and the limits of the human. In his most recent film, About Endlessness
(2019), visually inspired by Chagall and van Gogh, the juxtaposition of
tableau is accompanied by a Scheherazadean voice-over to invite
reflection on the precariousness and beauty of existence.
His stylization of cinematic images is complex because it is open and
dense, and this makes his trilogy distinctive and remarkable. As Lindqvist
(2016b) argues, his practice is based on the intermediality of film, poetry,
painting and music. While there is no one model of intermediality in
film studies, Pethő (2011) identifies a “sensual mode” based on the
attitude of flânerie that invites the viewer to get in touch with the world
and perceive the cinematic image in terms of other arts (Pethő, 2011, p. 5).
On this view, we could say Andersson’s tableau vivants mediate between
cinema, painting and theatre. Nancy, however, sees cinema poised
“between drawing, writing, music […] but each ‘art’ is a totality opening
onto others, configured with them, touching them […]” (Nancy, 2001,
p. 48). Pethő grounds the sensing of intermediality in the (inter)
sensuality of cinema while Nancy contends “art-technique looks, it has
regard for our look [regard], it looks at it and causes it to come about as
look” (Nancy 1996, p. 20).

78
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

The impression that Andersson’s cinematic image makes is a matter

of the selective film history he has in his eyes. He has repeatedly
cited Vittoria De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) as a formative film
(Kohn, 2015). The Decalogue, a 1989 TV series by the Polish director
Krzysztof Kieślowski, who was associated with the Cinema of Moral
Anxiety, restored his faith in cinema. His list of “best films” includes
works by Fellini, Tarkovsky, Wajda, Kubrick, Pontecorvo, Resnais,
Griffith, Kurosawa, and Buñuel (Andersson, 2012). Like Jacques Tati’s
Playtime (1967), Andersson’s optical and sound situations depend on
set construction and the right rhythm and movement of bodies. His
comedy also emulates aspects of the American silent comedies of Charlie
Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The “tragicomedic” tension between
jollity and gravity has been identified as a vital ingredient that infuses
his films with human authenticity (Lindqvist, 2016a, p. 561). The future
may look bleak but his looking at the human condition is lightened with
laughter, and that is, “the joy of the senses, and of sense, at their limits”
(Nancy, 1993, p. 390). There is a laughter that laughs at human
inadequacies and failings, but this sense is transformed into another
sense in the face of scenes of cruelty and violence that solicit an ethical
response.
Andersson’s filmmaking also involves poetry as art and technique.
In this respect, what is essential are poetic images, which Heidegger
defined as “imaginings in a distinctive sense: not mere fancies or illusions
but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the
familiar” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 226). Lindqvist (2010) reads the aesthetics
of Songs in terms of its formal artistic and intellectual correspondences
to César Vallejo’s modernist Spanish poetry. Songs, for example, opens
with this line of poetry from Vallejo’s Stumble between Two Stars: “Beloved
be the one who sits down.” Other lines of this poem are sampled in
subsequent dialogue with minor variations in colloquial Swedish. Beyond
his appropriation of this poem, Lindqvist shows how the humanist ethos
of Vallejo’s poetry infuses Andersson’s “trivialist” film style.
Vallejo is not the only poet providing a measure of mystery and the
poetic truth value of revealing being. The title of You, the Living comes
from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Roman Elegies (1790): “Be pleased,
you living one, in your delightfully warm bed, before Lethe’s ice cold
wave, will lick your escaping foot.” Death is integral to existence; this
poem reminds us that awareness of death is what gives meaning to life.
Film and poetry are fused together as aletheia, as a veiling/unveiling.
After the titles, A Pigeon begins with three portraits of everdayness titled
Three Meetings with Death. A husband dies opening a bottle of wine in the
dining room while his wife is using an electric mixer in the kitchen, an old

