EN DJUNGELSAGA

Internationally Arne Sucksdorff is best known for his short city symphony on Stockholm, Människor i stad (1947), which is something of an irony since he really is the great renderer of nature and wildlife, making more than a dozen shorts on this subject in the 40ies and 50ies. In 1953 he travelled to India to shoot the ten-minute Vinden och floden, arguably his most beautiful short. Like Renoir before him and Rossellini after him, Sucksdorff was fascinated by India, and he returned a couple of years later for the production of En Djungelsaga, a film on life in and around a village in the Bastar region in central India. En Djungelsaga was the first film to be shot in AgaScope (format 1:2,35), but due to its long production period (shooting alone took eighteen months) it was not the first film to be released in this format. Sucksdorff uses the wide format not just to capture lateral movement from one end of the screen to the other, but also for compositions heightening both background and foreground in different parts of the same shot. (Jon Wengström, Cinemateket-Svenska Filminstitutet)