Peter Kylberg

Peter Kylberg, born 1938 in Stockholm, is a Swedish experimental filmmaker, screenwriter, composer, editor and artist, who tried to combine pure experimentation with commercial cinema and television film. In the 1960s he was regarded as an artistic wunderkind whose fall from grace was accentuated when his debut feature "Jag" ('I', 1966) was not deemed to live up to the highly inflated expectations his audience had of him. Kylberg, whose great uncle was the colourist painter Carl Kylberg, made his debut with an exhibition at Stockholm's Sturegalleriet in 1957 with a macabre collection of pictures of massacred human bodies. Later on he joined Svensk Filmindustri, whose head Carl Anders Dymling gave him carte blanche in the drawing studio at Filmstaden. The upshot was the abstract animation Kadens ('Cadence', 1960), screened at the 1961 Berlinale and highly praised in Sweden by the film critic Bengt Idestam-Almquist. He also found a mentor in Ingmar Bergman, who advised him not to compose the soundtracks for his own films, but Kylberg would not be moved and went on to explore his own concept of filmmaking as a one-man affair. The string quartets and piano concertos he composed for his films were influenced by the atonal compositions of Arnold Schönberg. In all Peter Kylberg created 9 cinematic compositions - 4 feature and five short films.