79
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

woman on her hospital death bed refuses to let go of her handbag full of
money, jewellery and her husband’s gold watch, a cashier in a cruise ship
cafeteria tries to give away a shrimp sandwich and a beer purchased by
a man who has just died of a heart attack. These are not tragic deaths
by murder, suicide or extermination. As ontological attestations of our
finitude, these scenes of indeterminate and senseless death appeal to
a sense of life. Andersson frames death similarly to Nancy: “Death is
neither the opposite of life nor the passage into another life; it is itself
the blind spot that opens up the looking […]” (Nancy, 2001, p. 18). This
blind spot, which “makes an opening for a gaze and presses upon it to
look” (Nancy, 2001, p. 12), is not limited to death scenes. Andersson’s
films open up a way of looking and what leans on our eye is their
intermedial density.
Intermedial density is obvious in Andersson’s fusion of film and
painting. Painting is central to his carefully-composed, tableau shots
and his sense of filmmaking technique. He found montage in the Baroque
printmaker Jacques Callot’s La Pendaison (1633) and was inspired by the
German new objectivists Otto Dix, Karl Hofer, Georg Scholz, and Felix
Nussbaum; and by Belgian painter James Ensor, American realist painter
Edward Hopper, and Spanish painter Francisco Goya. As Mildren (2013)
argues, Songs and Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death
“share structural and aesthetic affinities that transcend their radically
different media and eras of production” (p. 148). He adds: “The echoes of
style and satiric intent in Bruegel in Andersson’s work are crucial to the
construction of the director’s critique of an arguably terminal malaise of
a particularly European sense of identity” (p. 148). Similarly, A Pigeon is
indebted to Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow. Three crows sitting in the tree
above the hunters in the painting’s foreground inspired this film’s
imaginary birds-eye view of human existence.
For all their painterly qualities, however, Andersson’s films are
not purely visual; they also draw upon literary and musical resources.
Songs samples from Louis-Ferdinand Céline and August Strindberg.
The nonlinear narrative of A Pigeon, and the way the two novelty item
salesmen wander from place to place, is borrowed from Homer’s Odyssey,
while their characters are distilled from Laurel and Hardy, Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men and de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. He draws upon
a literary canon that includes Stig Dagerman, Hjalmar Söderberg,
Honoré de Balzac, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Milan Kundera. In addition
to Andersson’s inventory of literary invocations, there is music and
song. His soundtracks favor traditional music and New Orleans jazz.
He is also fascinated by the “unassuming music that existed in the
1930s when Nazism grew up” (Andersson quoted in Cedarskog, 2007).

80
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

Andersson uses music to bridge scenes or as counterpoint, to transmit

affective tones or evoke atmosphere. However, what distinguishes
music and sense? According to Nancy, music is beyond signification, a
sonorous site “where sense and sound mix together and resonate in each
other, or through each other” (Nancy, 2007, p. 7). Listening stretches
the ear and music has a resonant meaning “only in resonance” (Nancy,
2007, p. 7).
Of course, singular sonorous perception is in a complex relationship
with the visual. “In the image,” Nancy writes, “the visual and the sonorous
share registers with one another, communicate their accents to each
other (2016, p. 74). Andersson’s tableaus owe much to the way these
accents are shared across film viewing and listening space. For Songs
music was composed by Benny Andersson, and rearranged and
performed by Stockholm Session Strings. As Lindqvist (2016b) notes,
the “slow, jolting, pulse of bass strings in a waltz tempo contrasted with
a lighter, cautiously playful, melody – exemplifies both the style and
themes of Songs” (p. 115). Music and songs also enter the diegesis
in diverse ways. In one scene, a taxi driver and his girlfriend sit on a
kitchen chair and play a recorder together. In another scene, a group
of subway riders form a choir singing an elegiac aria. In You, the Living,
a middle-aged woman’s lament turns into Motorcykel, performed by the
Stockholm Classic Jazz Band. Some characters belong to a Louisiana
Brass Band and there is also a guitar player in a band called the Black
Devils. Other songs include the Swedish hymn I Have Heard About a City
Above the Clouds, which is often played at Swedish funerals, the German
university song O alte Burschenherrlichkeit with Swedish lyrics, and
a melody from A Little White Rabbit, a popular song that was recorded
by Edvard Persson in the 1930s. In A Pigeon, flamenco music and
dance convey a teacher’s attraction for one of her students. We also hear
Shimmy Doll, a 1950s rockabilly song, performed by Ashley Beaumont,
that evokes rhythmic, upbeat movement. Andersson also takes cues
from musical theatre when he stages a cheerful musical number in the
Limping Lotta bar scene in Gothenburg. Later in another scene, Jonathan
(Holger Andersson), one of two travelling salesmen, listens to a song
on a record player in his room and he cannot get the “beautiful, but
horribly sad” song out of his head. Apart from any musical interpretation,
what is dispersed along with each song is a “playful execution of sense,
a being-as-act through cadence, attack, inflection, echo, syncopation […]”
(Nancy, 1997, p. 86).
In Nancy’s (2016) theory of art, there are two regimes. The image is
the regime of surface distinguished from ground whereas musical
sonority represents a regime of outside and inside. In A Pigeon,

