Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes.
Documentary stills of newspaper clippings in combination with headlines, drawings of the Swedish flag and tigers form a montage highly critical of society. The film was made in the course of one day in January, 1970: shot in the same morning, edited while in the camera, and developed that same afternoon.
A Swedish Tiger takes up elementary political questions, as topical today as in 1970 when the film was made. When will someone have the courage to break the silence?
Eric Michel Nilsson was born in Brussels in 1935, he moved to Sweden at the age of 15.
Nilsson was educated in directing at the reputable film school IDHEC in Paris. In the early 1960s, he came to be a part of the then newly started department of documentary film at SVT, and it was in television that Eric M Nilsson got the opportunity to develop his associative pictorial storytelling. A variety and mix of genres are unmistakable in Nilsson’s work: essay films as Anonym and Åtgärdas alongside documentaries as Djurgårdsfärjan, and the experimentation in form in Passageraren, Brutal, and Ormgard. The common denominator is mistrust in language and an interest in the creation of meaning in the relations between words and images.
In the films of Eric M Nilsson there is consistently a playful approach, and at the same time, a critic of the medium’s illusory qualities and its ability to trick its viewers.
