I Am Curious (Yellow): The Swedish Film That Fought U.S. Censors

Vilgot Sjöman shot an enormous amount of footage in Sweden in 1966 and cut it into two features. He called them I Am Curious (Yellow) and I Am Curious (Blue), after the colours of the Swedish flag, and released the yellow one first in 1967. Grove Press bought the American rights. U.S. Customs seized the print. What followed was a legal fight that ran for years, reached the Supreme Court, and turned a discursive Swedish essay-film about class, non-violence and the failures of social democracy into one of the highest-grossing foreign films ever released in America.

Almost nobody who queued for it in 1969 wanted the class analysis. That gap — between what the film is and what it was sold as — is the entire subject, and Sjöman, to his considerable credit, saw it coming.

What the film is actually doing

Lena Nyman plays Lena, a young woman who lives in an archive of her own political enthusiasms, keeps files on everything, and goes out into Stockholm with a tape recorder to ask strangers whether Sweden has a class system. Sjöman appears as himself, directing the film you are watching. The crew is visible. Lena has an affair with the director, and with an actor named Börje Ahlstedt playing a character called Börje, and the film keeps folding its fiction back into its production until you cannot separate the two — which is the point of the exercise.

Real people wander through. Olof Palme, then a rising Swedish politician and later prime minister, appears and is questioned. Martin Luther King Jr., filmed during a visit to Sweden, appears and speaks about non-violence. Yevgeny Yevtushenko turns up. The interviews are genuine; the drama around them is staged; the film refuses to signpost which is which. It is a 1967 Swedish picture doing what Godard was doing in France at the same moment, with a documentary spine and a self-reflexive apparatus bolted on.

The sex, which is what the queues were for, occupies a fraction of the running time and is filmed with a flat, unglamorous frankness that is the opposite of arousing by design. Nyman and Ahlstedt are naked in a tree, on a balustrade outside the royal palace, in a bedroom. The camera does not caress. There is no score to tell you this is beautiful. Sjöman shoots intimacy the way he shoots the interviews — as material, observed.

Why the method works

The self-reflexive frame is the craft, and it is genuinely well built. The moment you put the director inside the film and let him sleep with the leading actress, every scene acquires a second layer: is this Lena’s jealousy or Nyman’s? The device could be a student trick. Sjöman makes it structural, because the film’s political question and its formal question turn out to be the same one. Lena wants to know whether Sweden’s egalitarianism is real or performed. The film asks whether its own honesty is real or performed. Both questions get the same answer, which is that the performance is the reality and there is no backstage to check.

The tape recorder is the best object in the film. Lena’s vox-pop interviews are the picture’s most alive material — ordinary Swedes, asked directly about class, giving answers that range from thoughtful to evasive to plainly annoyed. Sjöman lets these run. The accumulation is what does the work, and by the fifth or sixth exchange you understand the thesis without a word of narration: everybody knows the class system exists and everybody has a reason it does not apply to them.

The film also cuts against itself constantly. Lena’s political seriousness is undercut by her chaos; her chaos is undercut by the genuine intelligence of her questions; the director’s authority is undercut by his obvious infatuation. Nothing in the picture is allowed to stand unqualified. That instability is what makes it hold up as cinema rather than as a legal artefact.

The trial, which is the famous part

Customs seized the print on import and the government moved to have it condemned as obscene. The case is captioned, gloriously, United States v. A Motion Picture Film Entitled “I Am Curious-Yellow” — the defendant is the film. A jury found it obscene. The Second Circuit reversed in 1968, holding that the picture was not without redeeming social value under the standard then in force. In 1971 the Supreme Court took the matter up and affirmed by an equally divided court, with Justice Douglas recused; a 4-4 split leaves the lower ruling standing and settles no principle.

The commercial consequence was enormous. Grove Press had a certified scandal with a court-stamped licence, and the film played to vast American audiences on the promise of what the government had tried to stop them seeing. Municipal fights continued around the country. The picture became a fixture of the obscenity litigation of the period and a milestone in the collapse of the American production code’s successor arrangements.

The artistic consequence was worse than nothing. A discursive film about Swedish social democracy was tried, marketed and remembered as a dirty picture, and the trial fixed that reading permanently. The mechanism is the one I traced in The censor’s scissors: how cuts made some films more notorious — prohibition is the most effective advertising ever devised, and it always advertises the wrong thing. Sjöman got his audience and lost his film in the same transaction.

