Axel Danielson - Maximilien Van Aertryck about their Sundance-bound Fantastic Machine

The Swedish documentary under the full title And then the king said-what a FANTASTIC MACHINE, is the feature-length debut of Danielson and Van Aerttryck who also served as producers and cinematographers on the film, and shared the editing credit with Mikel Cee Karlsson (Triangle of Sadness). The film is executive produced by Erik Hemmendorff and Ruben Östlund.

The directing duo is digging deeper into Östlund’s own favourite subject of human behaviour, a topic explored notably in their own celebrated short film Ten Meter Tower short-listed for a 2017 Academy Award.

Through a comprehensive use of archive material, Danielson and Van Aertryck are scrutinising people’s obsession with image and how this has evolved over time, from the early days of the camera camera obscura, to the digital age. Their take is altogether informative, challenging, humorous and thought-provoking.

The film was co-produced by SVT, Film i Väst, Denmark’s Bullitt Film, with support among others from Nordisk Film & TV Fond. Herratic is handling global sales.

Danielson and Van Aertryck have sent joint-answers ahead of the film’s world premiere at Sundance.

First of all, why this long title...”And then the king said what a FANTASTIC MACHINE?
Axel Danielson & Maximilien Van Aertryck: Around 1900, a Parisian man named George Méliès was creating popular experiments with the help of the very first movie-cameras. He’d make a woman disappear through skilled jump-cuts, for example. One day, he was commissioned to film the coronation of the new King in London. He realised the location would be too dark, and solved it by instead simply staging the whole ceremony in his Parisian studio, with French actors. To flatter the King, he even hired a much taller actor.

…And here comes our title: When the King saw this film he said “what a Fantastic Machine the camera is, it can even captures the things that did not happen”.

Already in 1900, the dilemmas of how cameras and their images were able to manipulate our perception of reality was very apparent. There were even newspaper articles of the time, dismissing the film as “fake news”. We find that very funny and fascinating.

How do you work together and complement each other?
AD & MVA: We kind of work like a dual processor in a computer. We tackle most problems together, simultaneously, both on a practical and intellectual standpoint. We are somehow totally synchronised in how we look at quality, when it comes to material: for example, whether a scene or image is worth using or not.

We complement each other through different temperaments and different experiences. One of us - Axel being more impulsive and intuitive and the other - Max - more meticulous and structured. We also have different backgrounds: Axel is 13 years older and used to work as a firefighter. He’s lived all his life in Sweden, whereas Max is a French/German/Swedish citizen and has lived in many countries and cultures throughout his life.

Your expository film has a very wide narrative- tackling the chronological evolution of the technology behind image creation - from photography-television-to internet-, how it shapes human’s behaviour both in front of and behind the camera, and society itself. Did you have a clear script to start with, or overarching themes that you then illustrated with archive material and self-made footage, or did the structure really emerge only in the editing?
AD & MVA: ‘Image Literacy’ has been our number one objective: our single, impassioned focus over the past decade. For 10 years, we’ve been collecting images that raise questions about the “why” of humans’ fascination with images.

Five years ago, we looked at the vast collection we had, and thought we should make a movie about this. Content came first, but almost immediately, we faced a bigger challenge: how to find structure.

We started talking about the footage. About how to categorise, how to decide what images were actually saying; what they were speaking to. We talked about how to contextualise. It was important for us that the images are not illustrating a point of view, but speak for themselves. This process gave us new ideas to base our archival research on. Furthermore, we experimented with the use of a voice-over, as we understood the film would need a subjective narrator.

We used a script to help build the film’s structure, but it really emerged in the editing. When our colleague Mikel Cee Karlsson came onboard as our editor, the film really started to work. Two structures emerged: one historical, from 1828 to today, and another one which was more associative and made it possible to keep a strong dynamic in the composition.

Could you go through your creative process - how you went about selecting the material from the web - both in terms of its content (thought-provoking, purely informative, comical clips etc) and how it was delivered (mostly in English language)?
AD & MVA: We’re always on the look-out for interesting images, so we would send each other fascinating clips continuously, as well as involving our colleagues and friends.

Finding the right archival footage is similar to knowing when we just filmed something good ourselves. It feels like going hunting for something, we know when we strike gold.

