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lifted his film effectively above the level of slapstick. This element recurred in Ballongen (1948), a fantasy on reincarnation, but most of Poppe's films have been slighter pieces, some of them based on English musical comedies. Soldat Bom (1949) was followed by Pappa Bom and Tull-Bom (Bom in the Customs) (1950), a series of films in which he reverted effectively to the 'little man' characterization. Poppe writes and shares in the direction of his films and is not a sufficiently severe critic of their shortcomings. He has, however, genuine gifts as a comedian which sympathetic direction could bring to the screen with greater force.
Standing apart from the main volume of Swedish film production is Arne Sucksdorff, whose brilliantly individual talent has no duplicate anywhere in the cinema. The series of short films he has made gives him the stature of a major artist in his medium. In a genre where words have become an obsession, he has shown how a film can dispense altogether with them and still make its meaning clear and compelling. He handles the camera as freely and fluently as if it were a brush in his hand, so that his pictures seem to reach the screen with a freshness and immediacy which deny the intervening mechanical processes. With his feeling for composition and unerring sense of rhythm, his films are visual poetry, a continuous delight for the eye and a subtly enriching experience.
Sucksdorff's interest lay first in still photography and his early films were clearly the work of a man who could compose beautifully within the frame, but had very little idea how to make a film move. En Sommarsaga (1941), his first film for Svensk Filmindustri, was an exquisite little lyric about life in the forest. The mischievous exploration of a foxcub provided a certain visual continuity; but more important was the continuity of feeling Sucksdorff maintained with his astonishingly intimate shots of flowers and insects and birds. This intimacy of contact with natural life developed in his later films into a mystique. In Vinden /ran Vaster (1942) he described, through a boy's eyes, the instinctive reaction of the Laps to the warm west wind of spring, urging them out of the shelter of the civilized valleys back to the wild freedom of the northern plains. Sarvtid (1942). an impression of the autumn round-up of the reindeer which he made in the same area, had a straightforward commentary, which made the film seem ordinary despite the quality of its photography. Trut (The Gull) (1944), made on the island of Stora Karlso in the Baltic, was an astonishingly personal account of the great sea bird community, with the greedy, vicious gull as the villain and the peaceloving guillemots as his innocent victims. So personal did the film appear that it was thought at the time to have a political parallel. In Gryning (Dawn) (1944) he returned to the idyllic mood of En Sommarsaga and, with a delicately sensitive camera, caught the feeling of early morning light stealing through the trees and young life stirring by the lakeside. His sympathy with the animal world took an intensified form in his next film, Skuggor over Snon (Shadows over the Snow) (1945), which described an unsuccessful bear hunt and the hunter's return through the darkening forest, with the trees throwing dark shadows across his path and
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