vromos-458-520497 some men wonder about ultimate meanings, and usually they are not found, other movies did that. some of them on a simpler scale_ like "the Seventh Seal"_ and some did it the hard way like this movie, here are symbols, some of them were simple to catch some were not as they were dug deep out of the memories and dreams of the artist, do we sacrifice our young ones to keep the elder as they are?, but are the elder comfortable with that?, do they live!!?, does any one who is ultimately good in our world always get accused and crucified?, do I have to live in an asylum if I'm a poet without a sense of trading?, do economists and old men with ties and ((experience)) actually understand a hick or is it all vomit?, do we have to carry all of our old trash with us no matter how heavy it is thinking that this is how we will get to the better moments?, funny!!, but happens!!, does it happen all the time?, in other words is this view universal or is it just a view out of the scope of one cinematographer?, very few will be able to decide.

TheLittleSongbird I have seen a lot of movies, but recently not many have completely blown me away. Songs from the Second Floor did. The film does look accomplished, the scenery is stunning and the cinematography is done with deliberate disquietingly static insistence. The pace is meditative, again deliberately done to perhaps give the characters more humanity, but it is never dull. The story is told with a haunting and somewhat surrealistic atmosphere with some biting satirical elements, and even more impressive is its ability to effectively convey modern life's coldness and chaos. Songs from the Second Floor is directed beautifully and while completely improvised there is not an amateurish note in sight. In conclusion, an astounding film really. 10/10 Bethany Cox

Joseph Sylvers Songs From The Second Floor, is the second feature from director Roy Andersson, whose spent his career making according to fellow Swedish director and legend Ingmar Bergman, "The best commercials in the world"(Youtube his name for proff of this). Anderson takes an advertisers eye to this film and inverts it, into around 40 or 50 short vignettes, some with recurring characters, like the man seen on the cover who has burned down his business to collect the insurance but bumbled the job, while most include walkons, and many characters drift in an out of scenes before the movie ends. These short vignettes are nearly all deadpan and absurdist tragi-comic advertisements for peoples lives broken or on the verge of breaking. The antagonist, if there must be one, is capitalism(a subject which the commercial making Anderson is very much aware), and it's de-humaizing effects on all its touches. As bleak as all this sounds, the material is played more often than not for laughs. There's a traffic jam which has clogged the city as if everyone were leaving at the same time, a girl who is blindfolded and lead of a cliff by her village elders, a man accidentally sawed in half by poor magician, men and women in business suits walk down streets in parade's flailing themselves as an act of penance to God so he will prevent the further falling of stocks, and a man followed around by ghosts of friends and strangers. If that weren't enough each scene is composed with a static non moving camera, giving each vignette the detailed composition of a photograph or a painting. The movie could be considered a tragi-comic funeral song for western capitalism and modernity(the film takes place just before the new millennium I think), but a tag like that really doesn't communicate how humane, clever, funny, and accessible this movie really is. It's like a lyrical Monty Python film, or a an absurdist Ingmar Bergman, and yet again it's a film all it's own, structurally, conceptually, and aesthetically, if your interested in where film-making may be going in the future and right now, Songs From The Second floor, is the movie to see, and one of the best of the new millennium

Weredegu I watched this movie the first time and I found it intriguing but kind of hard to stay with. When I saw it the second time two years later I laughed myself sick. The third time around, one more year gone by, I could hardly wait to see it again. To know this film was a masterpiece was not difficult, already the first time. To feel it, though, required the second time. It just physically works that way. The camera takes in so much with each shot, you can't keep up with it. And it's not simply that there are too many details in each and every composition. More than that, it's the difficulty of taking them all in digestion-wise. All the small pieces of information you may gather from watching add to an extremely dark view of the world. 'Mister Andersson' planned it all very carefully. It's like he was really-really fed up with everything in the matrix, you know, and decided to let his anger go by preparing for years for every single destructive shot included in the 'movie' (movie is not a really appropriate word, since it's rather static in fact), so that he could reveal the most about the ugliness he saw around himself. He invites you to a corner at some party you may not have enjoyed anyway, to a corner from which you can see all those present at the same time, and then he shows you how all those people around kill, maim and torture each other. And, to get you even more desperate, he also points out the strings attached to them: they are all puppets on strings, you see, they are doing what they are doing because their characters and their whole lives are structured in a given way stemming from reasons beyond anyone individually. Then he finally gives you some consolation by somehow putting what you see into an angle from which you can't help but laugh, not really cruelly, because it's about your own fate, too. It's just the emergency exit for the mind, for which the safest way out is delving into something totally different after watching this twisted reality show.