We originally planned to shoot more ourselves, but then the pandemic came. We went even deeper into archival footage, which was where we found - oddly enough because of the pandemic - absolutely fascinating images and examples.

It also involved a lot of detective work to track down ownership and raised new questions: What and how much are we collectively publishing for the world to see nowadays? Who controls how those images are seen/used, and what was the intent of the content creator when they first posted?

With 300 million images published every day, and 500 hours of moving images uploaded every minute, we feel an urgency to the conversation now.

What parts did you film yourself?
AD & MVA: At the beginning of our process, we got permission from SVT to record the raw footage of their own studio cameras, thus we collected quite a lot of behind-the-scenes material: The international jury giving their points at the Eurovision eventually made it into the film. Moreover, we shot certain set-up situations ourselves, to study human behaviour in relation to the camera, such as the giant camera obscura or the school photo sequences.

How was the process of writing your voice over-which is quite minimal and purely factual to drive the historical narrative?
AD & MVA: We used the voice-over pragmatically, letting it give context where needed as we progressed in the editing. Eventually it became clear the film needed our subjective voice, and thus we went with Maximilien’s voice.

There is one scientist in the film [Asgeir Jakola from Sahlgrenska University Hospital] who mentions the impact of images on the brain and dopamine boost. Could you expand on this very interesting aspect, as you’re both interested in behaviourism? What are the positive and negative aspects?
AD & MVA: The positive aspect of the moving image is that it acts as an extension of our eyes, and thus provides the opportunity to take in the experiences of others in an incredibly effective way. The problem is that so much of what we consume nowadays only aims to “entertain” us and make us watch more of the same.

Algorithms can be compared to sugar in our food, but a sugar that is specially designed for each of us individually to make us want more of it. And the body is programmed to want more, it’s not something we control by our will alone. Algorithms use this biological ‘treat’ to maximise our consumption, and in turn maximise corporate profit margins.

In our society, we have recently started to debate the consequences of algorithms. Sugar has long been an ingredient and basically everyone thinks there should be rules to regulate its use: nutrition tables for food, information on how the body works and balanced diets etc. The same collection of forces will be needed from society regarding education around image and our consumption patterns.

You often go back to camera perspective and framing - how this can change the viewers’ understanding and twist the narrative, which can be used as fake news, propaganda and as a weapon against democracy. Do you feel people should be better educated to understand this in our digital world?
AD & MVA: Definitely. If we don’t talk about the impact of image on society and ourselves individually now, when will we?

We are engaged in what the UNESCO calls “MIL” (media and information literacy), and this film is also our filmmakers’ contribution to that educational field. We’ve learned to read and write text for many years in school, to be critical of what we read and to identify who’s addressing us. It’s beyond time for image literacy to be taught in schools in the exact same way. Being able to navigate the media landscape has become a democratic issue.

How did your Plattform colleagues - Erik, Ruben, Kalle Boman contribute to this film?
AD & MVA: Kalle Boman has been our creative advisor for many years already. We discussed the general themes at length with him because he always opens up new angles and questions.

Plattform Produktion functions like a collective of directors in which we all discuss and also work on each other’s films. Ruben and Erik’s contributions were especially important in discussing attack angles and sharpening certain scenes. They worked with us in the same way as we worked with them on Triangle of Sadness.

As filmmakers, what do you want to convey through your camera in general, and with this film in particular?
AD & MVA: There is an interesting scientific term, “behavioural contagion”, which is the sociological term used to describe how we as a species will imitate each other and how certain expressions and impulses in this regard are stronger than others.

This is both a natural and important part of how we function as a species. But we live in an individualistic age, where the idea that we freely choose our behaviour and our lives consists of free choices. With the help of the camera, there is a fantastic opportunity to show our behaviour in a way where the “story” does not stand in the way. It is in this type of use that we see both humour and potential social criticism.

What's next?
AD & MVA: A FANTASTIC MACHINE book, an expansion of the film in a way in which we can include lots of things that didn’t find their place in the film. We want to craft a publication that can be used in schools to playfully discuss the stakes and consequences of image literacy.

We’re also formulating the idea around possibly our next film, called Money, Money, Money!