Claes Söderquist

The Return of the Buffalo

The ‘Indians of All Tribes’ group occupied Alcatraz prison, which closed in 1963, from 1969 to 1971 in order to build a cultural and educational center. When Söderquist visited the island in 1970, the occupants had built up a functioning society with jobs, family life and schools. The text ‘Indian America Land’ was posted on the outside of a building. In a voice-over, school teacher Bob Bradley discusses political inequality, social problems and the difficult situation for the Native American population in the USA, as well as the background for the occupation. The Return of the Buffalo is a stylized and unique documentary (the only filmed material from the occupation), a black-and-white depiction in which architecture, former prison buildings, politics, music and dance are interwoven with local radio, conversations and discussions into a focused whole. The film became the starting point for Söderquist’s Alcatraz – The Return (2013).

Fly till vatten och morgon

A young man returns to his parental home where his mother has lived alone as a widow for many years.

Brev ur tystnaden

In In Letters from silence, the reconstructed home of German writer Kurt Tucholsky is portrayed. Tucholsky was a left-wing democrat of Jewish heritage, a pacifist and antimilitarist who lived in exile in Sweden between 1932 and 1935. In letters written to his friends Hedvig Muller and Walter Hasenclever, he warns of anti-democratic tendencies in politics, the military and the judicial system in Sweden as well as in Germany and the rest of Europe, but also of the current threat of Nazism. With unconventional austerity, slow travelling shots of details and empty rooms, (a form recognized from Landscape), along with the bitter tone of the letters, Söderquist conveys the existential emptiness and exclusion that exile from Germany meant for the writer.

Landscape

Landskap is a focused and tightly-constructed series of panorama, whose masterly projection of natural sound and cyclical construction are manifested in seasonal color-and-light variations, glistening sunlight and flowing streams.

Epitaf

A 1981 short film.

Civil Engineering

Old photographs and pictures with a dialogless soundtrack of a train ride.

In Tuxedo

In Söderquist's first film [I frack] In Tuxedo, playfulness and improvisation are combined with absurd humor. An artist steps into an empty studio and begins assembling objects into a tree-like sculpture. The sculpture is adorned with small white paper clouds, puppets and undefinable items; all the while, the studio fills up with new things: a suitcase, a mirror and formal attire. The artist, now wearing a top hat and tuxedo, paints the paper clouds and the wall in a frenzy of activity, ending with his sitting exhausted in a corner surrounded by the mess he has created. The growing chaos, the various layers of narrative and the music of the soundtrack, which was improvised and recorded live during a viewing of the final film cut, interact in counterpoint.

Labyrinth

Labyrinth was filmed in Malmö in the south of Sweden in the summer of 2012. It forms a trilogy together with Landscape (1985 – 1987) and Passages – Portrait of a City (2001). It is a minimal film based on time, place and movement and like Passages, it is also a portrait of a city, but of a different and more intimate kind.

Passages – Portrait of a City

Passages was filmed in Malmö, a city in the south of Sweden. It is a non-narrative film based on time, place and movement, which forms a trilogy with Landscape (1985 – 1987) and Labyrinth (2013). 48 different locations in the city were documented using circular pan shots.

Travelogue: Portraits – Images from a journey

A black-and-white travel journal, in which the themes of memories and their relationship to the past suddenly catch up and rush away from us. The film is based on a series of portraits of American artists, all of whom belong to a young and politicized generation, presented in static tableaus from their studios, films and home environments.

Civil Engineering

Old photographs and pictures with a dialogless soundtrack of a train ride.

Utflykt Opus 2

In the prologue of Excursion:Opus 2, the camera sweeps over nearly unidentifiable details on a sleeping man’s body, mixed with discontinuous images of the morning routines of two people and their preparation for an excursion. Subtle sounds of wind blowing are combined with squalling, inarticulate sounds of birds and frogs. The couple cycle through a dense forest, climb amongst ferns, and kiss to a soundtrack of classical music (without being overtly obvious or romantic) layered with birdsong, which gradually distorts into more psychedelic and frightening noise. Close-ups of the romantic couple, camera shots that follow the cyclists’ rush through the woods, and the couple struggling through the dense and almost unreal vegetation of bush and tangled pine, are woven together in an intense montage of dream-like and unworldly atmosphere.