The Cinematheque

“I caught sight of Mai Zetterling’s Vincent the Dutchman 30 years ago and have never forgotten it … This is a film I cherish for its rawness and verve, a long, brave reach for a portrait … Zetterling asks with frank élan and the help of equally dedicated contemporary artists, ​‘How to make art and live a life?’”

Tilda Swinton

After The Girls was released, Mai Zetterling saw multiple projects rejected, essentially severing her relationship to the Swedish film industry for nearly twenty years. Rather than compromise on the basis of authorship, Zetterling channelled her energy into television; two rarely screened works from her time in that medium are presented here. Neither shies away from the format’s constraints. Instead, Zetterling foregrounds their documentary aspects.

We Have Many Names
(Vi har många namn)
Sweden 1976
51 min. DCP In Swedish with English subtitles

Mai Zetterling first became known in Sweden as an actor in films by directors like Ingmar Bergman and Alf Sjöberg, but once she stepped behind the camera she left that practice behind—until We Have Many Names. The film’s premise is a theatrical, universal treatment of the destabilizing grief that arrives at the end of a longterm relationship. Zetterling is always dissecting and comparing the snares of love, or ​“kärlek,” a word that opens this film like an incantation. But here, in the format of an intense chamber drama, Zetterling made arguably her most personal work, an exorcism of her feelings of betrayal and heartbreak after the end of her marriage to David Hughes, whose artistic collaboration supported her directing career from its beginning.

Restored DCP courtesy of the Swedish Film Institute

“An astonishing TV film of raw, unfettered emotion.” Alex Barrett, BFI

“Too good to overlook … A haunting drama-documentary.” Pamela Hutchinson, Sight and Sound

preceded by

Vincent the Dutchman
United Kingdom 1972
58 min. DCP

Michael Gough plays an actor preparing to play van Gogh—“a man forever stopping and staring at things”—in a film. As he attempts a method approach, his voiceover reflections spiral into a quest for meaning: does artistry demand an extroverted, internalized, or inaccessible kind of performance? Zetterling intertwines Gough’s wanderings with interviews of contemporary artists, unscripted interactions between an in-costume Gough and Dutch locals, and increasingly fictionalized flashes of the despair and violence that colour van Gogh’s life and legend.

Advisory: Vincent the Dutchman includes scenes of bullfighting.

“As sensuous and as severe as the painter’s personality and—like all [Zetterling’s] films—made with awesome sincerity.”

David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film