Susanne Bier
Susanne Bier (Danish: [suˈsænə ˈpiɐ̯ˀ]; born 15 April 1960) is a Danish filmmaker. She is best known for her feature films Brothers (2004), After the Wedding (2006), In a Better World (2010), and Bird Box (2018), and the TV miniseries The Night Manager (2016) on AMC, The Undoing (2020) on HBO, and The First Lady (2022) on Showtime. Bier is the first female director to win a Golden Globe Award, a Primetime Emmy Award,[2] and a European Film Award, collectively.
Susanne Bier
15 April 1960
- Director
- writer
- producer
1991–present
Tómas Gislason
(198?–?; divorced)
Philip Zandén
(1995–?; divorced)
Jesper Winge Leisner
(?-present)
Gabriel Bier Gislason, Alice Bier Zandén
Early life and education[edit]
Susanne Bier was born to a Jewish family in Copenhagen, Denmark on 15 April 1960. The family of her father, Rudolf Salomon Baer (born 1930), emigrated from Germany to Denmark in 1933 after Hitler's rise to power. The family of her mother, Heni (née Jonas; born 1936), emigrated to Denmark from Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, to escape rising antisemitism. In 1943, the two families fled from Denmark to Sweden, together with most Danish Jews, to escape the deportation to the Nazi death camps. Three years after the end of World War II, they returned to Denmark. The effects of the Holocaust caused Bier's parents to instill the strong moral values and principles into their children. Later, the importance of human resilience and dignity would be a recurring theme in her films.[3]
During her schooling, she went to Niels Steensens Gymnasium. In interviews for the media as an adult, Bier describes herself as lacking in social skills as a child, who liked to play football with boys and preferred reading books to interacting with others. After high school, citing a desire to reconnect with her Jewish roots, she studied art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Later she would study architecture at the Architectural Association in London before finally returning to film and graduating from the National Film School of Denmark in 1987.[4] De Saliges (1987), Bier's graduation film, won first prize at the Munich film school festival and was subsequently distributed by Channel Four.[5]
Style and themes[edit]
Bier's films often deal with the traditional family framework, with the collapse of the bourgeois middle class under the pressure of globalization, terrorism, and war, and the way in which people deal with a disaster or a formative event outside their lives. She notes that the moment that interests her in characters' lives is when their sense of security cracks and the outside world knocks on the door. The main questions in her films are questions of morality: whether it is moral to leave a partner who has become disabled, whether personal good precedes the general good, and how to respond to the violence directed at the individual. Bier often raises questions about how far one would go for a child is in distress, if social services appear to be unable or unwilling to help, and the limits one exceeds to get their own desires fulfilled.[39]
Bier's style of direction gives the players a great deal of freedom, allowing improvisation in both texts and presentation. Her films have a common visual code - all of them are filmed in a shoulder camera, and emotional peaks use extreme close-ups of eyes, lips, and fingers. In addition, the editing method is not faithful to the continuous editing tradition, and it adds to a more free and random feeling.
Bier's films are characterized by the fact that, despite their tragic structure, there is a "flattening" of the dramatic events, or, alternatively, no dramatization of the major events. For example, in the scene of the first encounter between the father and his daughter in After the Wedding, the two of them are silent for most of the scene, and talk about a bottle of water he brings to her. This style of direction creates the feeling that nothing happens in her films, but a thorough analysis of the events shows that the films are faithful to the dramatic structure of the theatre of ancient Greece.
Moreover, Bier makes sure to finish her films with a slightly optimistic tone, saying that although her films are not purely commercial, they are also not pure art, and therefore she should communicate with her audience and give them some light to lean on.[40]
Influences[edit]
In Susan King's article,[20] Bier claims her Jewish heritage embedded a strong sense of family in conjunction to a sense of instability and turmoil. This pertains to her father's need to flee Germany in 1933 to Denmark, where he met Bier's mother. The two of them fled by boat to Sweden after Nazis began rounding up Jews in Denmark. Originally, Bier imagined herself married to a nice Jewish man with six children. She later decided that she wanted to pursue a career. She has been married twice and has two children, Gabriel and Alice. Despite this, she still holds family as her biggest influence and claims she would have never become a filmmaker without her children. To Bier, "family is a sense of identity". "I speak to my parents every day. I have a very close relationship to my aunts and uncles, but also my ex-husband…who comes to stay with us. I have this almost obsessive desire to whomever is close to me, I want to have a very intense, close, intimate relationship with them. That way of living definitely informs the stories I tell."Although she frequently depicts international stories in third world countries, Bier had never been to Africa or India until she started making movies there. On her frequent interest and depiction of the Third World, Bier insists that "it is sort of pointing out that the Third World is really a part of our lives. It is unavoidable, and we need to relate to it…" As she writes in a public letter after winning the Oscar for In a Better World,[41] "My particular world is not just Copenhagen. It had to be broader than this. My world is larger than it used to be." In Sylvaine Gold's article,[10] Bier claims she doesn't like to be in a state of comfort when working. Typically in her films, happy and comfortable characters are met by situations of extreme sadness and catastrophe. She attributes this obsession to her parents experience during World War II when "society suddenly turned against them" because they were Jewish. Despite this obsession with tragedy, Bier says "I've had a very fortunate, very privileged life [but] I say that with all humility, because it could change tomorrow. But I have a very strong ability to empathize, to understand what things feel like." Her frequent writing collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen confirms this "humanness" in her, that "She's very good at putting herself in a character's place, which is really a gift." Bier also insists that despite her negative depictions in her films, she always wants to end a film with some vestige of hope. She never wants to alienate her audience, that it is always key to "have an ability to communicate".
Personal life[edit]
Bier first married the Danish-Icelandic film director Tómas Gislason (da), with whom she had a son, Gabriel Bier Gislason (born 1989), who also works in the film industry. With her second husband, the Swedish actor and director Philip Zandén, she had a daughter, the actress Alice Bier Zandén (born 1995)
Following her divorce from Zandén, her partner is the Danish singer and composer Jesper Winge Leisner (da), who wrote the music for several of her films.[42][43]