Jag är nyfiken - en film i gult

Plot synopsis:
Director Vilgot Sjöman plans to make a social film starring his lover Lena Nyman, a young theater student who has a strong interest in social issues.
Nyman's character, also named Lena, lives with her father in a small apartment in Stockholm and is driven by a burning passion for social justice and a need to understand the world, people and relationships. Her little room is filled with books, papers, and boxes full of clippings on topics such as "religion" and "men", and files on each of the 23 men with whom she has had sex. The walls are covered with pictures of concentration camps and a portrait of Francisco Franco, reminders of the crimes being perpetrated against humanity. She walks around Stockholm and interviews people about social classes in society, conscientious objection, gender equality, and the morality of vacationing in Franco's Spain. She and her friends also picket embassies and travel agencies. Lena's relationship with her father, who briefly went to Spain to fight Franco, is problematic, and she is distressed by the fact that he returned from Spain for unknown reasons after only a short period.
Through her father Lena meets the slick Bill (Börje in the original Swedish), who works at a menswear shop and voted for the Rightist Party. They begin a love affair, but Lena soon finds out from her father that Bill has another woman, Marie, and a young daughter. Lena is furious that Bill has not been open with her, and goes to the country on a bicycle holiday. Alone in a cabin in the woods, she attempts an ascetic lifestyle, meditating, studying nonviolence and practicing yoga. Bill soon comes looking for her in his new car. She greets him with a shotgun, but they soon start to make love. Lena confronts Bill about Marie, and finds out about another of his lovers, Madeleine. They begin to fight and Bill leaves. Lena has strange dreams, in which she ties two teams of soccer players – she notes that they number 23 – to a tree, shoots Bill and cuts his penis off. She also dreams of being taunted by passing drivers as she cycles down a road, until finally Martin Luther King Jr. drives up. She apologizes to him for not being strong enough to practice nonviolence.
Lena returns home, destroys her room, and goes to the car showroom where Bill works to tell him she has scabies. They are treated at a clinic, and then go their separate ways. As the embedded story of Lena and Bill begins to resolve, the film crew and director Sjöman are featured more. The relationship between Lena the actress and Bill the actor has become intimate during the production of Vilgot's film, and Vilgot is jealous and clashes with Bill. The film concludes with Lena returning Vilgot's keys as he meets with another young female theater student.
The movie also includes an interview with Martin Luther King Jr., who happened to be visiting Stockholm when the film was being made. In addition to the footage of King, the film also includes an interview with Minister of Transportation Olof Palme, who talks about the existence of class structure in Swedish society (he was told it was for a documentary film), and footage of Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Tags: anti war, violence, avant garde, murder

Review:
At times Yellow appears to be an earnest social-political documentary, with Lena, the main character, and others interviewing both common people and politicians (e.g. Olaf Palme at home).
All the while, Yellow acts as a personal documentary exploring Lena's life - her home life, her loves, her political views, her view of herself.
In the sixties, the Swedish films were known to be the most sexually graphic, but this is the one that really rocked the world It was shocking in its uninhibited portrayal of sex and in its fulminating piece of social democracy It was a significant step forward in getting the adult film shown in the theaters The film comes in two editions, blue and yellow The blue version focuses more on the political issues and the yellow concentrates on the emergence of sexual liberation The lead character is a young Swedish girl who attempts to hold fast to her philosophy of nonviolence, free love, and democratic socialism...
"I Am Curious (Yellow)" was the first "mainstream" movie in the United States to show sexual intercourse.
Although the film was made in Sweden, the controversy that it ignited here reveals a lot about how we Americans think and act about sex.The film itself is no masterpiece, but is mildly entertaining.
Gee, that sounds more like an American movie of today.The other dimension of the plot  is kind of a documentary about the Swedish policy of not waging overt war against any country who occupies them.
The "Yellow" in the title comes from the Swedish flag, along with its sequel "I am Curious (Blue)."It was very hip for young people to see this movie.
But then again, you really couldn't think of this surrealistic story in a linear way.The movie did offer some very entertaining diversions, including the opening scene where Lena and her wealthy sponsor attend a reading of "Babi Yar" by Yevtushenko.
