This short film would show up in Manhattan movie theaters every so often for ten years or more. We remember it so well because we treasured our first viewings of it, and were so flummoxed by trying to describe it to friends, that the subsequent viewings were often spent compiling mental notes. As the 70s wore on and Madeline Kahn's star brightly ascended, her big joke -- "phallica symbole?" -- became widely quoted. To be able to quote that line got used more than once to fake having actually seen this cool in-joke of cinemagoers. The more of us who saw it, the more we tormented our virgin friends over their having missed it yet again, while arming them with more details to fake their way through chuckling with the beaming cocktailers rather than in envy of them.
Kind of like an initiation rite, because the more pretentious the moviegoer -- those cocktailing cognoscenti -- the more humiliating the first viewing must have been, especially if one were not extra-attentive to the gibberishy narration/dialogue track (overstuffed with nature sounds, to further the verisimilitude).
Much as with actual Swedish, the first jokes detected were often squelched as inappropriate thoughts, distant Germanic echoes from a related tongue, so those who believed they were watching a meditation on memory had the hardest time catching on that they'd been slipped an unannounced comic short. Only well into the 70s did newspaper ads start billing when De Düva (The Dove) would be shown.
Even after realizing it's a comedy, what we took to be Swedishy gibberish revealed itself to be a pastiche of Scandinavianized English, Yiddishisms, and silly dirty jokes.
The climactic incest scene was the hottest screen action I'd ever seen to that point, satirizing the brief era when Swedish features showed more skin than US-released ones.
Kind of like an initiation rite, because the more pretentious the moviegoer -- those cocktailing cognoscenti -- the more humiliating the first viewing must have been, especially if one were not extra-attentive to the gibberishy narration/dialogue track (overstuffed with nature sounds, to further the verisimilitude).
Much as with actual Swedish, the first jokes detected were often squelched as inappropriate thoughts, distant Germanic echoes from a related tongue, so those who believed they were watching a meditation on memory had the hardest time catching on that they'd been slipped an unannounced comic short. Only well into the 70s did newspaper ads start billing when De Düva (The Dove) would be shown.
Even after realizing it's a comedy, what we took to be Swedishy gibberish revealed itself to be a pastiche of Scandinavianized English, Yiddishisms, and silly dirty jokes.
The climactic incest scene was the hottest screen action I'd ever seen to that point, satirizing the brief era when Swedish features showed more skin than US-released ones.