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What sort of disillusioning experience could lead a filmmaker to make something like Roy Andersson’s Songs From the Second Floor (pictured), a series of absurdist vignettes depicting contemporary Sweden as teetering somewhere between the Dark Ages and Ragnarok? Well, maybe it’s a coincidence, but Andersson supports himself as a maker of TV commercials. In fact, the Swedish director’s immaculately realized adverts are widely acclaimed; they’ve been described by Ingmar Bergman, Andersson’s former teacher, as the world’s best. This retrospective of Andersson’s work includes an hourlong program of his commercials (at 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 29), which precede 2000’s Songs. Though all it’s selling is societal breakdown, the movie shows the influence of the director’s full-time gig: Filmed in wide-angle single takes with a fixed-position camera, each of the 46 scenes is a comprehensive, if enigmatic, indictment of Sweden’s habits, religion, superstitions, and—an old but still tender wound—collaboration with the Nazis. Made 30 years earlier, Andersson’s first feature has a rather different vibe. A Swedish Love Story (at 2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 28) has been described as a sunnier version of such early Bergman films as Summer With Monika: Two teenagers fall in love, creating their own private idyll during the fleeting Nordic summer. It will be screened with 1975’s Giliap, a low-key account of life at a declining small-town hotel; the film was a commercial flop, but its exquisite imagery has held up well. The series runs Saturday, Aug. 28, and Sunday, Aug. 29, in the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium, 4th Street and Constitution Ave. NW. Free. (202) 842-6799. (Mark Jenkins)