Zetterling, Mai

b. 24 May 1925, Västerås, Sweden

d. 17 March 1994, London, United Kingdom

“Is it possible to change people and the world we live in? You tell me. Can we change ourselves? That’s why Aristophanes wrote {Lysistrata}. To get things moving, to make people care… to stop us sitting around, believing we can do nothing… We have to talk! Stop being so embarrassed and critical. People have to be able to talk. Don’t you understand that it’s we who make the world what it is?”¹ – Flickorna (The Girls, 1968)

Mai Zetterling’s films make people talk – her deliberately nonconformist and controversial themes of gender and sexuality were attacked again and again by critics as exploitative and distasteful. On the other hand, this approach raised a cult following that applauded the fearlessly critical and sharply feminist voice throughout her filmography. A lack of financing after her controversial early films led Zetterling to explore different formats, including documentary and television filmmaking. By doing so, Zetterling exemplified her persistent voice by working through the unique pressures, restraints, and freedoms presented to her by these distinct mediums. Zetterling showed that her work demands to be taken seriously, whose social and political critiques become increasingly relevant, and whose obsession with the same themes, plots, and images indicates an unwavering authorship over her work.

Zetterling turned to directing films in the 1960s after a career in acting. She had found her love for stardom by visiting a movie theater as a child: “For a time, we lived above an old cinema… I never remember paying, but I do remember that I loved, adored, venerated Shirley Temple. Smack opposite the cinema was the abominated school which looked and felt like a prison. I used to sit in the window over the neon signs, dreaming about Shirley and identifying with her world.”² After spending her youth working dangerous jobs, like on an assembly line for a prison textile factory and as a sex worker for older men, she pursued her dream of acting. She was accepted into the acting school at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, where many famous Swedish directors and actors were taught, including Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, and Ingmar Bergman. This education launched her acting career, landing her a role at the age of 19 in Alf Sjöberg’s film Hets (Torment, 1944), which was written by the then-unknown Ingmar Bergman. From then on, Zetterling acted mostly in films from Sweden or the United Kingdom, including Freida (1947) and Musik i Mörker (Music in Darkness, 1948). She then ventured into Hollywood to act alongside Tyrone Powers in Abandon Ship (1957) and Peter Sellars in Only Two Can Play (1962). 

After acting in film and theater for two decades, Zetterling decided she wanted to transition behind the camera as a director. She notes in her autobiography, written in the third person, about the moment when she decided to change from acting to directing: “{Zetterling} underwent what can only be described as a gradual disillusionment with acting, which so far had been her only channel of expression. There were too many limitations, not enough creativity. She had come to realise that she was not a bit passive; that she was a doer, a fixer of things, with many ideas of her own which she wanted to explore and communicate to others.”³ This statement not only sums up Zetterling’s transition into filmmaking but also part of the style that she took up in her films. Rather than continue her path of passivity, Zetterling had an eagerness to take action and vocalize the ideas that she found important by taking up the role of a filmmaker. The stylistic traits that Zetterling further developed throughout her career also take on this active role of criticizing and exploring relevant social and political issues. Her transition came with some backlash from outside directors, actors, and critics, who perpetrated a gendered way of viewing these roles into the passive female actress and active male director archetype.⁴ This retaliation to her blurring of gender roles would not escape Zetterling, returning in response to the direction of her later films.

Zetterling’s first mission as a new filmmaker was to learn the basics of the medium while finding her voice as a director. Over the span of four years, from 1960-1963, Zetterling directed four documentaries which include The Polite Invasion: Mai Zetterling in Lapland (1960), Lords of Little Egypt: Mai Zetterling Among the Gypsies (1961), The Prosperity Race: Mai Zetterling in Stockholm (1962), and The Do-It-Yourself Democracy: Mai Zetterling in Iceland (1963). She co-wrote these alongside her husband and continual collaborator David Hughes. The four ethnographic documentaries focus on different cultures and communities out of Zetterling’s fascination with them, including Norway, France, Sweden, and Iceland. The documentaries themselves are met with some controversy, as they depict an othering of cultures presented as exotic or mysterious, an unfortunately common trait among documentary films.⁵ The creation of these four documentaries would greatly build Zetterling’s skills as a filmmaker, preparing her to transition to narrative filmmaking.

