Gösta Werner (b. 1908) is a remarkable person of many identities within the Swedish film culture: a film historian (and especially the leading specialist of Stiller), essayist, filmmaker of both feature and short films (some 60 films), the author of the first doctoral thesis on film history in Sweden. We celebrate the recent hundreth anniversary of Gösta Werner with his Att döda ett barn (To Kill a Child, 1954), a uniquely cinematographic variation of the feel of the literary “40-talismen” (the spirit of the Forties) represented by authors like Lars Ahlin, Sivar Arné and Stig Dagerman (on whose text this 10-minute film is based). It’s simply a masterpiece on the themes of time and space, co-incidence and necessity: for once a film catches the structures of modern literature with all its tensions and dimensions.

Peter von Bagh