Chatter, questions, & sex: I Am Curious (Yellow)

Notorious in the 1960s for its sex scenes, censors in the US and elsewhere may have had more problems with the left-wing politics of I Am Curious (Yellow) and (Blue).

From the place that gave the world Greta Thunberg, this once famously-banned pair of 1960s Swedish films as though foreshadow the identity passions of today in the sense that 1960s US civil rights activism fed today’s Black Lives Matter movement. It is an ambitious project that tells a similar narrative in two films that complement each other like the yellow and blue in Sweden’s flag, addressing issues of no less import today than they were sixty years ago despite the vast social, political, economic, and historical changes that have taken place.

Börje (Börje Ahlstedt) and Lena (Lena Nyman) cross the line into character in I Am Curious films.

I Am Curious (Yellow) and (Blue) were shot in a “meta” style: A small film collective makes a movie about a small film collective making a movie about the sociopolitical and sexual adventures of the “curious” Lena (Lena Nyman), a young woman footloose in Stockholm. But the sex for which the films initially had been banned around the world is barely pornographic. Contemporary censors and viewers likely were offended by the notion that an ordinary young woman would explore her own sexuality and sexual freedom to challenge her country’s social status quo. But the protagonist Lena is less porn queen Linda Lovelace than John Waters’s Tracy Turnblad in Hairspray (1988).

Lena (Lena Nyman) and Börje (Börje Ahlstedt) engage in post-coital political dialogue in Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious-Blue (1968).

The documentary-style rendering of a young woman openly discussing sex, orgasms and other sexual bodily functions and having “free sex” in the ordinary run of things in circa 1966 Stockholm is a far cry from the underground “blue movies” of the time or the sex film industry to which the two I Am Curious films helped open the door in the 1970s. The films portray an assertive, politically left-leaning, sexually curious but naive heterosexual woman in her early twenties discussing politics and having sex with contemporaries, pursuing her own curiosity and desires with partners roughly as clueless in their own ways as she is in hers. The personal relationships come first.

In the I Am Curious films, filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman and his star Lena Nyman construct a critique of contemporary Swedish society.

The film opens with young filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman, playing himself, in a relationship with his star Lena, a drama student playing herself, contemplating how to tell a story about contemporary Swedish society. Inspired by the US civil rights movement, the character Lena challenges Swedish society by trying to apply Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles of non-violent resistance/non-cooperation to achieve social, economic, gender, and sexual equality. The drama student Lena also half-teases Sjöman to film a sex scene between herself and a student she spots at a poetry reading—“just a quickie”.

“We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files/We’d like to help you learn to help yourself”: The file room of Nymans Institut in Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious films.

The character Lena establishes “Nymans Institut” in her bedroom at her father Rune’s (Peter Lindgren) apartment where she lives: “I had to start my own business because [others] don’t do anything: Newspapers work too fast and can’t be trusted. Science works far too slow and gets no results. You have to do it yourself.” She collects data aided by informal assistants with whom she also pickets institutions (the church and the US, Soviet, and Chinese embassies). She and her collaborators sing “We Shall Overcome” many times in both films. She pens picket signs that read: MEDDELANDE TILL MÄNSKLIGHETEN; RIV PRIVILEGIE—SAMHÄLLENA RUNT OM I VÄRLDEN [LENA] (Message to humanity—down with the privileged classes all around the world) and MEDDELANDE TILL DE FÄRGADE FOLKEN: FÖRBERED ER! DE VITA SVIKTAR! [LENA] (Message to non-white people—be prepared! White people are failing!) There were very few non-white people in Sweden at this time.

Lena and her helpers also vilify the then-Spanish dictator/autocrat Francisco Franco, picket the Spanish embassy, and Lena challenges Swedes at the airport returning from vacations in Spain for tacitly supporting Franco’s regime: A woman traveler retorts that Sweden’s “dictatorship” makes a bottle of whiskey cost 50 crowns, as one might imagine a US follower of Fox News grouse today). Lena keeps a picture of Franco on her wall and a running tally on her bedroom wall of the number of days since her father purportedly “fled” the 1930s Spanish Civil War after serving just three weeks in the anti-Franco International Brigade. (The film was banned in Spain until 2005.)