81
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

a disturbing modulation of image, voices and music occurs when we hear

screams transformed into eerie music when colonial soldiers incinerate
African slaves in a giant, rotating copper drum outfitted with the wide
end of trumpets. As it rotates, we see that “Boliden” is inscribed on
the drum – a reference to the Swedish mining company that shipped
toxic smelter sludge to Arica, Chile in the mid-1980s. In the next shot,
a group of formally-attired elderly people emerge from behind
curtained, glass sliding doors that reflect the previous shot. They
drink champagne and watch this atrocity while looking directly into the
camera. The music continues into the next scene with Jonathan (the
aforementioned salesman) sitting on his bed. He has thought of
something horrible and that he was involved, but he is unsure whether
it was a dream or not. The presence of unspeakable atrocity remains in
the present. This music hangs in the air in the next scene when he comes
out of his room, looks down the hallway to where the building manager
is sitting, and asks him, “Is it right using people only for your own
pleasure?”. The manager looks at his watch and asks, “Should we be
discussing these things in the middle of the night?”. As far as the manager
is concerned, there is nothing more to say because “there are people
here who are getting up early for work tomorrow.” At this moment,
we might hear what this kind of speaking lacks. The common sense of
the spectator’s sensitive body is dislocated by another order of sense
and truth.
These occurrences of Andersson’s intermedial production underscore
what Nancy calls art’s “multiple essence” and the “internal multiplicity”
of motion pictures (2001, p. 22). Rather than being merely a matter
of inter-art correspondences and influences, their inter-expression
indicates a principle of the arts and its corollary: “art’s irreducible
non-totality” and “between the arts, an interminable mutual resonance”
(Nancy, 2016, p. 74). Their sensual mode of intermediality appeals
to sight and sound without internal unity. Across his triptych,
Andersson’s film form and style is within and between the arts-in-process.

Andersson’s Axiomatics of Looking

In The Evidence of Film, Nancy differentiates films with metaphysical
themes from the mediation of existential themes. Cinematic metaphysics
means grasping “cinema as the place of mediation, as its body and its
realm, as the taking-place of a relation to the sense of the world” (Nancy,
2001, p. 44). In Andersson’s case, such mediation cannot be separated
from Sweden’s socio-political, historical reality or his social and political
sympathies. However, the surface of his screens can be considered
in another dimension, in which his cinema takes up its “presentation.”

82
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

This is where Nancy’s theory of cinema takes leave of the philosophy of

representation since Plato’s allegory of the cave. Nancy’s fundamental
premise is that “[t]he reality of images is the access to the real itself, with
the consistency and the resistance of death, for instance, or life, for
instance” (Nancy, 2001, p. 16). As Colebrook (2009) explains, for Nancy,
“the world is cinematic, and we come to realize that it is so today, with
cinema, and specifically with cinema of a certain type (non-narrative,
non-postmodern, or meta-cinematic cinema)” (p. 161). He insists that
the cinema has a specific mode of presenting presence, which he refers
to as the “evidence of cinema” (Nancy, 2001, p. 44). The relation
between film and world is a relation of evidence that presents the world
in each case.
In writing about Kiarostami’s film-making, Nancy shows how he
“mobilizes the look; he calls it and animates it, he makes it vigilant” (2001,
p. 16). Instead of representing the world, the cinema “presents – that is
to say shares (communicates) – the intensity of a look upon a world of
which it is part and parcel […]” (Nancy, 2001, p. 20). In his reading,
Kiarostami’s cinema is “intensified” and turns toward presence. And yet,
“[p]resence is not a mere matter of vision: it offers itself in encounters,
worries, or concerns” (Nancy, 2001, p. 30). The power of cinema lies in
its “regard” and “égard,” French words which mean to look and
to respect (Nancy, 2001, p. 38). Likewise, Andersson’s films affirm
cinema and have a presentational power that connects looking and
respecting. In a manner that is very different from Kiarostami’s poetic
road movies and documentary tropes, Andersson’s filmmaking combines
an insistence upon human everydayness with a way of looking at the
enigma of being. Judging from his scenes of animal cruelty and
companionship, his lens on modern homo sapiens in A Pigeon is
zoomorphic, and this supposes that “human exceptionalism” is rooted
in blindness to cruelty and abuse (Savage, 2016).
What are Andersson’s axiomatics of looking? Returning to the
Greek root axioˉma, – what is thought fitting – I will sketch four aspects
of his cinematic frame and images. First, “[a]lways there is a cut, a
framing” (Nancy, 2001, p. 42). From a fixed camera position, Andersson’s
viewfinder frames a studio space with a certain distance and duration.
His framing incorporates Bazin’s view of a filmed image. As Batemen
(2015) observes, within his frame there is an absence of a focal point
for the audience to look at. Hanich (2014) suggests that the “freedom of
the viewer – but also his or her obligation – to scan the temporal
progression of the shot demands a more active perception than usual
[…]” (p. 48). Freeing the eye to roam over a wide shot opens our visual
sense to more watchful viewing and curiosity.

