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Men have landed on the moon, but to many, I Am Curious
(Yellow),
I Am Curious (Blue) will be the event of 1969.1
Such read the headlines appearing in American newspapers when the film directed by Swedish director Vilgot Sjöman was seized by customs officials upon its arrival in the United States in 1968, with a subsequent highly visible trial around allegedly obscene content. The film, primarily political in content but containing scenes with full frontal nudity, was billed within the American media as a pornographic film. Rejecting the indictment, Sjöman argued that it was the films explicit male nudity that troubled US Customs censors, underscoring the ironic regard of male nudity as less permissible than the overt female nudity prevalent within film and advertising at the time.
I am Curious (Yellow) and its companion film I am Curious (Blue), released in Sweden in 1966, were intended to be one integrated film. Sjöman amassed substantial footage and decided to create two versions of the same film (Blue) developed into a sober film about state, church, prison camps and other aspects of Swedish society. (Yellow), the more sensational counterpart, unfolds around Lena Nyman, a radical student activist who engages in a public inquiry about social, political and sexual questions relevant to Swedes at the time. The film evolves ambiguously, never resolving whether the real-life Nyman has been cast to play herself or a role created by the director. In this way, Sjöman further complicates the reading of the film as either documentary or staged, while posing sexual encounters as a set of intimate relations involving distrust, anger, envy and betrayal, rather than offering a