Lena throws herself into the mainstream of Swedish life with a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder slung from her shoulder, posing questions on current topics to incidental men and women at work and on the street. She asks national service inductees if they would consider conscientious objector status. She campaigns for prison reform, biking 150 miles to the then-new maximum security Kumla prison in western Sweden. She opposes the högern (the political right), particularly högerstedenterna—conservative students. She and Sjöman interview figures such as Dr. King, the Swedish socialist politician Olof Palme, the Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Sweden’s King Gustaf VI Adolf (played by actor Holger Löwenadler).

Film recording supervisor Raymond Lundberg and his assistant do "yoga" with Lena on retreat in I Am Curious-Blue (1968).

Sjöman films himself making statements that Dr. King appears to answer directly (from an interview on the US civil rights movement filmed earlier in Sweden). Lena tells Sjöman: “I like [King]. He talks about better things than Palme,” referring to the then-Swedish transport minister, a rising star in the country’s Social Democratic Party who opposed the US war in Vietnam. Sjöman films himself filming an actual interview with Palme in the minister’s backyard with his then five-year-old son Mårten “Råttan” [Mouse] and his wife Lisbeth at an upper window. The films were made before King was assassinated. (Palme, later Sweden’s prime minister, was assassinated in February 1986. Palme’s unsolved murder is modern Sweden’s greatest mystery.)

Filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman interviews Swedish politician Olof Palme with his five-year-old son Mårten in I Am Curious-Yellow (1967).

Sjöman and his crew also film Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at a university poetry reading. Yevtushenko was a “rock star” of the Brezhnev regime, a charismatic, youthful-looking, officially-sanctioned “dissident” poet popular in the West. Yevtushenko’s comments at the reading are later spliced-in to rebuke Lena’s naive political views. Her interview with the king of Sweden (Löwenadler) is a fantasy that includes her lover Börje (Börje Ahlstedt) as the king’s grandson, in which she reassures His Majesty in his living quarters: “It isn’t you, personally, the socialists want to get rid of...”

Lena (Lena Nyman) and King Gustav VI Adolf (Holger Löwenadler) at home in the palace in I Am Curious-Yellow (1967).

And Lena experiences lively varieties of sex, in character and as a person. She surprises her film partner Börje (who lives unmarried with the mother of his baby daughter, which Lena later discovers) when she says that she has had sex with 23 men. “The first 19 were no fun” she said, because she “did it to satisfy them, so that they would have an orgasm...” The director Sjöman tells himself that “a love scene without consequences would be pointless.” He tells his actor Börje at the beginning of Blue that Börje will have a love scene with Lena: “A love scene with consequences.” “What kind of consequences?” “I don’t know. I’ll think of something.” Sjöman works this out while filming Lena and Börje, telling himself: “[Ingmar] Bergman always used to say it’s bad to fall for your star. You get blind to her affectations. It never happened to him, though.” Or so Sjöman supposed.

Lena (Lena Nyman) and Magnus (Magnus Nilsson) watch the film crew prepare in Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious-Yellow (1967).

In a moment of passion, Lena confesses to her ideal: “Listen, Martin! I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough. But that’s the way it is. Börje is a big shit, and I’m going to kill him when I get my hands on him! You said it yourself: ‘If you can’t adhere to nonviolence, you shouldn’t participate.” You need people who are strong. I won’t ever speak for your ideas again.”

But Lena’s adventures free-range a large expanse of social, political, economic, and sexual topics and give a broad picture of the universal influence of the 1960s US civil rights movement which may apply to an even greater extent in the form it takes today.

Jag är fri!!! Reformera världen!

Jag är nyfiken-En film i gult/gul [I Am Curious (Yellow)] 1967 Sweden (121 minutes) and Jag är nyfiken-En film i blått/blå [I Am Curious (Blue)] 1968 Sweden (104 minutes) Sandrews/Criterion. Written and directed by Vilgot Sjöman; cinematography by Peter Wester; edited by Wic Kjellin; music by Bengt Ernryd; produced by Göran Lindgren.