After her first documentaries, Zetterling created a narrative short film called The War Game (1963). This was “the last step toward preparing for a feature film”.⁶ Although the film was largely self-funded, it generated a positive reception, winning the Best Short Film at the 24th Venice International Film Festival and was Nominated for a BAFTA. The War Game follows two boys, whose pretend game of war slowly becomes violent. Zetterling depicts this boy’s game to highlight the childish escalation of warfare among adult politicians and military leaders. Zetterling relates the way that children fight over a toy gun to government officials fighting over military forces.⁷ This anti-war sentiment is something that Zetterling would return to and expand upon in many subsequent films, oftentimes showing war in relation to gender. The War Game ultimately shows promise for Zetterling’s further narrative work. This ability to weave political critique into a compelling narrative was something that Zetterling would expand upon in each of her films. Although her later films become increasingly pronounced in their themes and directorial artistry, The War Game still holds merit as an early work by Zetterling.

Soon after The War Game, Zetterling visited Stockholm to star in an advertisement for Lux soap, which quickly became an opportunity for her to successfully pitch her next feature film, Älskande Par (Loving Couples, 1964). The film was to be based on a book of the same name from Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s Miss von Pahlen series. This resulted in the funding for Zetterling’s first feature, for which she received a sizable budget and access to star actors (Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, among others) and crew (notably Sven Nykvist as the cinematographer). Many of the actors, alongside Sven Nykvist, were associated with filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, as he frequently cast them in his films throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. This resulted in a troupe-like community that was analogous to Bergman. Alongside their similar visual style, this inevitably resulted in critics drawing associations between Zetterling and Bergman – an idea which would not only increase the international market for Zetterling’s films but would also prove to spin Bergman’s ideas on its head. Zetterling would effectively appropriate Bergman’s actors, characters, and themes as a way of reinterpreting them through a feminist viewpoint. It’s easy to recognize the connections between Loving Couples and Bergman’s early films, like Kvinnors Väntan (Waiting Women, 1952), Kvinnodröm (Dreams, 1955), and especially Nära Livet (Brink of Life, 1958) through their similarities in narrative structure, visual aesthetics, characters, and overarching themes. Zetterling reinterprets these concepts found in Bergman’s films to gain a deeper, realistic female gaze perspective of the same ideas. In this regard, Zetterling was able to create her own vision, even with the looming figure of Bergman dictating the Swedish style. 

Loving Couples

Loving Couples follows three pregnant women in a maternity hospital. Their stories are interwoven through their experience within the hospital, alongside a flashback structure that merges past with present. The film presents multiple themes that would become highly prevalent throughout Zetterling’s body of work: marriage, sex, and birth. These, alongside concepts of freedom and loneliness, were the “fundamentals of life” according to Zetterling.⁸ To answer specifically why Zetterling was so obsessed with sexuality is not entirely possible. Rather, it seems obvious that sexuality, and its counterpart of gender, act as gateways into tapping into a human form of expression that was suppressed through social and political traditions. By expanding upon gender and sexuality in her films, Zetterling effectively fights against normative conventions in art and society. This would soon cause large amounts of controversy for each film that disrupted the traditional way of depicting gender and sexuality in cinema.

One example of this in Loving Couples is at the end of the film, where Angela (Gio Petré) gives birth to a child. The scene shows Angela fighting against the pain of childbirth, intercut with a shot of a baby being pulled from her womb. Zetterling utilizes the real birth of a child for this shot – one of the first narrative films to do so. This would cause controversy for Loving Couples as viewers found it disturbing to watch an unexpected live birth on screen. This shows Zetterling’s boldness in creating deliberate shock while pushing the themes of gender, sexuality, and reproduction. By doing so, she breaks through normative traditions of filmmaking and cultural taboos to demonstrate a realistic viewpoint. This concept is emphasized in another scene of the film, which depicts a lesbian relationship between two women. She elicits this relationship as a way of disrupting how sexuality is generally perceived. Through one of Angela’s flashbacks, we meet Bell, whose pining for Angela first seems predatory, but ultimately unveils an empathetic and tragic side to her character. Her unrequited longing for affection results in the sad embrace of a tree, subsequently falling to the ground in despair. Zetterling touches on a charged feeling common in queer sexuality: unrequited love causing a deeper repression of identity. Bell’s character becomes a tragic figure when her repressed sexuality is met with rejection. Zetterling depicts this raw and tragic relationship to normalize queer sexuality in cinema while targeting relevant struggles that individuals deal with. 