This film has little to do with documentary and is more interesting in playing with our ideas of advertising and its relationship to reality.
Lines of real and not real are crossed in ways familiar with films discussing documentary, but this time we do it for the sake of consuming and marketing, not for describing the real..
This is a great film - esp when compared with the sometimes wearisome earnestness of today's politically-minded filmmakers.
A film that can so easily combine sex, gender relations, politics and art is a rarity these days.
This film, once sensational for its forward-thinking politics and depictions of free love and sexual liberation, has been reduced by time to a mere curiosity.
I am Curious (Yellow) (a film, in near Seussical rhyme, is said right at the start to be available in two versions, Yellow and Blue) was one of those big art-house hits that first was a major sensation in Sweden then a big scandal/cause-celebre in the United States when the one print was held by customs and it went all the way to the Supreme Court.
What's potent in the picture today is not so much what might offend by way of what's revealed in the sex or nudity- the director/"actor" Vilgot Sjoman films the various scenes in such a way that there is an abundance of flesh and genitalia and the occasional graphic bit but it's always more-so an intellectual expression than very lust-like- but the daring of the attempt at a pure 'metafilm' while at the same time making a true statement on the state of affairs in Sweden.
(if not as surreal and deranged) or to a slightly lesser extent Bertolucci, Sjoman is out to mix politics and sex (mostly politics and social strata) around in the midst of also making it a comment on embodying a character in a film.
The two characters, Lena and Borje, have a hot-cold relationship in the story of the film, where Lena is a "curious" socialist-wannabe who demonstrates in the street for nonviolence and 'trains' sort of in a cabin in the woods to become a fully functioning one, while at the same time maybe too curious about her car salesman boyfriend.
And as this is going on, which is by itself enough for one movie, Sjoman inserts himself and his crew from time to time as they are making this story on film (there's even a great bit midway through where, as if at a rock concert, title cards fill in during a break in shooting who the crew are, negating having to use end credits!) Then with this there's a whole other dynamic as Sjoman gives an actual performance, not just a "hey, I'm the director playing the director" bit.At first, one might not get this structure and that I am Curious (Yellow) is just a film where Lena is a documentary interviewer asking subjects about their thoughts on class, socialism, Spain and Franco, and once in a while we see Lena's father or Bjore.
But Sjoman does something interesting: the structure is so slippery as the viewer one has to stay on toes; it's impressive that so many years on a picture can surprise with not being afraid to mix dramatic narrative, documentary, film-within-a-film, and even a serious interview with Martin Luther King, who also acts as a quasi-guru for Lena.
His anarchy is playful but not completely loaded with semantics or tricks that could put off the less initiated viewer.If I Am Curious (Yellow) stands up as an intellectual enterprise and a full-blown trip into exploring sex in a manner that was and is captivating for how much is shown and how comfortable it all seems to be for the actors, it isn't entirely successful, I think, as an emotional experience.
Where Bergman had it down to a T with making a purely emotional film with deconstruction tendencies, Sjoman is more apt at connecting with specific ideas while not actually directing always very well when it comes time to do big or subtle scenes with the actors.
Occasionally it works if only for the actors, Lena Nyman (mostly spectacular here in a performance that asks of her to make an ambitious but confused kid into someone sympathetic and vulnerable even) and Borje Ahlstedt (a great realistic counterpoint to the volatile Lena), but some 40 years later its hard to completely connect with everything that happens in the inner-film of Lena and Borje since (perhaps intentionally) Sjoman fills it up with clichés (Borje has a girlfriend and kid, will he leave her, how will Lena reconcile her father) and a heavy-handed narration from his starlet of sorts.And yet, for whatever faults Sjoman may have, ironically considering he means it to be a comment on itself, I Am Curious (Yellow) holds up beautifully as an artistic experiment in testing the waters of what could be done in Swedish cinema, or testing what couldn't be and bending it for provocative and comedic usage.
I'd even go as far as to say it's influential, and has probably been copied or imitated in more ways than one due to it being such a cult phenomenon at its time (a specific technique used, with the film rewinding towards the end, is echoed in poorer usage in Funny Games), and should be seen by anyone looking into getting into avant-garde or meta-film-making.