83
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

Second, there is Andersson’s staging in depth and foregrounding/

backgrounding of characters. Hanich argues that his “hidden depth
shots” unveil previously hidden dimensions. In addition to their
comic, expressive and symbolic functions, he analyzes an “active-viewer
function” that “allows Andersson to combine an existential critique of
our modern life-world […] with an attempt to involve the viewer more
actively in the film […] in order to counter this modern malaise” (Hanich,
2014, p. 48). His characters are always observed and surrounded by
co-present others but “nevertheless existentially left alone” and situated in
modern, urban, European “non-places” (Hanich, 2014, p. 48). However,
this presupposes that there is an “I” that is prior to “we,” and overlooks
how Andersson conceives of space and the places where people live
and work.
Third, Andersson enjoys “watching and describing someone in a
room – in the widest sense of the word” (Andersson, 2010, p. 275). In
The Human and the Space (Människan och Rummet), he outlines his broad
definition of space in these terms:

But it is the space that bears traces of the human hand, formed by humans,
that in my opinion most strongly rouses the sensation that the space is
pursuing us. It reveals our place in social life and in history. It is revealed
that our conditions, our existence, is the result of a historical process in
which the influence of our own will is of lesser consequence than we would
like to believe. (Andersson, 2001)

Correspondingly, “[s]pace defines the human and exposes the value

of and conditions for the realization of the dreams a person might
have. Space speaks the truth. We do not always want to see or hear
it – especially, traditionally speaking, at the movies” (Andersson, 2001).
As he elsewhere sums up: “I think it’s extremely interesting to portray the
human being in the room, that is to say the environment they happen
to be in. The room tells us a lot about one’s place on earth and one’s
situation on earth” (quoted in Ratner, 2015). Whether we are being
observed or observing, this room presents film’s philosophical possibility
of beholding being there.
What is noteworthy is how this passage from Nancy’s Being Singular
Plural parallels Andersson’s view of a room:

Someone enters a room, he disposes himself in it and to it. In crossing

through it, living in it, visiting it, and so forth, he thereby exposes the
disposition – the correlation, combination, contact, distance, relation – of
all that is (in) the room, and, therefore, of the room itself […]. Being with is
not added on to being there; instead, to be there is to be with, and to be with

84
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

what makes sense – by itself, with nothing more, with no subsumption of

this meaning under any other truth than that of the with. (Nancy, 2000,
pp. 97–98)

Likewise, Andersson’s film-world presents a spatial sense of the world

where being-with is originary. In this Nancian sense, Andersson’s sense
of a room is where the truth of existence can be grasped. Neither solitary
beings nor humanity are alone in the world; the basic character of
existence is being-with-one-another in a crowded world. His attentive
looking at the world where we are with others and care for our existence
turns our looking at this world towards undercurrents of vulnerability
and humiliation, disconnection and alienation.
While this ontology is spatial, being-with can only happen in
time. Nancy privileges a spatial sense of time but has also thought
about the non-chronological present as a “nonequivalence of
singularities” – people, moments, places, gestures, hours, locutions, etc.
(Conley & Goh, 2014). This “Proustian” sense of the present involves
a “multiplicity of senses” that fills the present with a sense of the
world (p. 6). Andersson’s cinema touches another sense of the present
by drawing attention to time. Sometimes his characters recite platitudes
about time. In Songs: “Everything has its day.”, “There’s a time for
everything.”, “A new day is dawning.”. In You, the Living: “Tomorrow is
another day” is repeated. “Another” could mean time stands still, or
another day could affirm that a day is “the turning of the world – each
time singular” (Nancy, 2000, p. 9). His longer than usual scenes unfold
time as lived duration that sidesteps chronological time. He has described
how his “timeless” image is based on growing up in Sweden in the 1950s,
and how the “colors of that time” color his film images (Andersson,
2015). The video The Magnificent Anders(s)ons – The Look of Reality
illustrates the aesthetic of artificiality he shares with Wes Anderson,
but their memories of the past are very different (Beyond the Frame,
2017). As Lindqvist (2016b) notes, his scenes are anachronous. Waking
life, dreams, memories and history blur the succession of time as
past-present-future. The architectural styles of buildings also help define
a “between-ness” that is neither now nor then. As Andersson explains
his take on the heterochronic present, “[w]e are really living both our
time and the past all the time. Everything is affected by what has gone
before” (quoted in Ratner, 2015).
Fourth, consistent with his painterly technique, Andersson applies
Matisse’s rule to dreams, memories and histories. “Dreams,” he says,
“are realism, but in disorder” (Andersson quoted in Jakobson, 2016).
Sometimes characters turn to face the camera and tell us their dreams or

