Dear Professors,
I hope this email finds you well and that the school-year is off to a good start.
I wanted to highlight a Metrograph series that I’ve curated and that I think could be of interest to you and your students : Breaking Free : The Films of Anja Breien, a series celebrating an unsung giant of Scandinavian cinema, the late Anja Breien, championed personally by Ingmar Bergman.
When Breien passed away in May at age 86, not a single major American publication ran an obituary. That says everything about how little known she remains in the US and how necessary this retrospective feels.
Her films deserve to be considered alongside the work of fellow European filmmakers working in a feminist tradition, like Chantal Akerman, Vera Chytilová, and Ulrike Ottinger. Like them, she came of age cinematically in the orbit of the French New Wave while studying at the IDHEC film school, before forging something entirely her own.
But what really defines her, to me, is her joyful, unruly feminism: her women transgress, they push back, they run up against the same stubborn questions of money, sex, and independence, and they do it with a lot of wit.
Her best known work is the Wives trilogy. The first entry (1975) is a bold, funny, feminist riposte to John Cassavetes’s Husbands, following three women in their early 30s who bail on their domestic routines for a three-day spree through Oslo. She returned to the same three characters, played by the same actresses, a decade later, and then again in the 90s.
Breaking Free : The Films of Anja Breien opens on September 11, we are presenting the US premiere of six of her features in new 2K restorations from the National Library of Norway.
Feel free to share this info with your colleagues and students.
Hope to see you at the movies!
Thanks,
Adeline