Peter Kylberg is one of those rare testimonies to cinema's claim as the seventh art-form. At the tender age of 18, his debut film Kadens was screened at the Cannes film festival, representing Sweden's only contribution that year.
While we can speak of his films as firmly rooted in the auteur-style cinema of the French New Wave, with another foot reaching for the Eastern European tradition of animation art (Starewicz and Borowczyk), we might also stop to ask ourselves if we have actually produced a meaningful sentence. The truth is that his is an art, whose narrative never ceases to defy conventional definition. Indeed, the word "narr" in Swedish means jester, which may provide some guidance as to his playful weaving of a web between character, viewer and director. His films are a sequence of sound- and colour-carpets, that blur the structural distinctions between the signifier and the signified. From this perspective, the criticism directed against the introverted and egocentric nature of JAG ("I"), is really a projection of collective shame.
Since the death of Brakhage, Kylberg probably remains the most innovative and original figurehead of experimental cinema.