85
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

nightmares. In You, the Living, the scene of newlyweds Anna (Jessika

Lundberg) and Micke (Eric Bäckman) in their apartment rolling into
a train station full of well-wishers is a dream of idyllic happiness. In
another series of scenes, a cement worker recounts a dream where he
ends up on trial and is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair,
raising the question of injustice. In A Pigeon, between two bar scenes there
is a recollection image of Limping Lotta’s bar in Gothenburg in 1943.
Sheets of the past – like King Charles the XII and his army marching
to and back from Russia – march in and out of the present. In Songs,
a flashback of the hanging of a Russian teenage girl and boy are modelled
on a historical photo taken by a Lithuanian SS officer that documents
the hanging of two teenage members of the resistance movement in
1941. Another news photograph of the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of
Phnom Penh in 1975 inspires an airport departure hall scene. As his
cinematographer István Borbás comments, the presence of the past
makes it possible to “talk about political issues that spread over time”
(Borbás quoted in Bateman, 2015). Andersson’s concern that past
moral and political conditions leading to atrocities will continue gives
impetus to his articulation of humanism, social critique and “guilt toward
existence” (Lindqvist, 2016b). Ontological curiosity is intermingled with
ethical looking at “how we behaved in war, to poor people, and to others
exploiting them” (Andersson quoted in Ratner, 2015).
Besides these axiomatics of looking, Andersson constructs a film-world
with an idiosyncratic collection of characters. As a cross section
of Swedish society, their typicality flashes back to August Sander’s
photographic portraits during the Weimar Republic. In this
respect, characters may stand for more than themselves. He begins
production by sketching and painting his characters in watercolors. They
are then dressed in generic clothes and made-up in white face
make-up – in the tradition of circus clowns and the masks in Japanese
Noh theatre – which downplays social difference and renders them
archetypally human. Their pallid masklike faces are any-face-whatevers
that convey being weary and weighed down. Whether they are major
or minor characters, part of a dyad, small group or crowd, all of them
are portrayed in what Andersson calls “light without mercy” (quoted in
Spigland, 2010). This is consistent with his restrained, monochromatic,
minimalist set designs. As Andersson explains: “There are no shadows
to hide in. You are illuminated all the time. It makes you naked, the
human beings – naked” (Andersson quoted in Ulaby, 2015). Rather than
casting professional actors, Andersson has been “collecting characters
for years” in stores, restaurants, and gas stations, or by sending out
researchers (quoted in Romney, 2001). By finding the “right amateur,” he

86
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

gets an “extra quality, a presence […] a human being laid bare” (quoted in
Carlsson & Arte, 2011). In these ways, his characters are figured in
an image, where, in Nancy’s words, “every image is in some way a
‘portrait,’ not in that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that
it pulls and draws […]” (Nancy, 2005, p. 4).
In Nancy’s view, we are part of the “people”, not as one being but
as being-with. Beneath the tendency to judge people as “strange” or
“incredible” based on our own habitus, he uncovers another level where
the strangeness of singularity can be apprehended. Andersson’s naked
characters precipitate this strangeness. His praxis grasps the existence
of people “in the paradoxical simultaneity of togetherness (anonymous,
confused, and indeed massive) and disseminated singularity (these or
those ‘people(s),’ or a ‘guy,’ ‘a girl,’ ‘a kid’)” (Nancy, 2000, p. 7). The city
they inhabit is a location of co-existence as such, of common experiences
of being the same and different, of inclusion and exclusion, and intimacy
and loneliness.
In Swedish and German, the word irrfärd/irrfahrt (odyssey), suggests
a journey without a particular goal or distinct plan, wandering into
unexpected situations. Andersson’s interest in people coming and going
is evident in a funding application to the Swedish Film Institute:

