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.
In Brutal Eric M Nilsson illustrates the actual costs for culture and creativity with effective images. The film was made as a part of the project ‘Sverige 80’, initiated by the Swedish Film Institute, aimed at supporting the creation of high-quality short films. The productions were to be no longer than 10 minutes and produced in a relatively short period of time.
In a voice-over Nilsson discusses the choices people involved in the creation of films make, their attempts to create meaning and what the future may hold for the medium and its roll in society. The filmmaker juxtaposes a range of still and moving images, often in humorous ways, in this self-reflecting short film: “Making these images adds up to a total cost of 274 SEK per second, this regardless of quality”.
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.