Alongside these themes of gender and sexuality, Zetterling also indicates her signature style of depicting time, space, and memory. In Loving Couples, Zetterling, alongside editor Paul Davies, makes clear use of multiple editing techniques to create a sense of muddled time and space. In one scene, we see Adele (Gunnel Lindblom) as she runs down a corridor within the maternity hospital. Zetterling quickly fades to a flashback of Adele running through the woods to a naked lover awaiting her. The next shot brings us back to the present, as the nurses from the hospital catch up to Adele running through the hallway, restraining her with their hands. This again triggers Adele’s memory of her lover, as Zetterling fades back and forth between the harsh treatment of the nurses restraining her in the present, and passionate caressing with a lover in the past. These spaces become intertwined into a single montage of fading, where the memory of the past is revived in the present. This scene not only depicts Zetterling’s thematic representation of sexuality, but is also an example of the way in which she stylistically utilizes space and time to elicit the complexities of memory.

Out of Zetterling’s filmography, Loving Couples was received the best by critics and filmgoers on release. This being said, the film was met with some controversy, in part due to the fact that Zetterling was a female director. Famously, critics deemed that Zetterling “directs like a man”;⁹ it seemed that there were preconceived notions of the European art-film aesthetic being predominantly masculine. Zetterling’s aesthetic style closely resembled this European look to such an extent as to define her as a ‘masculine’ director, a sentiment which still puzzles critics to this day. Despite reviewers’ misogynistic viewpoint of Zetterling, it was clear that she showed promise as a filmmaker with a naturally distinct sense of voice and style. This inevitably led to Zetterling’s continuation as a filmmaker, with her next film, Nattlek (Night Games, 1966) releasing two years after Loving Couples.

Zetterling’s second feature film, Night Games, again co-written with David Hughes, premiered at the Venice Film Festival with the following epigraph:

“I tried to film a story of modern Europe. I try to be honest, so it shows signs of decadence. Perverted sex is one of those signs, perhaps the most dramatically obvious, and I use it because I believe you can only come to a positive view of things by passing through innumerable negative views.”¹⁰

At its core, Night Games is an intensely Gothic film in the literary sense. Not only does it focus on the decadence and sexual perversion that Zetterling mentions, but its Gothic sensibility is made evident by the heightened melodrama, emphasis on psychological trauma, and the setting of the crumbling castle in which the plot takes place. Night Games follows Jan (played by Jeve Hjelm) as he returns to his childhood home in Sweden, forcing him to grapple with his memory of the past. As Jan explores his previous home, Zetterling depicts vivid memories of his past, implementing a flashback structure similar to Loving Couples. Thus, the film takes place in the present and the past by intercutting the same physical spaces. Utilizing this structure allows for an exploration of subjective visions and memory, tapping into a psychological headspace to experience how characters interact with time and space. In this sense, memory, space, and time reveal a Freudian – and Gothic – look into how childhood memories shape adult perversions. Zetterling places an emphasis on sexuality in this regard, focusing on the relationship between young Jan and his mother. Jan is presented as a child sexually obsessed with his mother: he hides in her skirt, puts on her makeup, and in a culminating scene, masturbates in front of her. The Oedipal connection to Freud seems evident on its own, as this sexual connection between mother and son causes psychological trauma which Jan is forced to cope with when revisiting the house. Zetterling taps into a deeper understanding of trauma and memory by eliciting this perverse sense of sexuality. This, of course, comes at the risk of controversy and scandal by audiences who aren’t willing to look past the shocking factors to understand the film’s underlying themes.

