Kino London

Posted by Jamie Kennerley on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 12:04 pm.

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers, by Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stärne Nilsson

As we’ve mentioned already, August has been pretty much a holiday month for us here on kinolondon.com. Holiday in the continental sense, whereby everything pretty much shuts down for the month, save the odd sign to say “we’re still here and still thinking about you, but we’re just taking it easy for a few weeks”. Now we hit September we’re determined to be back blogging with a bang. With that in mind…

I first saw this film back in 2005, at a Future Shorts night in Manchester. Given how fiendishly effective Future Shorts are at keeping their chosen films off the web I was very pleasantly surprised to see this up on Youtube. I remember thinking at the time how bloody Swedish it felt, without any real idea of what I was talking (thinking) about. Watching it again I still can’t quite shake that feeling. There’s nothing Bergmanesque about it, but perhaps it’s the straight faces and total earnestness with which the actors are doing something so completely ridiculous (and totally brilliant).

Pay close attention to how the music in each room nicely echoes the natural household sounds you’d expect to hear there – white goods and appliances in the kitchen, mechanical and pill-prolonged sex in the bedroom, and routine washing and scrubbing in the bathroom. Also consider if you’d be happy for these criminal hipsters to pick the lock to your house and make music in your various well-appointed rooms. They don’t clear up after themselves, but thankfully they do seem pretty non-judgemental. I think they’d have a whale of a time with my combi-oven.