Text by Simon Starling
July 2020
Reduit (Redoubt), 2014
4K to HD video, stereo sound, colour. 14 min 33 sec
Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery
My response to an invitation to select a film for On Screen Specials — an online series of screenings conceived in part as a way to connect with an audience confined to their homes by the pandemic — is, in some sense, a site-specific one. It struck me that John Skoog's film, Reduit (Redoubt), 2014, a short documentary about the conversion of a humble cottage in the agricultural flatlands of Skåne, in southern Sweden, into a fortress by the farm labourer turned Cold War prepper Karl-Göran Persson between 1945 and 1975, might, as we continue to retreat to the safety of our own homes, resonate here and now in new ways. This thought was further compounded when I contacted John, a former student of my class at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, about the possibility of proposing the film for this On Screen Special and discovered that Persson and his fort were still very much current in John’s thinking — John having recently completed the script for a feature length film on the same subject in which the French actor Denis Lavant will play Persson.
Born in Malmö in 1985 and growing up in rural Skåne, John Skoog’s work as an artist and film maker is still firmly grounded in his childhood home. Even the films he’s made outside his native southern Sweden seem to question the potential for such a specifically home-grown, land-locked practice. The other film he completed in 2014, Shadowland, was filmed at a number of different locations around Los Angeles that have been used in Hollywood productions to portray geographically remote locations around the world — it’s as if John was testing the parameters of an inherently localised practice in this distant film making mecca. The story of Karl-Göran Persson and the fort he built to protect himself and his community from the perceived threat of nuclear devastation similarly seems to channel the global through the local.
Filmed at twilight, that notional space between fiction and reality, day and night, the living and the dead, Reduit (Redoubt), is something of a cinematic 'phantom ride,' not the white-knuckle, break-neck variety of early cinema, but more of a creaking and groaning invocation, mediated through what appears to be a single tracking shot. It is perhaps relevant to mention that the very same track rented by John and cinematographer Ita Zbroniec-Zajt for filming Reduit (Redoubt) was used by Andrei Tarkovsky and Swedish cinematographer Sven Nyqvist in 1986 to film The Sacrifice. Tarkovsky's Swedish swansong is about a middle-aged intellectual’s attempts to bargain with God to avert an impending nuclear holocaust by destroying, in return, everything he holds dear. It famously climaxes in an extended tracking shot, with him burning his own home — an appropriate cinematic counterpoint to Persson’s fortified cottage.
As the camera moves seamlessly along its pedigree track, snaking in and out of Persson's fort, it interrogates the building's rough concrete surfaces, its rudimentary windows and improvised doorways. Recycled metal objects, scavenged in the local area and embedded in its structure, protrude at intervals along its concrete walls, still binding the building together — grills, tin cans, bed frames, bicycles, even train tracks — everything brought to the building site by bike, the voiceover tells us. At times the surface of the building feels more organic than man-made, echoing the bark of two trees that huddle close to the structure. Nature and culture seem fused here. At one point, the camera appears to try and free itself of the building, moving out and up into the evening sky, only to be pulled back into the building's orbit, as if by the sheer weight of the structure.
The pared-down visual narrative is augmented with a complex, thickly layered soundscape developed with David Gülich (I would recommend a set of good headphones when screening the film). We hear the sound of the heavy camera and dolly creaking and squeaking along the vintage tracks, punctuated with the occasional whispered interjection from the crew.
Above and beyond these process-related noises, deep, resonant rumbles, that seem to emanate for the very core of the massive building, blend with the wind and what sounds like running and dripping water. We might almost be on board a ship. 'He was an incredibly strong man. Not that big, he kind of crouched under everything, to lift it up.' From time to time a number of voices punctuate the soundscape with pithy recollections of the 'barrel-chested' Persson and his heroic building project. While many of the comments are affectionate and admiring, the overall sense is that perhaps the eccentric, single-mindedness of his attempts to shelter himself and his community, as a public information pamphlet published by the Swedish state had inspired him to do, ended-up driving a wedge between him and the community he worked so hard to protect.
— Simon Starling, December 2020
Reduit (Redoubt)
A film by John Skoog
Cinematography: Ita Zbroniec-Zajt
Sound design: David Gülich
Focus puller: Wojtek Szumski
Grip: Martin Martinsen, Mattias Edström, Benedikte Bjerre
Colour garding: Gosia Grzyb
Post supervisor: Łukasz Ceranka
Voices: Ingeborg Andersson; Bodil Göransson; Astrid Göransson; Kjell Olsson; Siv Olsson; Torbjörn Sundqvist
Storytellers: Gottfrid Bengtsson; Alvy Gulin; Kjell Gulin; Barbro Hallberg; Erik Hallberg; Kjell Olsson; Siv Olsson; Sigvard Ohlsson; Assar Nilsson; Gösta Sjöholm