+ In Conversation with Professor Louis Lemkow, Mai Zetterling’s son
In a stark apartment building, two children playfully fight over a gun. As the tussle escalates from play to something more serious, their fight takes them higher up the building where the intensity of their conflict is mirrored by the increasing danger of their surroundings. Zetterling’s award-winning short film will be followed by a conversation with Professor Lemkow, Professor of Environmental Sociology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, who will talk about his mother’s life and work.
‘The War Game’: a contemporary review
A little drama of atmosphere and suspense, this film was obviously inspired by the cinematic potential of the new houses on the Oakhill Park Estate where it was shot (as the Dutch Big City Blues was similarly inspired by a half-finished concrete building). The film thus works on two levels which are perfectly blended: the psychological tension between the two boys, playing a game and yet also in earnest, and the background against which their game is played, the bright, affluent block set in a new estate with everyday noises breaking through. Indeed, with no dialogue or music, the brilliantly composed soundtrack is of the greatest importance. The two boys are perfectly cast and give excellent performances of considerable subtlety; through their intensity, the utter seriousness with which they play (but is it play?), the changing balance between them, the incipient viciousness and friendliness, this becomes more than merely a game between two children. It is a parable of antagonism which makes Golding’s Lord of the Flies all too plausible. Made with great care, impeccably scripted and photographed, this film is a credit to all involved in its making.
Monthly Film Bulletin, March 1964
Passion and All That Goes with It: The Films of Mai Zetterling
Stardom in post-war Britain brought Zetterling unfulfilling parts in a stifling system, though she found some satisfaction through serious stage roles. Her unconventional views on the ‘silly institution’ of marriage grabbed the headlines and cemented her reputation as Scandinavian ‘passion girl’. The determination to get behind the camera and bring her personal vision to the screen, by whatever means necessary, became the driving force in her life, and she left behind a dazzlingly varied and unique filmography. From visceral television documentaries to hard-hitting features, Zetterling was an auteur from day one, stubbornly demanding control of every stage of the filmmaking process. Often taking women’s lives as her focus, she refused to be limited or pigeon-holed by her sex, fighting stereotypes both on set and on screen. This season, celebrating her centenary, highlights the immense passion and talent she brought to everything she did, both as an actor and director.
Josephine Botting and Kajsa Hedström, season curators
Zetterling’s reluctance to be seen as a ‘women’s lib’ filmmaker reflected frustration at the tendency of critics to focus on her film’s feminist content at the expense of other aspects of her work. From her perspective, her films were just as concerned with other political issues – particularly pacifism, class and consumerism. (Zetterling’s left-wing leanings were well known enough that MI5 kept files on her throughout the 1940s and 50s, to monitor her ‘communist sympathies’.)
Her complicated relationship to feminism might also reflect her isolated position, as a rare woman director in the Swedish film industry, whose work pre-empted the 1970s feminist film movement. (Zetterling’s role models were celebrated auteurs such as Fellini, Buñuel and Tarkovsky, and she aspired to be part of the overwhelmingly male-dominated arthouse tradition.) Indeed, the loneliness of the trailblazing artist is a recurring subject for Zetterling, evident in engrossing hybrid documentary Vincent the Dutchman (1972), about Vincent van Gogh, and in Amorosa (1986), a biopic of her heroine Agnes von Krusenstjerna, charting the writer’s struggles with mental illness.
Another factor in Zetterling’s isolation, could be her position as an immigrant filmmaker. Despite making her best-known work in Sweden, Zetterling left as a teenager and spent most of her life in the UK and France. Her conflicted relationship with her birth country is apparent in Mai Zetterling’s Stockholm (1979), a travelogue made for Canadian television, in which she describes Stockholm as ‘the city of no faces, the city of no dreams… the city of the greatest isolation.’ The film is a weirdly disquieting watch, part sightseeing tour, part brutal takedown of Sweden’s self-image. She presents a large portion of the film, wearing a thin moustache and manic gaze, as the playwright and novelist August Strindberg, whom she portrays as a raving misogynist. The film’s working title, ‘Native Squatter’, underlines Zetterling’s sense of disconnection from her birth country. Yet despite her complicated feelings towards Sweden, her Swedish films have largely been absorbed into the national canon. In the UK, her cultural status is less clear, although Scrubbers (1982), a vicious punk-infused drama about the horrors of the women’s borstal system, still has many admirers. Undeniably messy and narratively confused in places, but elevated by some blistering set pieces and nightmarish imagery, Scrubbers has come to be seen as an essential, women-centric counterpart to Alan Clarke’s Scum (1979).
Rachel Pronger, ‘“What Do You Want from Me?” The Many Faces of Mai Zetterling’ (extract), Sight and Sound, June 2025 (available to buy from the BFI Shop)
Louis Lemkow Zetterling has lived and worked in Catalonia since 1975 and is currently Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).
Host: Josephine Botting is a Curator at the BFI National Archive and author of Adrian Brunel and British Cinema of the 1920s.
The War Game
Director: Mai Zetterling
Producer: Mai Zetterling
Written by: Mai Zetterling, David Hughes
Photography: Brian Probyn, Chris Menges
Editor: Paul Davies
Cast:
Ian Ellis
Joseph Robinson
UK 1962
15 mins
Digital 4K (restoration)
Total running time: 90 mins
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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