the opening shot of roy andersson’s 1991 short, härlig är jorden (world of glory, recently – obsessively – watched), sears itself into viewers’ minds, brutalising its audience without any of the torture porn presently enjoying vogue. a huddled clump of naked people shivers in the back of a boxy communist-era truck; only the youngest laments, and is quickly, apologetically retrieved by a young woman as the door is swung heavily closed and sealed. thirty-odd besuited men and women, with the unexplainable dweebishness of a crowd of insurance adjusters or industrial parts salesmen, look on attentively as an old man, one hand steadying himself against the truck, leans down to retrieve a long, thick pipe which he connects, one side to the truck’s exhaust, the other to a soot-scarred, profane-seeming valve midway up the truck’s rear door. as the engine revs, smoke billows from the pipe, and the viewer realises the horrifying fate of those gasping bodies, a grey-suited man in the foreground turns coolly, looks into the camera with a chilling blankness, and swivels back. the truck churns forward and, as violins in allan pettersson’s score thoughtfully begin to meander into the upper registers, turns in broad circles on the dirt lot, dispassionately killing the unknown number within. all this is shot as a curiously beautiful tableau, in a ratio reminiscent of 6×9 photographs, with colors somehow both saturated and pale; it is arresting, beautiful to look at, and as the screen briefly cuts to black, waves of complicity roll over the viewer.

the remainder of the sixteen-minute film follows that lanky foreground figure through a life unraveling. the short vignettes are astoundingly beautiful, and equally disquieting; with the echo of the film’s opening still reverberating, the smallest moments of quiet despair become amplified. each scene – there are fifteen brief thoughts, all delivered directly to the camera – is masterfully shot, with an eye towards photographic composition but a brilliant understanding of its own medium: andersson knows the power of subtle movements, and plays with visual expectations in a way that is delightful to watch. his frames presage photographers like gregory crewdson, but while crewdson self-consciously hides his constructed frames behind layers of artifice, andersson makes the frame self-conscious, always aware of its own observation.

all of this yields a slow but stunning realisation. the steady disintegration of the character underlines the horror of the opening scene, in which viewers participated unwittingly. yet, even as viewers realised too late what they saw, they still bear responsibility for it, still are in a complex way complicit. if watching this event alongside you planted the seeds that rended this man’s life asunder, the film challenges the viewer, can you yourself really walk out of the theater unchanged? the film – on dvd as part of cinema16’s european short films collection – is beautiful, simple, quiet, and absolutely horrifying. watch it.