Cinema: Adalen '31

Wednesday, October 29, 1969 THE PROCESS of making a film in this country is long, arduous and, more often than not, frustrating. From its inception, right through to the showing on the local Odeon screens, crucial decisions are taken by those outside of the creative process, and such decisions are arbitrary, vulgar and defined by the box office.

Hundreds of scripts are written that never see the light of day and as many productions are cancelled at the last minute or postponed. CINEMA Schildt • Kerstin Tidelius Roland Hedlund Marie De Geer • Anita Björk Written and directed b PAGE THREE

With the withdrawal of American finance, the British industry faces a serious recession. There are just very few films being made.

Those that are tend to reflect the uncertainty of the situation.

Seeing Bo Widerberg's 'Adalen '3l' at Academy One, one marvels hrstly that such a film is made and financed, for without a shadow of a doubt it would be impossible to set up such a project in this country.

To have taken this script along to the 'money' on Wardour Street might have had comic possibilities. Anything from 'I don't think it's really our cup of tea from some suede-booted, fawn-suited exlawyer, to the more forthright and down-to-earth 'Who do you think's gonna be interested in a film about workers on strike?' ', but little else.

There are clearly qualitative differences between the British and Swedish film industries, or may be it was simply the box office success of his earlier film 'Elvira Madigan' that guaranteed Widerberg this kind of freedom.

His next film is to be about the Wobblies - the International Workers of the World who helped form the basis of American trade unionism.

Bo Widerberg establishes himself with 'Adalen '31' as a major film talent. After the soft romantic idyll of 'Elvira Madigan' he has developed a sharp political insight.

Yet it would be wrong to see the two films as disconnected, for his major concern is with human relationships, of love between men and women, but at the same time he is conscious of an imprisoning dehumanizing social world which inhibits their true developIn 'Elvira Madigan', it showed itself merely in terms o* But try adalen utice.

But in the sharp material form of class struggle.

It is the social relations that men enter independent of their wılls, it is explicitly the capitalist mode of production that drives men before it, that defines and limits their lives.

It is the inexorable class struggle that drives them on.

'Adalen '31' explores and reveals the dialectics of strike, based as it is on a real struggle which took place in Sweden in 1931 in the small town of Adalen.

When the film opens the strike is into many weeks. The dockers are resisting a wagecut. The docks are still, the chimneys smokeless; it is sumwarm light bathes the countryside, a rich landscape of hills, streams, lakes and flowers.

There is a restlessness amongst the workers, but at the same time that sense of leisure that a strike provides them with.

The youth play in an improvised jazz group while older workers practise in brass band.

At home the women try to keep up an appearance of normality; the husband's shirt is still ironed crisp and white, the home is still scrubbed and cleaned.

The kids play together, trying to fly with cardboard wings.

Yet underlying all their actions is a desperate shortage of money and food. It governs their lives. When one of the children falls from a roof and breaks his leg, the first concern is whether it will be possible to afford a doctor.

When the husband catches a fish and the whole family celebrates with a meal, husband and wife, exhilarated by the party, end up in bed and their love-making is spoiled by the danger of having a child, yet another mouth to feed.

In contrast is the home of the manager, tasteful, spacious, cultured, his wife refined and educated, his beautiful daughter back from school in the city for the holidays.

For them life continues much as normal; food is plentiful, servants cook and serve. Only in the frowning brow of the manager does the strike express itself.

The balance of forces is, at this stage, in a state of truce.

Technicolor® Techniscope@ A Paramount Release A young striker attempts to frighten the daughter of his employer by mimicking Frankenstein.

The manager's wife still gives art lessons to one of the worker's sons. And the same youth begins an affair with her daughter.

Class compromise is still possible for the bright boy.

Outside the teenagers discuss sex and horror movies.

People pursue their own pre-occupations, living their normal lives within the economic limitations of the strike.

But finally the falling profits assert themselves. Export orders are lying idle on the docks and have to be loaded.

The management is driven to use scab labour and it is here that the truce ends.

The strikers are incensed. They hold a meeting and decide to prevent the scabs from working.

They march to the docks and physically throw the scabs off the ships. No mercy is shown them.

One of the strikers, the father of the boy, harbours one of the scabs and binds up his wounded arm. When the others learn of it, they smash his windows and there follows a furious row between one of the young militants and the scab defender.

The essence of the argument is between a liberal viewpoint that surrenders class solidarity for non-violence and a trust in official union negotiators An AB Svensk Filmindustri Production against a militant sciousness.

The arrival of armed troops to defend the scabs objectively discounts any liberal compromise position. The strikers are now confronting the repressive power of the state.

They taunt the soldiers, shining mirrors in their eyes, jeering at them, calling on them to go home.

At a mass meeting, the strikers decide to march to a nearby town for support and with banners and a band playing the International they set off.

But on arrival they meet head on with the troops, who open fire killing five and wounding five.

It is a violent and panic-stricken response.

The road is littered with the dead, there is a moment of terror, but the strikers regroup themselves and, carrying their dead, break through the army lines.

The dead are carried home to the wail of factory sirens.

That evening the young boy, whose father has been killed by the soldiers, finds that the manager's daughter, who was to have his baby, has been given an abortion in Stockholm.

It is the final end to class compromise. Art is one thing and pregnancy another-there The army assemble before attacking the strikers.

is no confusion in the mind of the manager's wife.

And the death of his father and other other strikers emphasizes for the boy his own class position. All else is illusion.

Still stunned and confused, he meets the militant young worker who confronts him with the question: 'Was your father really innocent?'.

He is still unable to answer, yet he clutches the handle of the siren that wails out its lament and solidarity.

'We must have class unity,' says the young worker.

"That and knowledge,' replies the boy.

By concentrating on human relationships during the strike, by presenting the struggle not in crude black and white terms of wicked boss and exploited. workers, Widerberg is able to reveal the true nature of the class struggle.

It is the relentless drive of capitalism that locks men in contradiction, that, divides them them into classes, that sweeps aside any idealism, that drives wedges between men and women's hopes and desires. There is no resolution to this conflict until it is fought out and won by the working class, until capitalist property relations are destroyed, until profit is replaced by human needs.

All the options are worked through in this film and revealed as inadequate.

Although the brutal murder of these strikers brought about the fall of the then conservative government and saw the coming to power of the Social Democrats, Widerberg reminds us that there is still inequality in Sweden - that capitalism still continues.

'Adalen '3l' is a great film, of wit, humour, tenderness, emotion and understanding.

As an event in the film calendar, it demonstrates that Marxism and creative art are far from incompatible.