"Bird's-Eye View: The Films of Mikael Kristersson" is showing October 25 - 26, 2019 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, with Kristersson in person.
The films of Swedish documentarian Mikael Kristersson are extraordinary portals into lives of his subjects: birds that live in and migrate through his coastal town of Falsterbo, Sweden. Since the early '80s he has been using the warmth and depth of 16mm to showcase how his birds live—how they move, sound, interact, give birth—and also, all that they themselves are looking at. He forgoes traditional narration and intertitles, as well as background music, and instead lets the birds create their own hypnotic narratives and rhythms as we watch them interact with their surroundings.
In 1987, he made his first feature film, Pica Pica, which tracks the comings and goings of a group of magpies (small black and white birds) in Vällingby, Sweden—a suburb west of Stockholm. It's a transfixing film, with the small birds constantly moving in and around the larger daily life of the town.
Roughly ten years later he had finished Kestrel's Eye (Falkens öga, 1998), a quiet film that follows a group of falcons living in church steeple in one of the small, medieval cities of Skanör-Falsterbo on the southwest tip of the Scandinavian Peninsula (not far from Copenhagen). The film is as interested in the falcons as it is what the falcons themselves are looking at.
In 2008, he finished what feels like his most personal film Ljusår, or Light Year. A tender portrait of the lives that inhabit his own backyard in Falsterbo, it actually took Kristersson ten years to make the film. His gentle touch as a filmmaker is evident in the opening shot's roving camera and in how deftly and delicately he later handles a scene of a mother great tit guarding her eggs.
Despite acclaim (and many awards) in Sweden, his films remain largely unknown to the international film community. In advance of his first retrospective (which I co-curated with Annie Novak) in New York City, I conducted an interview with Mikael over email. His answers, unlike his films, are short and succinct, likely, in part, the result of a language barrier, but I suspect that the nature of his answers is mostly indicative of a man who prefers to let the camera and editing tell his stories, instead of forcing a narrative onto his viewers.
NOTEBOOK: To start, a simple question: How did you get into filmmaking?
MIKAEL KRISTERSSON: A friend of mine had an 8mm film camera that I borrowed at the age of thirteen, to try to film birds. I wanted to show others what I had personally experienced in nature. Later, in the early 1960s, I was part of a children's program for Swedish TV. A film team came down to Falsterbo from Stockholm but it was bad weather and there was no bird migration over the two days they were there and they just filmed some interviews for the program. I felt like they missed everything! That's why I decided to film these things myself, to show how fantastic it was. I started collecting money from my summer job for a Bolex 16mm camera. I went to film school (1973-1975) and then awhile later, in 1981, I made a film about the bird migration at Falsterbo called The Great Migration. It was shown on Swedish TV and was awarded with a special recognition award for Excellence in Photographing Wildlife Behavior at the 1982 World Wildlife Film Festival in Montana.
NOTEBOOK: Your films tell stories of very specific places and of the birds and creatures that inhabit them. What inspired you to tell these stories specifically?
KRISTERSSON: Films about nature and wildlife usually show exotic places far from people's own homes with a lot of information in the narrative text. I want to show that we humans are all part of nature and I want my films to act as eyes openers and for people to get a kick out of experiencing the nearby nature but also become cautious about it. By depicting something in one place, one can avoid narrative text and instead stimulate the audience's own curiosity and allow them to experience more themselves. Instead of voice over and music, I work a lot with the documentary sounds as part of the story.
NOTEBOOK: You mention that you wanted to make films that consider the nearby, or have a more local focus. For you this means coastal Sweden. Could you talk a bit about your connection to that land in particular and how it has informed your filmmaking practice?
KRISTERSSON: Yes, although I mean that nature is nearby everyone, even in more urban areas where many people live, like in the Stockholm suburb of Vällingby where I filmed Pica Pica. But since I was born and have lived most of my life in Falsterbo, the southernmost point of the Scandinavian peninsula, the nature here and the concentrated bird migration mean a lot to me, the seasonal changes ....
NOTEBOOK: Duration plays such a large role in your films. With a film like Light Year, for example, a film that took ten years to shoot, how did you work with time? Or how did you decide when to film and how long to film?
KRISTERSSON: I was not supposed to work for so long with Light Year and I was also working with other projects in parallel, for example Kestrel's Eye. But it took time to succeed with certain aspects of the film, like the wasps and the great tits inside the tree trunk.
NOTEBOOK: Could you talk a bit about the filming of Kestrel's Eye, which I believe made use of four cameras simultaneously?
KRISTERSSON: Yes, sometimes I filmed with four Super-16 cameras simultaneously to be able to edit between the outside and the interior of the church. Inside the church tower I had a camera standing behind a black cloth, only about 1.5 meters from the falcon's nest. The camera lens was placed in a hole in the cloth even before the breeding season, so that the falcons became accustomed. I also had a remote controlled camera directly above the nest. Out on the church roof, I had got permission to build a hide. In this I could sit hidden with one camera with a telephoto lens and with another camera on a tripod on the roof cam, with a wide angle lens. When something spectacular happened, such as the falcons' kids flying out of the nest, I could remotely start all four cameras at the same time.
NOTEBOOK: I'd love to hear more about how you record audio in relation to how you shoot the images.
KRISTERSSON: I always "collect" a lot of sound in parallel with the filming. When shooting close-ups with telephoto lenses, you usually have no microphone nearby. So I often film without audio and then silently edit the films. When I am almost satisfied with the story, I work with the sound for a long time, that is the most stimulating part of the work! You can tell so much with a subtle sound.
NOTEBOOK: The films have such a wonderful rhythmic quality and I'm wondering more about what your editing process is like? How much material are you working with and how do you determine what makes it into the final film?
KRISTERSSON: So far I have edited the images of all of my films in analog, from a work print, by flushing all the material in an editing machine, over and over like a sculptor carving a sculpture. And I often try to capture events in long shots to preserve the animals' natural rhythm. I think there is a risk of missing material when editing digitally.
NOTEBOOK: How does your filmmaking practice align with your environmental work?
KRISTERSSON: I have always been involved in nature and environmental protection. Right now I am working on a film about a colony of avocets while I am engaged by the county council to protect the little island where they nest.
NOTEBOOK: What environmental changes have you noticed in Falsterbo over the years as you've made these films? And how does this effect the birds you've so lovingly documented?
KRISTERSSON: The meadows have decreased in surface area and human population pressure has increased. But at the same time we have succeeded in creating new nature reserves and the grazing of cows has been reintroduced, so we hope to turn the development into something that is for the betterment of all!