In Songs from the Second Floor, we meet an existence that can neither be
apprehended nor surveyed, teeming with human destinies, some of which
we come to learn about, and they become the film’s main characters.
But we will have the experience, not of following these characters, but
rather of bumping into them, losing them from sight for a while, then
bumping into them again – and again, and again. (Andersson quoted in
Lindqvist, 2016b, p. 25)

His main characters wander, drift in and out, and move from the
foreground to the background or vice versa. They are positioned in
relation to secondary characters who are onlookers, bystanders, and
passersby. Some of these characters play the role of observers. We watch
the main characters and those who watch and listen to them. They are
exposed to the gaze and judgement of onlookers aligned with our gaze.
In Andersson’s view, both the space of being-with and the spacing of
beings characterize human existence.
In Nancy’s co-existential analytic, being “cannot be anything
but being-with-one another, circulating in the with and as the with
of this singular plural coexistence” (Nancy, 2000, p. 3). This means
that “we” are meaning because circulation constitutes existence, and
that the “ordinary” itself is the most strange because it is originary.

87
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

With existence laid open this way, he asks whether the purpose of art
and literature is to present this strangeness. In Andersson’s respectful
gaze, what is presented are places of being-with detached from
the Swedish ett volk (a people). What is illuminated is a plurality
of beings in positions – with, among, between – where all appearing
takes place.

Andersson’s Sense of a World

What sense of sense can clarify Andersson’s form of film-world as an
exposure of sense? For Nancy, art disengages the world from signification
and “that is what we call ‘the senses’” (Nancy 1996, p. 22). Moreover,
sense and world touch each other (Librett, 1997). This means that the
world is structured as sense and vice versa. Being “is being toward
the world, as toward the sense that it makes” (Librett, 2015, p. 215). In
The Sense of the World, he describes three formal structures of sense:
“(1) the observance of an order and ritual of the world […] (2) salvation,
where unhappiness is an illness, a worldly alienation […]” and
“(3) existence, as the exposition of being-toward-the-world or being-
world – where evil seems coextensive with good, the ‘worst’ with the
‘best’[…]” (1997, p. 147).
How does this structure map onto Andersson’s sense of the world, as
the place where sense happens? His observance of order and ritual
is marked by irony, sight gags, satire and nonsense. In his depiction of
the church and business, religious doctrine has been replaced by
neoliberal economic dogma. Unhappiness and inhospitality prevail,
and nothing is painted with salvation or redemption. Mortals live
under the sky but in the final scene of You, the Living, the sky is filled
with a squadron of B52 bombers flying over a large city. With respect
to the insignificance of the everyday compared to a world of mayhem,
this way of seeing comes with a sense as surprise, as the possibility
of significance. Each film takes a stance “toward the happenstance that
the world is” (Nancy, 1997, p. 152), of good and bad encounters or
confrontation, and the “sovereign possibility of responding to the
happenstance of sense” (Nancy, 1997, p. 151).
Andersson’s co-existential film triptych can be summarized as an
ontological event composed of one hundred and forty-six scenes that run
for four hours and forty-eight minutes. What the film viewer experiences
is a flow of scenes that begin in medias res and do not reach a conclusion.
In the absence of a narrative and any drama of rising and falling action,
the unfolding of human situations is unpredictable. Each scene comes
as a surprise each time. Some cinematic tableaux vivants are even
more discrete because they are exhibited like paintings at an exhibition.

