Härlig är jorden

This brief black comedy is among the darkest and dreariest films I have ever seen in any genre. Despite making me laugh throughout, this film is extremely tragic in its own bizarre way. It has an awfully dry and deadpan sense of humor that has an uncomfortable, awkward vibe to it. At times you might want to squirm in your seat.

This film is mainly made up of a middle aged man doing and speaking of the mundane tasks in his life in a monotone voice. this may not sound like a very exciting or even interesting film at first, but it is so cleverly and well made, written, and scored that it manages to be among the most fascinating short films I have ever seen, and I recommend it with enthusiasm to all fans of art-house cinema, as well as extremely dark (but also extremely funny) humor.

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.

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.

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.