Susan Sontag
Scenes from BROT HER CAR L
PREFACE
MARCH
1969. The day after I had checked the first print of
Duet for Cannibals
back from the laboratory, it was screened for Goran
Lindgren, the president of Sandrew Film
&
Teater AB, the company
that had produced the film. At Lindgren's request, he saw it alone
at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning, in a private screening room in
the empty Sandrew office building ; I came ten minutes after the screen–
ing started and spent the next hour and half laboriously reading three
Friday Stockholm newspapers in the corridor. In the time since I had
first come to Sweden, on his unexpected invitation, in July 1968, to
make a film, Lindgren and I had hardly ever meet; he had never
appeared on the set, come to the rushes, or turned up during the
editing and mixing. What he said in the corridor after that screening
took about a minute. He liked
Duet
for Cannibals,
he told me. I was
"welcome" in Sweden the following year to make another film. We
shook hands, he turned toward his office, and I went into the street to
look for the sun. A few days later, without seeing Lindgren again, I
left Stockholm. So accustomed was I by that time to the laconic, shy,
spectacularly honest Swedes that it never occurred to me to wonder
if I needed something like a contract or a letter to
be
sure that Sandrew
really meant to produce my second film. And, of course, I didn't.
EARLY JANUARY
1971. The first print of
Brother Carl
has just come
back from the laboratory. A different screening room, for Sandrew has
new offices now, but the same ritual: Lindgren inside, alone, the first
to see the finished film, and me, late on purpose, alone, in the cor-
• NOTE :
Brother Carl
had its first public screening at the Cannes Film Fes–
tival under the auspices of the Quinzaine des Realisateurs, in May 1971. It
is distributed by New Yorker films in the United States. In France it has
been released under the title
Les Glme.aux,
and in Italy, as
I Gemilli.
The film's length is ninety-five minutes.