Night Games

Night Games was met with controversy even before it premiered at the Venice Film Festival. Zetterling chose to utilize an anatomical drawing of intercourse from Leonardo da Vinci as the poster of the film, which sparked a large scandal at the festival. The poster was censored throughout the festival, “…they banned their own Leonardo da Vinci. Black paper covered my beautiful poster and nine hundred copies of the programme.”¹¹ The festival further decided to not screen the film to the general public, only allowing a private screening for judges and critics. All of this was done in an effort to censor the controversially perverse ideas that Zetterling wanted to emphasize. Critics deemed the film to be overly sensational, shameless, and exploitative for these same reasons.¹² In a mixed review of the film, Pauline Kael wrote, “I’ve never seen a movie with such a sophisticated technique joined to such bizarrely naïve content.”¹³ Many critics, including Kael who called it “the worst of Fellini with the worst of Bergman”,¹⁴ downplayed the film as a duplication of styles from Fellini, Bergman, and Buñuel, in turn dismissing any notion of originality in Zetterling’s approach to the film. Lastly, the screening of Night Games at the San Francisco International Film Festival caused a large amount of controversy as Shirley Temple, the same child actress who inspired Zetterling to pursue acting, resigned as the director of the festival in protest of the screening of the film. She stated about Night Games: “I, like many women, am round, not square. But I am squarely against pornography for profit.”¹⁵ This has become a notorious example of the backlash against Zetterling’s films internationally, as people found them to be tasteless and perverse, or in Shirley Temple’s case, pornographic. 

After Loving Couples and Night Games, Zetterling took on two large projects, which would take four years to complete. While working on what she thought was her next film, The Girls, Zetterling received a proposal to adapt Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doktor Glas, which she accepted. Zetterling shot The Girls but stopped before editing to shoot and edit Doktor Glas (Doctor Glas, 1968). Both films were then subsequently released in 1968. Doctor Glas was originally set to premiere at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival but was canceled due to political riots surfacing at the time. This led to the film being widely unseen, and even generally unrecognized to this day. The 2022 Criterion Collection release of “Three by Mai Zetterling” presents Loving Couples, Night Games, and The Girls as Zetterling’s important Swedish films, but unfortunately disregards Doctor Glas. Nevertheless, Zetterling shows a strong vision and style in Doctor Glas which ultimately proves to be one of her most masterful films. Zetterling takes her previous themes of reproduction, sexuality, and gender and presents them in a different light. 

Per Oscarsson plays the character of Doctor Glas: a cold, lonely, and impotent physician disgusted with the sexual environment surrounding him. One patient of his, Helga, confides in him about the discomfort she feels concerning her husband’s sexual advances. The husband, who is also a clergyman, forces sex upon Helga with the intent of claiming his ‘marital right’. Glas attempts to persuade the clergyman to stop his behavior but ultimately arrives at the solution of murder when other strategies fail.

Doctor Glas

Like Loving Couples and Night Games, Zetterling tells the story through an entanglement of flashbacks and subjective visions. Zetterling’s obsession with fractured narrative structure is utilized to highlight past, present, and subjective imagination. These moments are often shown in white indistinguishable spaces, shot with overexposed and high-contrast visuals. This not only taps into the psychological effect of inner subjectivity but also elicits a cold and distant atmosphere that matches the tone of the film. In this sense, Zetterling again emphasizes shocking effects to elicit discomfort in the viewer. In these scenes of memory and subjective imagination, Zetterling presents the viewer with difficult scenes. In one instance, Zetterling shows the marital rape between Helga and her husband, but positions the camera in Helga’s perspective to force the viewer into her inescapable circumstance. Zetterling requires that we identify with Helga’s position as we see grotesque close-ups of the husband’s face, intercut with explicit images of their genitals during the sequence. This striking choice creates deliberate discomfort in the viewer to witness Helga’s rape intimately. The sequence suits Zetterling’s style in challenging viewers to contemplate a reality that is often left unspoken. By consistently repeating themes of gender, sex, and reproduction, Zetterling actively incites a challenge for the viewer to confront – a provocation that finds its way into most of her films. Even in Doctor Glas, Zetterling reuses the controversial shot of live childbirth from the end of Loving Couples. There is a sense that she wants to repeat the elicitation of shock and controversy that the live childbirth in Loving Couples was met with. By doing this, it also seems evident that Zetterling has an infatuation with this specific imagery.

