Dea Marina

A song sets the tone, followed by an animated collage in which Super 8-film, photographs, drawings, slides, detritus and fragments from music and popular culture are used and processed. A mobileand intense portrayal of a changing country, America, America was Åsa Sjöström’s exam film at Royal College of Art in London in 1972. (Filmform)

A little girl gets separated from her teddy bear and is inconsolable.

The little man lives a safe and orderly life. But then strange things begin to happen.

Mass was made during Sjöström’s years at the film department of the Royal College of Art, in cooperation with the London Filmmaker’s Co-op. Random or staged shots of people and settings in urban London are arranged and abstracted, double-exposed and solarized. The result is a dense texture filled with layers and associative dimensions. Mass is a film attempting to convey, by strictly filmic means, the cooped-up feeling of the individual in the grey mass of the city. The absurd concrete city landscape is visualized through the unspoilt and naked eye of the camera in a concentrated mosaic of images and sound.