Ole dole doff (1968)

Pedagogy as horror movie - that's the core of Jan Troell's Ole dole doff, an extremely disturbing movie about a teacher's existential troubles. When I say 'disturbing' I don't mean that there are any particularly shocking sense in a conventional sense. Instead, the film is built upon explosives. The main character works in a school and we see him trying to stay calm, deal with the rowdy kids and be civil to his girlfriend. He is distant and insecure and what he does only aggravates the distance. Troell gets under the skin of this middle schoool teacher: we see the world through his eyes and we see his everyday life intermingled with nightmares. Troell uses both sound and image to evoke a truly haunting and genuinely frightening existential place. This is the anguish of ordinary life and he uses ordinary locations (a swimming pool, the home, streets) to capture this sense of immediate fear. A film with a similar approach to fear might be Repulsion by Polanski: what the two films share is the everyday as a frame for alienation. Per Oscarsson is absolutely stunning in the role of the teacher: he inhabits the part using twitches and fidgety movement - a very detailed form of acting. This is a film I can't get out of my head. It feels real even though it also uses dreams and some almost surreal elements to enhance the feeling of disintegration. Ole dole doff (also called Who saw him die?) is not primarily a film getting to grips with the school system or social problems. Nor does it follow the pattern of heroic representations of eloquent teachers. The teacher in the main role has problems with authority but what the film seems to say is not at all that authority should be reinstated, nor does it necessarily say that the teacher comes "from the old society" and feels awkward in a new system. Troell places the teacher in a social setting, but he doesn't churn out a socio-political agenda. We see a parents' meeting at the school. The parents sit at the kids' desks and they all express opinions about this and that in a way that is self-centered. Each parent has hir own agenda. The teacher is, again, responding with helplessness: he tries to embody the role of the teacher. He always fails. He can't become the role. This is one of the main topics of Ole dole doff - the main character goes through life in a state of insecurity. He tries to accomodate himself with the expectations and he tries to do what he thinks he should do, but all the time the social situation overwhelms him and there always seems to be an aspect of impersonation in him. This is a film I would like to watch several times.