Roy Andersson's Living Trilogy and Jean-Luc Nancy's Evidence of Cinema

Abstract

In this article, I explore three films that comprise Swedish director Roy Andersson's “Living Trilogy” – Songs from the Second Floor (2000); You, the Living (2007); and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). My aim is to push the philosophical bearing of Andersson's films towards Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy of art and cinema. How should we understand his cinematic way of looking, intermedial images, and production of sense? First, I trace Andersson's concept of the “complex image” and aesthetic of “trivialism.” Second, I outline Nancy's approach to “presentation” and the “evidence of film.” Third, I describe Andersson's “axiomatics” of looking and collection of characters. Finally, I consider the ways this co-existential trilogy suggests a realization of a Nancian ontology of being-with and exposure to the sense of a world. I contend that Andersson's style is a praxis and a regard for this world. What his fragmentary films communicate to us can be illuminated by Nancy's idea that some cinema makes evident a sense of the world.