Ruben Östlund’s cinema is no cinema. He much rather likes to call the 7th art "moving images", an approach to which he was influenced by Roy Andersson and Kalle Boman. Indeed, after seeing "Incident by a bank", the short film he is here with, one has a little feeling of "what just happened?". It’s quite simple though, you just witnessed a bank robbery, a real one.

Östlund draws his inspiration from real life, his experiences, those of his friends, or in the case of his latest short, from an event he witnessed; the main characters of the film are behaving exactly like he did back then.

He reconstructs these situations and see if they work, he tells us. Cinema is repeating itself too much and creating its own universe, overstylizing and caricaturizing its own clichés. And in that it has influenced us much; "Incident by a bank" leaves us with a strange feeling of timidity, the robbery we just virtually ’witnessed" wasn’t really what we had in mind, spoiled by gangster cinephilia, yet next time we’ll witness it for real, we’ll be prepared. Perhaps one should say that to the film students imagining red carpets and flashing lights… many of them fooled by their own dream. "Reading moving images should be on 1st grade in school" Östlund says. And we can only agree. Understanding images is a übernecessity to understand and control the hours of edited footage that influence us every day. death to videocracy!

To illustrate his point Ruben tells us an incredible anecdote; Roberto Saviano, author of "Gomorrah", explained in an interview how young gangsters from the mafia started to shoot their guns sideways after having seen "Pulp Fiction", imitating Jules Winfiled and Vincent Vega. Though that might have looked cool, the technique is utterly unefficient and led to even more bloody crime scenes due to the increased amount of bullets they had to fire.

"Incident by a bank" was shot on a 4k RED, as one still shot. Östlund loves limitation, as it creates energy. The constant camera movements in the movie where created in post-production, which took 4 months (and frankly the concept is stunning); partly also because you recognize a straightforward evolution in Östlunds cinema. More on that, how Ruben witnessed the "incident by a bank" and him on his latest feature "Unvoluntary" (2008) in the video above.

Max