Doctor Glas was released to a very minimal audience. Even then, the film was reviewed negatively, as Swedish and Danish critics called it “disgusting” and a “failed product”.¹⁶ This left it to be largely overshadowed by Zetterling’s other work throughout the years. Nevertheless, Doctor Glas seems to be one of Zetterling’s finest films. It absorbs ideas that had been explored in the previous films, presenting them in a thematically and stylistically unique light. In this sense, it is not only one of her most mature and serious films but also one of her most experimental and creative. 

Zetterling’s next film, Flickorna (The Girls, 1968), began as an idea based upon Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, an ancient Greek comedy. The play includes the themes of sensuality, humor, and anti-war that Zetterling found highly appealing.¹⁷ The Girls follows three women (played by Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom) as they perform Lysistrata throughout Sweden. Their individual lives become infused with the characters of the play, culminating in a relationship between theater, film, and reality charged with social and political feminist commentary. At this point in her career, Zetterling admits to being inspired by Bergman in creating her own troupe of cast and crew as a way of forming a family.¹⁸ Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, and Gunnar Björnstrand made their return to working with Zetterling, alongside new, yet equally famous actors Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson. 

The Girls

Out of Zetterling’s filmography, The Girls is the most outwardly feminist. Her themes of gender and sexuality discard subtlety to transform the film into an explicit and overtly feminist piece. In this sense, the characters act as mouthpieces to describe what Zetterling intends to say through her film, making her points evidently clear. In a central scene of the film, Liz (Bibi Andersson) pleads to a theater audience to discuss their interpretation and understanding of Lysistrata directly after performing it. She looks upon the silently awkward audience, and with the camera positioned amongst them, pleads toward us in a three-minute monologue: “Is it at all possible to change one another and the world we live in?”¹⁹ This sentiment of the capability for human change – intended with a feminist lens – is quickly brushed aside by Hugo (Gunnar Björnstrand) telling the audience with a smirk, “What? Yet another women’s revolt?”²⁰ The three women of the film persist in finding change, whether that be in their personal lives, in the production of the play, or through active protesting, to create a life that is not dictated by the patriarchy. The men of the film actively overlook and dismiss these notions as a form of maintaining their oppressive power. This morphs into a gender war between men and women. Zetterling places this against the backdrop of the historical rivalry of Sparta and Athens in Lysistrata, alongside the Cold War (and subsequently the Vietnam War) at the time of the film’s production.²¹ The historical nature of power within war, shown within The Girls as a slideshow of famous world leaders, is placed in relation to the ‘ordinary’ men of the film to create a distribution of oppressive power originating from the commonality of the male gender.²²

Although The Girls contains some of Zetterling’s most striking filmmaking, it also performed the worst out of her previous feature films. Not only did it have a very low turnout rate domestically and internationally, but the release also came with a generally scathing response from male critics. Some critics suggested that Zetterling was attempting to copy Bergman, Fellini, and Buñuel without providing enough original substance. On the other hand, many female critics and viewers resonated with the film. French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir gave The Girls a positive review in Le Monde, noting the film’s poetic and reflexive nature.²³ It wasn’t until years after its release that it began to receive generally positive reviews – a common trend for Zetterling’s filmography. More than any of Zetterling’s other films, The Girls slowly became accepted into the European art-film canon. In the contemporary lens, The Girls is Zetterling’s most viewed and appreciated work in her filmography. It is frequently screened and discussed as a quintessential entry into the feminist cinema canon in view of the film’s response to relevant political topics in the 1960s.

