Rut Hillarp

Rut Hillarp was a poet and photographer, and worked as a college teacher for many years. She has a given place in Swedish literary post-war modernism where she appeared with both poetry collections and novels, characterized by an erotic picture world and mythological patterns. After a few decades of silence as an author she returned in the 1980s as a poet, now experimenting with photographs and photomontage in connection with poetry. Less well-known is that her visual and expressive imagination was also expressed in some experimental films that came to be in collaboration with the Romanian photographer and filmmaker Mihail Livada, whose importance for Swedish experimental films is difficult to overestimate. Together they made Det underbara mötet (1949), an associative fantasy of a love meeting. Despite the technical limitations, Hillarp succeeded in imaging the strong sensualism that is at the heart of her lyrical creation. When the Svensk experimentfilmstudio – later called Arbetsgr...