04 September 2006

491 & Pigs and Battleship

(Photo from: http://www.malba.org.ar/evento/201504111800/)

'491' by Vilgot Sjöman. This is a film Aurore has written a paper about at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris VIII, a paper never validated because of a negligent University teacher (there are quite a number of those in France).

It's a movie that reveals the social experiments the governement undertook during the 1960:s and -70:s in Sweden when it came to rehabilitating young criminals.

A great failure from the societies side, a failure Sjöman is exposing in his film.
In doing so he partly demonstrates the naive way in which some social workers tended to meet the problems, partly how high officials toke advantage of the situation and exploited the people they were going to help.

The atmosphere is extremely well depicted, so are the attitudes and the picture given of the politically dictated preventive measures initiated by the authorities.
Not much has changed to this day.

The naivity among Swedish psychiatrists, psycologists and social workers (among others) is still a predominant feature in their work.


(Photo from 'Buta to gunkan' taken from://kinobank.org/movie/29149/)

Buta to gunkan ("Pigs and Battleships") by Shohei Imamura.

In some parts unintentionally amusing when describing a young criminals efforts to break free from the mob. He is drawn to criminals but tries to leave the criminal life he is leading. Loyalty and favours pulls him back in to the criminal world.
It ends with total and irreversible defeat, as so often in 'real life'.

The pigs? If talking about the animals, they also play a small part in this film.
(Photo from 'Buta to gunkan' taken from: http://kinobank.org/movie/29149/)

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