88
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

Only Andersson’s singular, intensified gaze that presents itself as distinct

provides continuity to discontinuity.
By creating a disquieting sense of a world without concern and care for
the other and reinstalling presence of a person, of the past, we may
come to thinking about worldly co-existence. In Nancian terms, each film
“is in its fashion a synesthesia and the opening of a world” but only
insofar as “‘the world’ as such, in its being-world (the being of that
to which opens a being-to-the-world, is plurality of worlds” (Nancy, 1996,
p. 31). For Nancy, it is not that existence has no meaning or that the world
no longer has sense; rather, the world means “being-to or being-toward”
(Nancy, 1997, p. 8.) Andersson’s fragmentary stories and kaleidoscopic
way of looking has been set up to look toward being-with and the world
as a concatenation of events. His aesthetic presents fragments of a world
simultaneous with a fragmented world that avoids nihilistic non-sense.
His sense of a world is partially behind the present (in history and
memory) and has its own spatiality (the room of co-existence). His
gaze underscores looking from the right distance to relate to being. For
the spectator, it is a matter of tuning into this looking. His films say: Look!
Have regard for everyday encounters and unfolding tragedies. Pay
attention to sublime moments within the familiar. Observe the loss of
attention that takes care of others. Do not fixate on the present or forget
atrocities. Wonder at how we co-exist, communicate being-with, come
together and depart in relation to the exigency of the sense of the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aftab, K. (2015, April 12). Film-maker Roy Andersson Interview: “This movie will make you
smarter.” Retrieved July 25, 2016, from http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/films/features/film-maker-roy-andersson-interview-this-movie-will-make-
you-smarter-10170862.html
Andersson, R. (2001). Människan och Rummet. (S. Martin Cheadle, Trans.),
Forum Inredning Arkitektur Design, 1. Retrieved from http://www.royandersson.com/
rummet/
Andersson, R. (2010). The Complex Image. In M. Larsson & A. Marklund (Eds.), Swedish
Film: An Introduction and Reader (pp. 274–278). Lund: Nordic Academic Press.
Andersson, R. (2012). Roy Andersson. Sight & Sound Directors’ Poll. Retrieved from
http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/sightandsoundpoll2012/voter/1154
Bateman, C. (2015, June 11). A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence – An
Interview with Cinematographer István Borbás. Retrieved October 11, 2016, from
http://fourthreefilm.com/2015/06/a-pigeon-sat-on-a-branch-reflecting-on-existence-an-
interview-with-cinematographer-istvan-borbas/
Beyond the Frame. (2017). The Magnificent Anders(s)ons – The Look of Reality. Retrieved
from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUEVSNMdYLA
Borbás, I. (2015, January 21). Space Defines Existence: Workshop with István Borbás.
Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://kustendorf-filmandmusicfestival.org/2015/space-
defines-pigeon-existence-workshop-istvan-borbas/

89
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

Brodén, D. (2017). Old School Modernism? On the Cinema of Roy Andersson. Journal of
Scandinavian Cinema, 7(1), 5–12.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Brooklyn,
New York: Zone Books.
Brunow, D. (2010). The Language of the Complex Image: Roy Andersson’s Political
Aesthetics. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, 1(1), 83–86.
Carlsson, J., & Arte, P. (2011). Tomorrow is Another Day: A Documentary About Roy
Andersson. Stockholm: Studio 24.
Colebrook, C. (2009). Jean-Luc Nancy. In F. Colman (Ed.), Film, theory and philosophy: the
key thinkers (pp. 154–163). Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Conley, V. A., & Goh, I. (2014). Introduction: Time in Nancy. In V. A. Conley & I. Goh
(Eds.), Nancy Now (pp. 1–19). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Dagliden, J. (2014, August 28). Roy Andersson: “I’m trying to show what it’s like to be
human”. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/
aug/28/roy-andersson-pigeon-sat-branch-reflecting-existence
De Luca, T., & Jorge, N. B. (2016). Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Gibbons, F. (2011, July 12). Jean-Luc Godard: “Film is Over. What to Do?” The Guardian.
Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/jul/12/jean-luc-godard-film-
socialisme
Grozdanovic, N. (2015, June 2). Interview: Roy Andersson Talks Award-Winning “A Pigeon
Sat On A Branch.” Retrieved June 12, 2016, from http://www.indiewire.com/2015/
06/interview-roy-andersson-talks-award-winning-a-pigeon-sat-on-a-branch-jacques-tati-a-
lejandro-gonzalez-inarritu-more-255345/
Hanich, J. (2014). Complex Staging: The Hidden Dimensions of Roy Andersson’s
Aesthetics. Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, (5), 37–50.
Heidegger, M. (1971). …Poetically Man Dwells…. In A. Hofstader (Trans.), Poetry, Language,
Thought (pp. 213–229). New York: Harper & Row.
Indiewire. (2015, June 3). Here’s How This Filmmaker Uses Painting to Bring
His Screenplays to Life. Retrieved October 9, 2016, from http://www.indiewire.
com/2015/06/heres-how-this-filmmaker-uses-painting-to-bring-his-screenplays-to-life-
61305/
Jakobson, C. (2016, May 7). Treatise on the Human Condition. IIIIXIII. Retrieved from
http://www.fourbythreemagazine.com/issue/nihilism-roy-andersson-interview
Kohn, E. (2015, June 4). Roy Andersson Explains Why It Took 25 Years to
Make His Third Film. Retrieved June 30, 2017, from http://www.indiewire.
com/2015/06/roy-andersson-explains-why-it-took-25-years-to-make-his-third-film-
61261/
Larsson, M. (2010). Changing Conditions for Auteurs after 1970: Introduction. In
M. Larsson & A. Markland (Eds.), Swedish Film: An Introduction and Reader
(pp. 270–273). Lund: Nordic Academic Press.
Librett, J. (1997). Translator’s Foreword. Between Nihilism and Myth: Value, Aesthetics,
and Politics in The Sense of the World. In P. Gratton & M.-E. Morin (Eds.), The Sense of the
World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Librett, J. (2015). Sense. In P. Gratton & M.-E. Morin (Eds.), The Nancy Dictionary
(pp. 213–215). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lindqvist, U. (2016a). The Art of Not Telling Stories in Nordic Fiction Film. In M. Hjort &
U. Lindqvist (Eds.), A Companion to Nordic Cinema (pp. 554–573). Chichester,
West Sussex: Wiley/Blackwell.