The immediate failure of Doctor Glas and The Girls ensured that it would be difficult for Zetterling to continue making mainstream films, especially in Sweden. Yet after some failed projects that didn’t receive funding, alongside a book of short stories, Zetterling directed Vincent the Dutchman (1972), a BBC made-for-television film that follows the life of Vincent Van Gogh. Although relatively small in budget and scale, the film won a BAFTA for Best Specialized Television Program in 1973. 

Zetterling followed this up with her segment “The Strongest” in Visions of Eight (1973). This film was a documentary anthology following the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, utilizing eight segments from eight separate directors from around the world (Miloš Forman, Claude Lelouch, Yuri Ozerov, Kon Ichikawa, John Schlesinger, Arthur Penn, Michael Pfleghar, and Mai Zetterling). Being initially uninterested, Zetterling turned down the offer of doing a segment representing Sweden twice before accepting. She notes her distaste for competitive sports in her autobiography, referencing Orwell’s The Sporting Spirit (1945): “…Sport had nothing to do with camaraderie and fair play, but that it was bound up with all kinds of jealousies about money, status, politics and hatred; that in a sense it was very close to warfare…”²⁴ This was particularly true for the 1972 Munich Olympics which Visions of Eight covered, as 11 Israeli athletes, five Palestinians, and one German security guard were killed during the event. Visions of Eight aimed to promote both anti-war and anti-competition sentiments, as suggested in an opening statement for the film, “This is no chronological record, no summary of winners and losers. Rather, it is the separate vision of eight singular film artists.”²⁵ The film, unlike Olympic films of the past – notoriously in Riefenstahl’s propagandistic Olympia (1938) – aims to view the festival through an artistic lens, focusing on the individual aesthetics of the artist, rather than any nationalistic or propagandistic viewpoint. In this sense, the directors take up the role of the passive onlooker of the artistry of the individuals, rather than a judge or advocate for competing countries.

Mai Zetterling (left) and the directors of Visions of Eight

Zetterling’s segment, “The Strongest” is no exception to this. She was initially offered a segment on women athletes at the Olympics but felt it was “too obvious a choice” and wanted to do “as far as possible from what I am and what I know about”.²⁶ Zetterling found the obsessive, strange, and isolating nature of the competitors profoundly interesting, ultimately focusing on the process that Olympic weightlifters undergo to make it through the festival. In “The Strongest”, we see weightlifters training in the gym, their scrutinized diets being produced, and their final competition as a product of their labor. What makes Zetterling’s segment of Visions of Eight so fascinating in regard to her oeuvre is how, when stripped away of the common themes of gender, sexuality, and fractured narrative structure, she still finds a way to keep the notion of obsession within the film. In this sense, Zetterling returns back to her documentarian lens once again to focus on a study of obsession within the ethnographic culture of Olympic weightlifting. As the segment begins we receive images of Zetterling working on set with the weightlifters, alongside narration of her thoughts: “I chose weightlifting because I knew nothing about it. And I suppose one thing that really fascinated me was that these men work in almost total isolation, and that they are obsessed. They don’t seem to have any life apart from lifting. I am not interested in sports, but I am interested in obsession.”²⁷ We see multiple manifestations of this in “The Strongest” as the athletes obsess over something that seems trivial, yet liberating. Zetterling emphasizes an athlete faced with the inability to lift a weight. His entire mental process of gaining the confidence and physical strength to overcome the obstacle is exhibited on screen. Zetterling visualizes the mentality of obsession strictly through camera placement, editing, and diegetic sound. This moment indicates a highlight for Visions of Eight, alongside the brilliance of Zetterling’s direction. She invites us to understand the mentality of obsession, reflecting her own obsession with specific themes, characters, and images utilized throughout her filmography. 

Zetterling’s late career, beginning in the late 1970s, consisted of smaller TV projects with minimal funding, ultimately receiving small amounts of attention. After the divorce of her husband and frequent co-writer David Hughes in 1976, Zetterling channeled her energy into writing and directing Vi har Många Namn (We Have Many Names, 1976), which, casting herself as the lead role, follows many of the struggles that she faced in her marital relationship. This was followed up, the next year, with Månen är en grön ost (The Moon is a Green Cheese, 1977), which Zetterling also wrote and directed. The Moon is a Green Cheese is Zetterling’s strangest entry in her filmography. Often noted as a children’s film, The Moon is a Green Cheese is a surrealist fever dream of fantastical colors and childish nonsense, which has earned it equal amounts of acclaim and distaste from modern viewers. It still holds a small level of contemporary cult following amongst viewers looking for experimental and psychedelic cinema. Nevertheless, The Moon is a Green Cheese was ultimately screened twice before falling into obscurity alongside some of Zetterling’s other ventures during this time period. 

