Being A Human Person

It’s per­haps hard to fath­om, but some genius artists are not great fans of being show­ered in adu­la­tion by those who con­sume their art. It just makes them feel self-con­scious and awk­ward, lead­ing them to seek out pri­vate cop­ing mech­a­nisms that enable them to inter­act with the world while assum­ing some sem­blance of polite normalcy.

Being a Human Per­son is Fred Scott’s chron­i­cle of the mak­ing of Swedish direc­tor Roy Andersson’s sixth fea­ture, About End­less­ness. Ander­s­son is known for a mode of sto­ry­telling which is pow­ered by immac­u­late­ly ren­dered tableaux which often trade off of a mor­dant vision of life’s absur­di­ty, human pet­ti­ness and hypocrisy, and occa­sion­al­ly, the evanes­cent poet­ry of the everyday.

How Ander­s­son is able to pluck these ideas out of the either and process them into these breath­tak­ing, hand-tooled vignettes, just baf­fles the mind, and while this film doesn’t quite hand you the skele­ton key to that process, it does nudge you down some inter­est­ing, inspi­ra­tional byways. For instance, many of his ​“scenes” are drawn from clas­si­cal his­to­ry, or paint­ings which have been re-ren­dered or recon­tex­tu­alised, and this imbues the results with a time­less­ness that expands across cul­tures and continents.

This film is large­ly set in the urban bur­row of Stu­dio 24, Andersson’s inde­pen­dent pro­duc­tion space and liv­ing quar­ters, where he and his team build the sets and shoot the films. It’s a some­what ram­shackle oper­a­tion on this evi­dence, not least down to the fact that Ander­s­son him­self does tend to allow his atten­tions to wan­der, while his brit­tle exac­ti­tude is not exact­ly con­ducive to speedy results.

The focus then takes some­thing of a turn when it is revealed – via a rather icky spy-cam shot – that Ander­s­son needs to take small nips of alco­hol through­out the day in order to fuel his cre­ativ­i­ty and sta­bilise his per­son­abil­i­ty. And this is very much a new thing which he sees as being whol­ly man­age­able, even though col­leagues can see the extent to which it’s affect­ing his work and his temper.

Dead­lines are missed, stage crew are left stand­ing tap­ping their watch­es, fes­ti­val invites are turned down, all as every­one des­per­ate­ly attempts to man­u­fac­ture the cor­rect con­di­tions for Ander­s­son to feel com­fort­able being a cre­ator again. There’s maybe a sense of moral­is­tic tut-tut­ting about Andersson’s drink­ing, yet see­ing him attend the Venice Film Fes­ti­val, frag­ile to the point of break­ing, and you do won­der whether the con­cern is justified.

The film does a bang-up job of cap­tur­ing an artist in his nat­ur­al habi­tat, and doesn’t fall into the hec­tor­ing trap of hav­ing peo­ple say over and over how great he is. And it does help to express the idea that these mav­er­ick types can­not oper­ate on their own – while the results of their cre­ative endeav­ours may be sec­ond-to-none, you need good, depend­able peo­ple around you to help trans­form those ideas into cin­e­mat­ic reality.

Being A Human Per­son is avail­able via Cur­zon Home Cin­e­ma from 16 October.