90
 Andersson’s Living Trilogy and Nancy’s Evidence of Cinema

Lindqvist, U. (2016b). Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Floor”: Contemplating the
Art of Existence. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Lindqvist, U. (2010). Roy Andersson’s Cinematic Poetry and The Specter of César Vallejo.
Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, 19, 200–229.
Macfarlane, S. (2015, June 5). Not “Making Bad Movies with State Money”: Roy Andersson
on A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Retrieved October 11, 2016,
from http://filmmakermagazine.com/94510-not-making-bad-movies-with-state-money-
roy-andersson-on-a-pigeon-sat-on-a-branch-reflecting-on-existence/
Mildren, C. (2013). Spectator Strategies, Satire and European Identity in the Cinema of
Roy Andersson via the Paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Studies in European Cinema,
10(2+3), 147–155.
Nagy, E. (2015). Stories About The Film – A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N3ILGFu1K8
Nancy, J.-L. (1993). The Birth to Presence. (B. Holmes, Trans.). Stanford, Calif: Stanford
University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (1996). The Muses. (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Stanford, Calif: Stanford University
Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (1997). The Sense of the World. (J. S. Librett, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being Singular Plural. (D. Richardson & A. E. O’Byrne, Trans.).
Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2001). The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami. (C. Irizarry & V. A. Conley,
Trans.). Bruxelles: Yves Gevaert.
Nancy, J.-L. (2005). The Ground of the Image. (J. Fort, Trans.). New York: Fordham
University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2007). Listening. (C. Mandell, Trans.). New York: Fordham University Press.
Nancy, J.-L. (2010). Art Today. Journal of Visual Culture, 9(1), 91–99.
Nancy, J.-L. (2016). The Image: Mimesis and Methexis. In C. Giunta & A. Janus (Eds.),
A. Janus (Trans.), Nancy and Visual Culture (pp. 73–92). Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Pethő, Á. (2011). Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between. Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Pub.
Pethő, Á. (2015). Between Absorption, Abstraction and Exhibition: Inflections of
the Cinematic Tableau in the Films of Corneliu Porumboiu, Roy Andersson and
Joanna Hogg. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 11, 39–76.
Ratner, M. (2015). The “Trivialist Cinema” of Roy Andersson: An Interview. Film Quarterly,
69(1), 36–44.
Romney, J. (2001, February 9). Funny Peculiar. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.
theguardian.com/film/2001/feb/09/culture.features3
Savage, B. (2016, January 24). A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence. Retrieved
June 18, 2018, from http://sheffieldanimals.group.shef.ac.uk/a-pigeon-sat-on-a-branch-
reflecting-on-existence/
Sinnerbrink, R. (2014). Techneˉ and Poieˉsis: On Heidegger and Film Theory. In
A. van den Oever (Ed.), Techneˉ / Technology: Researching Cinema and Media
Technologies – their Development, Use, and Impact (pp. 65–80). Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press.
Spigland, E. (2010, September 12). No Shadows To Hide In: A Conversation with
Roy Andersson. Retrieved August 9, 2016, from https://orbismediologicus.wordpress.
com/2010/09/12/no-shadows-to-hide-in-a-conversation-with-roy-andersson/

91
 Film-Philosophy 23 (2019)

Titmarsh, J.-A. (2014, September 2). A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Review - Venice 2014. Retrieved June 22, 2018, from https://www.heyuguys.
com/a-pigeon-sat-on-a-branch-reflecting-on-existence-review/
Ulaby, N. (2015, June 6). Roy Andersson: From Mordant Ad Director To Philosophical
Filmmaker. Retrieved August 9, 2016, from http://www.npr.org/2015/06/06/
411989169/roy-andersson-from-mordant-ad-director-to-philosophical-filmmaker
Vpro Cinema. (2015). Roy Andersson on A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Xm1BTMIk4

92