Zetterling returned to documentary filmmaking once again from 1979-1981. Here she created three documentary films: Mai Zetterling’s Stockholm (1979), Lady Policeman (1979), and Of Seals and Men (1981).²⁸ Mai Zetterling’s Stockholm is the most interesting and accessible of the bunch, which focuses on Stockholm’s social and political environment. The documentary, starring Zetterling as the guide and narrator, focuses on topics of religion, theater, and war within Stockholm. Zetterling takes on the persona of August Strindberg and Queen Christina, both of whom lived in Stockholm. Strindberg is the largest focus of Stockholm, as Zetterling not only discusses his life and connection to the city, but also his fallacies in relation to women. Strindberg was notorious for his misogynistic viewpoint of women, often pitting them against men in the “fundamental antagonism that exists between the sexes”.²⁹ Even in a documentary format made for television, Zetterling still emphasizes this theme of gender which she focuses on in her narrative films. Dressed in a caricatured costume of Strindberg, Zetterling pokes fun at his belief of inherent female antagonism by mockingly reading his notes. Over narration she states, “On the shelves {of his home} are the plays obsessed with a central theme: women.”³⁰ An underlying point of interest in this line is that it can be used to describe both August Strindberg and Mai Zetterling’s work. They were both obsessed with the same ideas, but viewed them in opposite regards. Strindberg saw women as mystifying, imprudent, and antagonizing, while Zetterling responded to these beliefs by emphasizing female agency in light of oppression. Stockholm not only uncovers a viewpoint of the city’s culture but also highlights how Zetterling’s themes build from the artists surrounding her, showing that, even through the documentary format, she persists in exploring her recurrent ideas.

In 1982, Zetterling was offered to direct a feature film in Britain, called Scrubbers (1982). The film dealt with the problematic borstal prison system, which was a youth prison reformatory in the UK. The film was initially co-written by Roy Minton, the screenwriter of the cult-classic British film, Scum (1979), which follows a group of boys face in a male borstal. With this in mind, Scrubbers was intended to be a ‘female version’ of Scum, utilizing similar plot points and themes but changing the gender of the characters. After Zetterling accepted to be on the project, she conducted extensive research inside ongoing borstals. This gave her a deeper understanding of how the corrupt system represses young women who “needed love and understanding”.³¹ Zetterling rewrote large portions of Minton’s script to expand upon these ideas which she discovered in her research, leading to Minton disowning the project. Thus, Zetterling’s Scrubbers ultimately became a unique film, not entirely associated with Scum, with the inclusion of her as director and writer. 

Scrubbers

The plot of Scrubbers follows two friends, Annetta and Carol, who are placed inside the same all-girls borstal together. While here, they meet other members of the prison such as Mac, a jester-like entertainer who sings dirty limericks, and Glennis, a cigarette and glue-huffing addict. Throughout the film, Annetta helplessly tries to get back with her daughter, as shown in hallucinatory visions. In this sense, Zetterling’s theme of motherhood, seen previously in Loving Couples or Night Games, reappears in the relationship between Annetta and her daughter. Zetterling equates motherhood with freedom and ambition, showing that for Annetta, and the other women of the borstal, the vision of motherhood is the only beacon of hope outside the prison system. This sensibility has carried through from Loving Couples, which ended with the birth of a child, giving hope for the creation of a new life. Although Scrubbers was a return to larger-budget narrative filmmaking, the film continues the concepts that Zetterling had been working on throughout narrative, documentary, and television filmmaking. 

