‘Incident by a Bank’: Ruben Östlund does true crime
After the recent success of Triangle of Sadness, many film fans have been newly introduced to the important filmography of Swedish auteur Ruben Östlund. Throughout his career, Östlund has pushed a unique brand of political filmmaking that questions the irreconcilable contradictions that continue to plague the sociopolitical conditions of modern society. This is evident in gems like The Square, which have helped cement Östlund’s reputation in the landscape of contemporary cinema.
Triangle of Sadness amplified Östlund’s image on the global stage, especially after it managed to score nominations at this year’s edition of the Oscars. If the 2022 political satire piqued your interest, you should definitely delve deeper into the Swedish director’s body of work since he has been producing fascinating works since the very beginning of his career. While his features have regularly attracted international attention, Östlund’s short films are worth exploring as well.
One of the most interesting short films made by Östlund is the 2009 project Incident by a Bank, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. Inspired by a real botched bank robbery that the filmmaker witnessed with his own eyes, Östlund reconstructed the entire event while asking important questions about the intersection between public duty, the ethics of filmmaking and the social frameworks which give rise to crime.
While discussing the film, Östlund said: “Incident by a Bank is about a failed bank robbery that I was an eyewitness to. If I was to reconstruct that incident in a more traditional way, what very often happens is that the most dramatic points are like the highlights of the film. But when you do it in a real-time shot, then guns going off is just as dramatic as those two main characters who are complaining about the cameras on their mobile phone. Those events are equal in the real-time shot, so a real-time shot is a way to highlight the banal things, the very subtle things, as much as the very dramatic things.”
The director also pointed out: “It’s completely shot with a fixed camera. Afterwards, we created all the camera movements in the edit, and this, of course, changes the relationships between the professions a little bit. No longer is it the cinematographer who sets the framing of the shot; it’s the editor who decides which framing we should use. But for me, the main reason that I wanted to use this technique was that I was able to control real-time.”
Incident by a Bank functions like an interactive portrait, with various elements evolving in real-time to paint a dynamic image of a criminal activity. However, the most interesting aspect is the self-conscious camera which picks and chooses its subjects and even films a pair of bystanders who do nothing except record the incident on their mobile phones. The short transforms into a metafictional experiment that challenges the very foundations of true crime.
Watch the film below.
