Midvinterblot’s companion piece of sort: another meditation on violent death, but under very different circumstances. Att döda ett barn takes place during a radiantly sunny summer day, among fields of ripe wheat – an accident will happen here, a child will be run over by a car whose driver is described in the voiceover as a happy man. This is told around 90 seconds into the film, and for the next five minutes one waits for it to happen. The accident’s circumstances are described with clarity, and without passion. The images illustrate the text by Stig Dagerman – they feel like evidence. And yet, in a moment of silence, between the words of Swedish literature’s foremost existentialist voice, female shadows appear out of nowhere on a beach, walking towards the sea, vanishing maybe with the soul of the little girl who went to get sugar for her parents, never to return.

Olaf Möller and Jon Wengström

Gösta Werner (b. 1908) is a remarkable person of many identities within the Swedish film culture: a film historian (and especially the leading specialist of Stiller), essayist, filmmaker of both feature and short films (some 60 films), the author of the first doctoral thesis on film history in Sweden. We celebrate the recent hundreth anniversary of Gösta Werner with his Att döda ett barn (To Kill a Child, 1954), a uniquely cinematographic variation of the feel of the literary “40-talismen” (the spirit of the Forties) represented by authors like Lars Ahlin, Sivar Arné and Stig Dagerman (on whose text this 10-minute film is based). It’s simply a masterpiece on the themes of time and space, co-incidence and necessity: for once a film catches the structures of modern literature with all its tensions and dimensions.

Peter von Bagh