As customary for a Zetterling film, Scrubbers did not receive high praise on release. Reviews from critics and audience members were generally mixed, sometimes noting an uninventive quality to the film. This being said, Scrubbers, like Zetterling’s other films, has aged well since its release. Although some still dismiss the film as a second-rate copy of the machismo cult-classic Scum, there is still an audience of viewers who are deeply interested in the queer, feminist, and political aspects of the film. 

Zetterling’s last narrative film, Amorosa (1986), perfectly rounded off her career as a filmmaker. The film is based on the life of Agnes von Krusenstjerna, the Swedish writer whose ‘Miss von Pahlen’ series Loving Couples was based on. Zetterling’s interest in the writer resurfaced due to the common themes they discussed: “{Von Krusenstjerna} wrote about men and women in conflict with one another. She wrote about love, to be sure, and the pain of love. She also wrote about family ties and tragedies: marriage, children, madness.”³² In this sense, Zetterling is the most suitable director to adapt von Krusenstjerna’s life for the screen. She would become the writer whose influence both started (Loving Couples) and concluded Zetterling’s career (Amorosa). It shows that Zetterling never lost sight of the same core ideas that she wanted to advocate for at the start of her career. Therefore the elicitation of von Krusenstjerna creates a neat arc to Zetterling’s filmmaking career.

At the end of her career, Zetterling directed a few smaller documentary films like Betongmormor (Concrete Grandma, 1986), and Sunday Pursuit (1990). By 1989, Zetterling took on a project for a film which was to be called The Woman Who Cleaned the World. While attempting to finance and produce the film, she would briefly return to acting in 1990, starring as Moa in Ken Loach’s Hidden Agenda (1990) and as the grandmother Helga in Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches (1990). Unfortunately, The Woman Who Cleaned the World was never produced due to financing issues. The project stopped altogether after Zetterling’s death in 1996. This marked a close to her career at the age of 68, although she had been eager to continue directing films until her death.

Unfortunately, many viewers and critics to this day have placed aside Zetterling’s filmography in favor of other Swedish directors working at the time. Ingmar Bergman, Bo Widerberg, Vilgot Sjöman, Lasse Hallström, and Jan Troell are often discussed as quintessential Swedish directors between the ‘60s and the ‘80s, although Zetterling was creating important films at the same time. This can’t be entirely attributed to Zetterling’s gender in a male-favored industry, but additionally the style of her films – deliberately controversial and unconventional – also contributed to dissuading viewers from attempting her work. On the other hand, there has been a community of viewers and critics who have appreciated Zetterling’s cinema over the years. Recent monumental restorations of Zetterling’s films by the Swedish Film Institute and Janus Films have made retrospective screenings, physical media releases, and streaming availability far more accessible. This has given a new generation of film viewers access to Zetterling’s films, some of which have been hidden in obscurity for many years. Along with the growth of interest in gender and sexuality in recent years, this has augmented the discussion for Zetterling’s works significantly. She has shown that her films, from her early documentaries to her late narratives, have exemplified a persistence in theme and style, no matter the budget, format, or time period in which she worked. 

Selected Filmography as Director

• The Polite Invasion: Mai Zetterling in Lapland (1960)
• Lords of Little Egypt: Mai Zetterling Among the Gypsies (1961)
• The Prosperity Race: Mai Zetterling in Stockholm (1962)
• The Do-It-Yourself Democracy: Mai Zetterling in Iceland (1963)
• The War Game (1963) 
• Älskande Par (Loving Couples, 1964)
• Nattlek (Night Games, 1966)
• Doktor Glas (Doctor Glas, 1968)
• Flickorna (The Girls, 1968)
• Vincent the Dutchman (1972)
• Visions of Eight, segment “The Strongest” (1973)
• Vi Har Många Namn (We Have Many Names, 1976)
• Månen är en grön ost (The Moon is a Green Cheese, 1977)
• Lady Policeman (1979)
• Mai Zetterling’s Stockholm (1979)
• Of Seals and Men (1979)
• Scrubbers (1982)
• Amorosa (1986)
• Betongmormor (Concrete Grandma, 1986)
• Sunday Pursuit (1990)

Endnotes