I Am Curious (Yellow)

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I Am Curious (Yellow)
DVD Cover for I Am Curious (Yellow)
Directed by	Vilgot Sjöman
Produced by	Göran Lindgren
Written by	Vilgot Sjöman
Starring	Vilgot Sjöman Peter Lindgren Lena Nyman Börje Ahlstedt Chris Wahlström Marie Göranzon
Music by	Bengt Ernryd
Cinematography	Peter Wester
Editing by	Wic Kjellin
Distributed by	Grove Press
Release date(s)	1967
Running time	121 min
Language	Swedish
IMDb profile

I Am Curious (Yellow) is a Swedish film (Jag är nyfiken - en film i gult) of 1967, directed by Vilgot Sjöman and starring Lena Nyman as herself.

It was a landmark film that helped define the emergent change in Swedish film of the 1960s, though it borrows heavily from the style of Ingmar Bergman. Like a French New Wave film, the movie uses jump cuts and features a story not structured in the usual, Hollywood structure. In one sense, it is a documentary-within-a-movie, but this is complicated by the companion film, I Am Curious (Blue), released in 1968. This second “version” of the movie, that takes place before and after the first movie, has a more somber and bitterly satiric style, and further explication of the framing narrative.

Initially, I Am Curious (Blue) and I Am Curious (Yellow) were meant to be one 3½ hour film. This is revealed in director Vilgot Sjöman’s book I Was Curious: Diary of the Making of a Film (published in English by Grove Press in 1968).

A once-notorious scene in which Lena kisses her lover's flaccid penis.

The film includes numerous and frank scenes of nudity and staged sexual intercourse. In one particularly controversial scene, Lena kissed her lover's flaccid penis. In 1969, the film was banned in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for being pornographic. After three court battles the U.S. Supreme Court, in Byrne v. Karalexis, 401 U.S. 216 (1970), legalized the movie by overturning the state anti-obscenity law that regulated motion pictures.

The film's title was the inspiration for the name of The Fall’s 1988 album I Am Kurious Oranj as well as The Simpsons episode "I Am Furious Yellow" and the Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane issue "I Am Curious (Black)" wherein Lois Lane becomes a Black woman for a day. In a contemporary reference, Chrysler Corporation offered a fluorescent yellow-green color on its 1971 Plymouth cars that was named "Curious Yellow".

[edit] Trivia

According to the film's scenario book (also published in English by Grove Press in 1968), the film also featured a brief appearance by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In that scene, Vilgot interviews Dr. King on his views of civil disobedience. This interview was filmed in March 1966, when Dr. King and Harry Belafonte were in Stockholm to start a new initiative for Swedish support of African Americans.

[edit] References

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