The ancestor

The obvious lineage is Godard, and Masculin Féminin (1966) in particular, with its interviews, its title cards and its children of Marx and Coca-Cola. Sjöman was working the same seam a year later with a Swedish accent.

The truer ancestor is Chronicle of a Summer (1961), the Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin film that gave cinéma vérité its name — a picture in which two intellectuals go into Paris asking strangers whether they are happy, then screen the results back to their own participants and film the argument that follows. Everything Sjöman does is in Rouch and Morin: the interrogative street footage, the director in shot, the film turning to examine its own honesty. What Sjöman adds is the fiction and the bodies, which is to say he added the two things that got him into court and out of the art house.

Set it beside the American strand of the same argument. Radley Metzger was making elegant, literate erotica for the same market on the same premise — that adult seriousness and explicit content were compatible — which I looked at in Sexploitation was the art house of its day: the case of Radley Metzger and in The sexploitation canon: the historically essential ten. Metzger’s films are more beautiful. Sjöman’s is more honest about the bargain, because his film is openly embarrassed by the audience it is about to attract.

For the other Sweden, the one the world had been taught to expect from Swedish cinema, there is The Phantom Carriage: the silent Swedish ghost story that haunted Bergman. Sjöman had worked as an assistant to Bergman, and I Am Curious (Yellow) reads in part as a young man’s revolt against exactly that inheritance — the moral gravity, the metaphysical anguish, the beautifully composed frame. Sjöman’s frames are ugly on purpose.

The case against

It is a difficult sit. The film is long, deliberately shapeless, and the qualities that make it interesting to think about make it wearing to watch. Lena is written and played as exasperating, and 120-odd minutes of an exasperating protagonist is 120-odd minutes of exasperation, whatever the strategy.

The self-reflexive apparatus curdles in places. There is a point beyond which a director filming his own sexual relationship with his lead actress and calling it structural rigour is simply a director filming his own sexual relationship with his lead actress. The film is aware of this problem. Awareness is not exculpation.

The politics are earnest and thin. The interviews are excellent; the framing around them is undergraduate. Sjöman has a genuine feel for what ordinary people say when a microphone is put in front of them and considerably less feel for what any of it adds up to.

And the film’s historical status has swallowed it. I Am Curious (Yellow) survives now as a thing people read about. That is a fair verdict on a picture whose formal daring has dated harder than its scandal.

The verdict

I Am Curious (Yellow) is a genuinely serious film that became a genuinely disreputable one through no fault of its own, and the double life is more instructive than either half. As cinema it is uneven, overlong and frequently brilliant in the interviews. As history it is close to essential: this is the film that established, in an American courtroom, that explicit content and social value could inhabit the same object, and the argument it won opened the door that Metzger, the sexploitation trade and eventually the whole 1970s walked through.

Sjöman’s real achievement is the thing the trial obscured. He built a film that interrogates its own sincerity and never lets itself off, and he did it in 1967, and the device is still fresher than most of what claims it today. The sex is the least interesting thing in it, which was true then and is why the government’s case was always going to fail.

Watch it with Chronicle of a Summer if you want the method’s origins, and watch (Blue) afterwards if you want the fuller picture — the two films are cut from the same shoot and comment on one another. Both circulate in restored editions from the archives that keep serious 1960s European cinema available. Go in for the tape recorder rather than for the reputation.

Spoilers below

The film has no plot to ruin in the ordinary sense, so what follows is its structure and its ending.

The affair between Lena and Börje collapses roughly where you expect it to, and Sjöman then does the thing the whole apparatus has been building towards: he breaks the fiction open. Lena’s jealousy over Börje bleeds into Nyman’s jealousy over Sjöman, the drama and the production are visibly the same argument, and the director is caught inside the machine he built. Whether any of this happened is unanswerable by design, which is the film’s argument about honesty delivered as a formal joke.

The material outside the fiction lands harder than the fiction. The Palme interview is a genuine encounter with a real politician being asked, on camera, whether his country’s egalitarianism is real, and his answer is a masterclass in the polished evasion the film has spent an hour cataloguing in ordinary people. The Martin Luther King footage, filmed during his 1966 visit to Sweden, is quietly extraordinary — a man talking about non-violence in a picture that will be seized at an American border for indecency three years later. History supplied that irony.

The picture closes without resolution, on the same instability it started with — Lena still curious, the film still unsure whether it means it, the archive of enthusiasms still unfiled. It is the correct ending and it is why the trial was so absurd. The state took to court a film whose entire thesis is that nobody, including itself, can be trusted to tell you the truth about what they want.