MILLIONS of people flocked to this stinker, thinking they were going to see a sex film...Instead, they got lots of closeups of gnarly, repulsive Swedes, on-street interviews in bland shopping malls, asinie political pretension...and feeble who-cares simulated sex scenes with saggy, pale actors.Cultural icon, holy grail, historic artifact..whatever this thing was, shred it, burn it, then stuff the ashes in a lead box!Elite esthetes still scrape to find value in its boring pseudo revolutionary political spewings..But if it weren't for the censorship scandal, it would have been ignored, then forgotten.Instead, the "I Am Blank, Blank" rhythymed title was repeated endlessly for years as a titilation for porno films (I am Curious, Lavender - for gay films, I Am Curious, Black - for blaxploitation films, etc..) and every ten years or so the thing rises from the dead, to be viewed by a new generation of suckers who want to see that "naughty sex film" that "revolutionized the film industry"...Yeesh, avoid like the plague..Or if you MUST see it - rent the video and fast forward to the "dirty" parts, just to get it over with..
This is a landmark Swedish film, that pretty much changed the way American films at least, looked at censorship, especially nudity and sex in general.
To me, the controversial material is not the frontal male and female nudity and sex scenes, but the political message, which I interpret as nothing but Communism.
I would call the political theme radical, but remembering how things were back then, the censors were more concerned about the male frontal nudity, and one particular scene where she kisses a guys flaccid penis.
I have the companion film "I Am Curious (Blue)" on loan from the library too, which with (Yellow) was supposed to be one long film, but they broke it up into two.
Without going too far on this subject, I would say that follows from the difference in ideals between the French and the Swedish society.A movie of its time, and place.
Easily one of the worst movies of all time, this badly shot and edited pretentious bore did attract moviegoers in the late '60s on the strength of the then novelty of seeing a few fleeting nude scenes -- which,m just like the rest of this endless waste of motion picture film, were ineptly staged, lit, miked and photographed.
No longer scandalous by modern standards, but still an interesting look at 1960s Sweden, and I like how the films interlock.
In the 1960s Sweden underwent an enormous social upheaval, which brought it from a rather rigidly stratified and staid society, which cinephiles might have seen in Ingmar Bergman's earliest films, to a place where the old sexual taboos collapsed and angry class war broke out just like in some other Western European countries.
He developed a script through a great deal of improvisation and then shot enough footage to release it as two films: "Yellow" in 1967, and "Blue" the following year (these titles refer to the colours of the Swedish flag).
This review treats both of them.The main actress of these films was 22 year-old Lena Nyman who plays...
Lena Nyman, a 22 year-old drama student already well into sexual exploration and political commitment.
The films have another layer, however, where we see Vilgot Sjöman coaching his actors and establishing a sexual relationship with his lead actress -- but even this layer is fictional.
Yellow is more about political engagement and non-violence in the context of the Cold War, and it attacks the hypocrisy of the Swedish left (which had become entrenched and no longer a force for social change) and the monarchy.
Blue, on the other hand, explores the themes of religion and the prison system, and more of it is set in the countryside where we hear some of the attitudes of rural Sweden as opposed to the capital.Upon their release, these films (especially Yellow) were attacked as pornography, and Sjöman as a letch (even though it was the real-life Nyman's idea that there be a subplot where the director seduces his lead actress).
Another way in which Sjöman critically examines the New Left is by charting how those who preach non-violence could be very cruel in their interpersonal relationships with friends and family.I had seen only Yellow a few times and was prepared to consider this only a four-star deal, highly interesting as documentary material about 1960s Sweden, but missing something that truly moved me.
However, getting a DVD set and finally seeing Blue provided that moving experience; it is quite impressive how Sjöman made the two films interlock with just enough overlap to make it a convincing whole.
I Am Curious is really two films in one - half of it is the sexual experimental side of Lena and the other half is her curiosity with political/socialism.
The director should have just stuck with the romantic side of Lena and made a separate movie for the politics.
The film feels more like a fictional documentary than a movie.
Other than the interesting sex scenes, you'll be bored dry watching this film.
