Night Games / Nattlek (1966) [The Criterion Collection]

Director: Mai Zetterling
Writers: David Hughes, Mai Zetterling (screenplay)
Stars: Ingrid Thulin, Keve Hjelm, Lena Brundin

Three Films by Mai Zetterling
A fearlessly transgressive, long-overlooked pioneer of feminist cinema, the Swedish actor turned director Mai Zetterling ruffled the feathers of the patriarchal establishment with a string of bracingly modern, sexually frank, and politically incendiary films focused on female agency and the turbulent state of twentieth-century Europe. Her ability to render subjective psychological states with startling immediacy is on display in these three taboo-shattering works from the 1960s, featuring some of Swedish cinema’s most iconic stars. With their audacious narrative structures, their elaborate use of symbolism, and their willingness to delve into the most fraught realms of human experience, these are models of adventurous, passionately engaged filmmaking.

Michael Haneke turns the unflinching gaze of the camera back on itself in this provocative, profoundly disturbing study of emotional disconnection in the age of mass-media saturation. Benny (a frighteningly affectless Arno Frisch), the teenage son of wealthy, disengaged parents, finds release in the world of violent videos—an obsession that leads him to create his own monstrous work of real-life horror. Layering screens within screens and frames within the filmic frame, Benny’s Video is a coolly postmodern, metacinematic labyrinth in which the boundaries between actual and mediated violence become terrifyingly indistinguishable.

Extras:
- New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
- Maybe I Really Am a Sorceress, a 1989 documentary on Mai Zetterling, featuring interviews with the director, her coscreenwriter, David Hughes; and actors Hariett Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom
- Swedish television footage from the production and premiere
- New English subtitle translation