‘I have an idea,” says Ruben Östlund. “What if you were only allowed to use a camera if you have a licence? You need one for a gun – at least in sophisticated countries. The camera is also a powerful tool.”
He laughs, slim and bearded, in a book-lined coffee shop in Stockholm. A double Palme d’Or winner – for art satire The Square and bilious kill-the-rich comedy Triangle of Sadness – Östlund takes cinema seriously. Others, he fears, may be less responsible.
“Movies are changing the world and it’s important to take that into consideration when you’re in this profession. In the entertainment industry there is the strange sense that if you’re dealing with fiction then it’s not going to affect the world. You have to fight quite hard to make people realise what kind of effect the images we consume have.”
Not just fiction, he clarifies. Here comes another idea: “That you’re not allowed to use images when you report about society.” His companion, Axel Danielson, smiles, before another young director, Maximilien Van Aertryck, speaking separately over video call, pitches in: “Or that you’re not allowed to voice your opinion before you have talked about it with your neighbour.”
All three men belong to the same loose academic and film-making collective; Östlund has now executive produced Danielson and Van Aertryck’s first feature, about society’s relationship with the camera. Fantastic Machine – as Edward VII called it after watching a richly camp French dress rehearsal of his 1902 coronation – premiered at Sundance, where it won the special jury award for creative vision. It’s slight yet ambitious: in 88 minutes it whisks you from the first camera obscura to the 45bn cameras today via Ted Bundy, Leni Riefenstahl and Eurovision. The familiarity of some footage is offset, for English audiences at least, by the Scandinavian slant: you hear quite a lot of off-guard weather forecasters swearing in Danish.
The big problem, they all agree, is that human development trails the technology. “We now have in our pockets a fantastic opportunity to convey human experience,” says Danielson, “yet every day you see something online that makes you think: is this really the best we can do? I don’t think humanity has really matured enough in how we use this.”
The answer, they think, is media literacy, essential to stay afloat amid the slippery images. Van Aertryck has overseen a drive for the film to be shown in schools (about 11,000 teens have now seen it). “In Sweden, people look at their personal screens nine hours a day; for younger people, that’s more hours than they spend in school. Yet at school, they barely talk about how to orientate yourself in this world.”
Such slack is understandable, says Östlund. “All of a sudden we are leaving text-based society and going to the image-based society and the old-school system is not as valued any more.” That, he thinks, is not due to digitalisation per se, but the key role played by cameras in such a step-change.
Danielson nods. “The photographic image is so strong because, unlike text, it bypasses so many layers of intellect.” Books, he says, offer unparalleled insight into what someone might be thinking; there’s a naivety about how much empathy seeing someone else on a screen enables.”
For evidence, Van Aertryck points to the populism of the previous decade and the polarisation that continues: “Look at the conflict in Israel and Gaza.” It’s the way we consume such images, as much as their framing, says Danielson. “I think the algorithms will kill us before environmental problems. They push us into rabbit holes where we don’t get contact with other people or ideas. When it comes to algorithms, we’re only consumers, not citizens. I think that needs to be changed.”
Östlund weighs in: cheerier than his colleagues, more invested in optimism. These drawbacks have highlighted what is so special about cinema, he says: “It offers some kind of citizens’ assembly, all reacting and starting to formulate things together. Physical meetings where you can discuss what you have experienced will be more and more important as people move into a meta world.” Cinema affords the chance to question your worldview, as well as consolidate it. “We have finally realised its unique point is not the big screen. It’s having to process information in a completely different way, because someone might ask you what you think. When you’re watching things individually, you are not processing the images in an intellectual way but like a zombie.”
Maybe that’s my problem. “I think that you are completely affected by the algorithm of how conflict-filled our world is,” he says as I start another doomy question. “The truth is that there’s so many great things coming out of this. I believe that we are going to have the most educated generation ever.”
Danielson’s 10-year-old son recently asked him why a video had no obvious ads or sponsors. “To think about the mechanism and know there is an economic interest behind every video is amazing,” says his father, proudly.
Östlund claps with delight: “The next generation will be Marxist!” Or, at least, will take a dim view of how we are currently coping. “My brother’s wife said to me: ‘Maybe in 30 years we will look back on footage of ourselves using screens the way we now look at when everyone smoked all the time.’ Maybe we will say: ‘My God, we were fucking crazy!’”
• Fantastic Machine is in UK cinemas from 19 April
