Härlig är jorden

From the off, we are welcomed into a bleak and mostly voiceless world. The protagonist witnesses something appalling, but he and those around him return seemingly nonchalantly to their pale existences nonetheless. What follows is a series of mundane but increasingly elucidating scenes - in that we are witness to (a) man's mental deterioration following a horrifying experience, and his effort to behave as though it had never happened.

In a sense, I felt like this film was a version of someone blabbering when they find themselves in an awkward situation or when they're in trouble - the man has (arguably) been an accessory to a serious crime, but he proceeds with his daily grind, showing us unexciting facets of his life as though to distract us from the misery that he has exposed us to simply be being his audience.

Capitalism, consumerism, genocide and guilt; just some of the themes covered by filmmaker Roy Andersson in this 14-minute experimental piece. As with his most recent films, Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, The Living (2007), World of Glory (1991) sees Andersson create a series of interconnected visual tableaux about a seemingly everyday man and the crumbling world that he inhabits.

Andersson uses the same principal as in his TV commercials, keeping the scenes concise and to the point; presenting us with a world filled with fragile, sickly looking people - the stench antiseptic and detergent pungently conjured in our minds. This mere description hints at the film's bleakness, a bleakness that is too hard to describe. With Songs from the Second Floor, Andersson used his series of vignettes to present to us the theme of cultural alienation using surrealism and black comedy. With World of Glory however, almost all elements of comedy have been discarded, leaving us with images of cheerless, unwelcoming reality.

That isn't to say that the film doesn't reward. The final scene complements that shocking opening image, making Andersson's message of repressed guilt as obvious as a punch to the stomach. It is only natural for the central character's carefully constructed world to fall down around him with the secrets he has been hiding, or indeed, the secrets that any one of us may be hiding; finally spilling out, until we here screaming in our sleep. There is no single way of interpreting or understating this film. The images wash over us, sometimes infuriating us with that sense of bleak, unbroken silences.

World of Glory acts as an astonishing companion to Andersson's more accomplished Songs from the Second Floor, and acts as a wonderful antidote to all those mindless summer blockbusters that permeate the cinematic sphere. As the cliché goes, you may not enjoy it, but you'll most certainly be left thinking about it for many weeks to come.

Through its 4th wall breaking vignettes, Anderssson's 16 minutes short is as disturbing and effective as a full length feature film. Each scene is meticulously set, blocked and staged, void of music and bathed in the milky florescent white that would reappear in his later films, here serves to add a morgue like aesthetic to everyday life, subverting the mundane domestic life and the ridiculous alike. You leave it having experiencesd a deep sense of universal dread, anxious and questioning the participatory prices one is willing to pay to find their place in western society and modern civilisation.

This deeply effective and chilling short piece, shows the emotional toll of complacency in a world where genocide and inhumanity exists all around us.

From the opening scene;, the gassing of a bunch of naked people in the back of a van by bland bureaucrats in what is obviously not Nazi Germany, but somewhere in modern Europe, Andersson is unafraid to challenge our idea that it couldn't happen again. And we don't all carry the seeds of inhumanity within us. And that, by living in that kind of a world, we are eventually torn up inside.

We follow a cadaverous man, who has witnessed this horror at the opening of the film as he slowly breaks apart.

And yet, this is not really a drama, it's more a super-black comedy. Indeed, this short embodies the best description I have read about Andersson – "Monty Python meets Ingmar Bergman".

But that doesn't do justice to the fact that the man has created a new and unique film language, and (as the behind the scenes pieces on his new "5 X Anderson:" set DVD shows) Andersson works with a perfectionism that is almost hard to believe to get exactly the right feel, lighting, acting and tone for each of his 1 take long static scenes in 1 shot.

BTW - I highly recommend the set for any admirers of Anderson's work. Seeing his student shorts as well as his two 'professional' shorts, this and "Something Has Happened", along with an entire disc of his working methods, and thinking behind his images, is really quite a treasure.

Without fuss, without emotions, a thin pale man shows us his life, introduces us to his sick mother, his dead father, his wife, his son and his brother. He shows us his home and we see him calmly go about his life until we see the impact that the secrets he holds start to wear on him.

I would love to write reams about this film and claim that it had moved and touched me, or that I was able to understand so much about what the film was trying to say but, if I did that, I would be lying. I found this film very hard to get into and was left thinking about it after it had finished. I continued to think about it and the bleak impression it had of a ordinary life that was scarred by one terrible action – in this case, I think, the fact that the man had allowed genocide to occur in front of him without saying a word, and only going back to his ordinary rather dreary life afterwards. What exactly he had seen/been involved in is hard to read into in much detail and it caused me the problem, but I accepted that this was his secret, that it was awful and that he tried to live with it but, in the end, could not.

The film is delivered in a series of static shots that are as grey and washed out as anything I have ever seen – you will not leave this film smiling that's for sure. The sheer drudgery of day to day life is laid out here and it is an unpleasant thing to see. The point of the whole short takes some thought and I'm sure that it will be different for each viewer that sees it but I took it as a sort of judgment on those (countries and people) who try to just live with horrid things in their lives as if nothing had happened – they will not move on and it will eat at them as it does here.

Like I said, I wish I had the answers and I wish I could pontificate at length about the film but I find it hard to do. But one thing is sure – the film is in my head now and it is hard to shake the images left there and the sense of doom that came with the man's ordinary life and his inability to ever get passed the deeds that he had either participated in or allowed to occur without so much as a tear shed.