There is little of the over-the-topness I'm so used to seeing in the American films during this time..
My gosh!) that got a bunch of sneering, self-righteous critics all in a snitty, little outrage over the sheer brazenness of this film's content back in the USA.Banned outright (upon its initial release) in several countries across the globe, I Am Curious (Yellow), (which contains plenty of full-frontal nudity of both men and women) made sex, from my perspective, to be about as interesting to view as being forced to have to watch someone, whom I disliked immensely, fry an egg.Very amateurish, indeed - This disappointing Swedish production, which was definitely far too long for its own good, certainly seemed to go out of its way to feature a number of decidedly unattractive actors (especially when seen in the nude) in its cast.And after the whole ordeal was finally done - I may be somewhat naive about a lot of things that go on in this crazy world of ours, but, after watching this film, I still don't frickin' know what the hell being "curious (yellow)" is supposed to mean..
Back in 1967, "I am Curious Yellow" made quite the splash because it was the first mainstream film to show male frontal nudity.
But none of this is really important as the film also is sure to let you know that it's all fake and it exits the fourth wall quite often--showing the filmmaker and crew several times.
It is one thing to want to oppose excessive puritanism but this movie goes too far, but in fact sex is a minor part of it; the discussion of social inequality is rather boring and without much relevance.
A political documentary, about the social system in Sweden at the time.
A narrative about a filmmaker, Vilgot Sjoman, making a film...
he deals with a relationship with his star in the film and how he should have never got involved with people he's supposed to work with.3.
She is also a coming of age and into her sexuality, and the freedom of that.The magnificence and sheer brilliance of "I am Curious: Yellow/Blue" is how these three elements are cut together.
In one moment you are watching an interview about politics, and the next your watching what the interviewer is doing behind the scenes but does that so well that you sometimes forget that it is the narrative.Another thing is the dynamic between "Yellow" and "Blue", which if you see one, you must see the other.
I'll try to explain it best i can because to my knowledge, no other films have done it though it is a great technique.Think of "Yellow" as a living thing, actual events in 14 scenes.
A complete tale.Think of "Blue" as all the things IN BETWEEN the 14 scenes in "Yellow" that you didn't see, that is a complete tale on it's own.Essentially they are parallel films...
the same story, told in two different ways.It wasn't until i saw the first 30 minutes of "Blue" that i fully understood "Yellow"I hope this was helpful for people who are being discouraged by various influences, because this film changed the way i looked at film.thanks for your time..
121), but neither are outright horrible films- merely dull and, with time's leveling, pointless exercises in puerile political masturbation.
Artistically, they are Ingmar Bergman on a really bad day, although Bergman was Sjöman's filmic idol, and politically they are about as deep as a thimble, larded with the naïve Left Wing tripe that the 1960s overdosed on, in reaction to the dying Right Wing Colonialist culture that arose for a last time after the Second World War. That Sjöman was 42 years old when he made these lightweight films is the only thing surprising because their ranting is more in line with a teenager's to their parent, when they are not allowed to do something destructive.The two films follow the same tale, from slightly different perspectives.
The film is semi-documentary, and yet the camera also goes behind the scenes of the making of the film within the film, as well as ostensibly following Lena and other characters, like her on screen and offscreen lover Börje (Börje Ahlstedt) in places where it could not go, but the viewer is asked to believe unquestioningly.
Of course, this mushes up the real, the 'real', and the staged, but not in a good nor profound way, and since none of the characters are deep nor well drawn, a viewer really has no interest in sniffing out which level is which, assuming that the levels confuse any viewers of intelligence.Like Bernardo Bertolucci's lame Last Tango In Paris, a few years later, neither of the I Am Curious films have relevance for anyone outside of their generation, which is a surefire marker that the art is bad.
Her co-stars were even less successful, and the I Am Curious films deserved their oblivion, for the years' passage has seen what at least seemed bold and innovative get pared down to dull and pretentious.
it's funny, the acting is great and it raises serious(curious) questions.i can't fully understand why this film was so mistreated, probably this is why i plan to never visit the us.
The film I am curious - yellow is made in the style of the nouvelle vague.
So it is no surprise that I am curious - yellow starts as a political film.