Daily Archives: Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Utvandrarna

Jan Troell (1971)

It makes sense to write about the two parts of Jan Troell’s magnum opus as a single entity.  Unlike the nearly contemporary Godfather films, this wasn’t a case of the second picture getting made thanks to the first one’s success:  although their original release dates were a year apart, The Emigrants and The New Land are the result of one extended shoot, in 1969 and 1970.  The films do share with Francis Ford Coppola’s epic(s) subject matter and extraordinary length.  Clocking in at a total of 393 minutes, Troell’s diptych outlasts Coppola’s by eighteen minutes.  Both pairs of films concern European immigrants to the United States, though the Corleone clan’s way of life in twentieth-century New York City is far removed from that of the Swedish farmers who make their home in mid-nineteenth-century rural Minnesota.

Troell’s focus is on a small group of characters – the Nilsson family, a few of their friends and relatives – but they are representative of a huge exodus from Sweden to North America, in response to what the Library of Congress website terms a ‘national population crisis – the small country’s population had doubled from 1750 to 1850, and was still growing.  Tillable land became more and more scarce, and famine swept the nation, killing 22 out of every 1,000 Swedes …’  The Swedes in The Emigrants and The New Land are among the earlier transatlantic settlers of the 1800s, arriving in America in the mid-1840s.  In the second half of the century, around a fifth of the entire Swedish population followed suit.

The films, for which Troell and Bengt Forslund wrote the screenplay, are adapted from a quartet of novels by Vilhelm Morberg, published in Sweden between 1949 and 1959.  According to Wikipedia summaries of Morberg’s books, the films are a faithful adaptation.  The novels are The Emigrants (1951), which describes the hardships of farming families in Småland in southern Sweden and the arduous sea voyage that follows their decision to emigrate to the US; Unto a Good Land (1954), which traces their journey from New York City to Taylor’s Falls, Minnesota; The Settlers (1956), in which Karl Oskar Nilsson and his wife Kristina work the Minnesota land while Karl Oskar’s younger brother Robert goes gold prospecting on the California Trail;  and The Last Letter Home (1959), covering the later years of the protagonists’ lives and, from their perspective, the American Civil War and the Sioux Uprising of 1862.  Each major part of Troell’s narrative corresponds to one of the four novels.

I’d never seen The Emigrants or The New Land until now (as part of this month’s Liv Ullmann retrospective at BFI) so am guessing that the painstaking description of hard-scrabble life in Småland was more innovative fifty years ago than it seems today, thanks to films like Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) in the meantime.   Olmi creates a more textured picture of rural indigence than Troell:  in The Emigrants grimness overwhelmingly predominates.  There’s bad weather leading to bad harvests; there are bad people, too.  Robert (Eddie Axberg) is indentured to a farmer (Åke Fridell) who beats him; one beating causes Robert lasting ear damage.  Organised religion is a vital but pernicious and authoritarian part of community life.  In a strong early sequence in a village church, Troell’s camera – and it really is his camera:  he did the cinematography (and the editing) too – moves across the faces of a congregation on the receiving end of a stern Lutheran sermon.  These are people who accept damage to their crops and livelihood as the will of God:  they would be hopeless if they didn’t.  The agnostic Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) is an exception to the rule and his God-fearing wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann) therefore blames the Nilssons’ rock-filled fields and financial hardship on her husband’s irreligion.  Their lives in Sweden are ones that you’re soon anxious for the main characters to escape.

Robert has read books about the New World and developed an idealised view of it (save for a story he tells about a crocodile).  He wants to sell his share of the family farm in order to finance his emigration and plans to travel with his staunch, simple-minded friend Arvid (Pierre Lindstedt).  When he broaches the subject with Karl Oskar, Robert is surprised to learn that his elder brother is independently thinking of quitting Sweden for America.  Kristina isn’t keen on the idea; she’s reluctant to leave her homeland and anxious about the gruelling journey for the couple’s four very young children.  Her mind is changed by the death of the eldest child, Anna, after she gorges on uncooked porridge that expands in her stomach.  For her bereft mother, the homestead is now irreparably damaged, and the Nilssons soon depart.  Karl Oskar and Robert’s parents (Sven-Olof Bern and Anna Alfredsson) stay behind.  Troell creates a potent image of the old couple, almost frozen into a still photograph as they watch the gradually disappearing cart carry their family away.

The voyagers also include Jonas Petter (Hans Alfredson), the Nilssons’ neighbour, who sees a chance to escape his unhappy marriage, and Kristina’s uncle, Danjel Andreasson (Allan Edwall), a devout fundamentalist Christian and one of Troell’s strongest characters.  For holding services in his own home, Danjel is persecuted by Småland’s religious establishment, represented by the morally hypocritical minister Brusander (Gustaf Färingborg).  Brusander ostracises the Andreasson family – Danjel, his wife Inga-Lena (Ulla Smidje) and their four children – along with Danjel’s disciple Ulrika (Monica Zetterlund), a former prostitute, and her illegitimate teenage daughter (Eva-Lena Zetterlund).  All accompany the Nilssons and Arvid on the brig that sails for America from the port town of Karlshamn.  Danjel firmly believes that those possessed of the spirit will not be seasick and, the moment they set foot on American soil, will be empowered to speak fluent English.  The rigours of the journey severely test his faith.  He is seasick and his wife dies.  She is not the only one.  The Nilssons make the acquaintance of an elderly couple called Andersson, travelling to join their son who now farms in the Minnesota Territory.  Måns Andersson dies of heart failure and is buried at sea, as are Inga-Lena and others – ‘So many on the ocean bed’, laments Fina-Kajsa Andersson.  Kristina’s apprehensions about the crossing are justified.  On the eve of their departure from Karlshamn, she tells Karl Oskar she’s pregnant again.  During the voyage, there’s a lice infestation, which she blames on Ulrika (whom Kristina considers morally unclean, despite Ulrika’s religious conversion).  Later, a serious nosebleed is a prelude to life-threatening haemorrhage but Kristina pulls through.

Newly arrived in America, the principals enjoy a few moments in paradise:  drowsing in intoxicating bright sunshine, Kristina wakes to see Karl Oskar bringing her an apple.  The fruit is delicious but an apple in paradise can’t be a completely comfortable image:  the brief interlude over, the party start their journey west to Minnesota, by train and then paddle steamer, and their next series of trials begins.  When one of the Nilssons’ brood wanders off during a riverboat stop, Ulrika finds the little girl and brings her back.  This transforms Kristina’s view of Ulrika but not all the children survive the journey – one of Danjel’s daughters dies of cholera.  The film ends with the travellers finding their way to the home of Fina-Kajsa’s son Anders (Halvar Björk).  His humble shack shocks Fina-Kajsa but the surrounding area is fertile.  Danjel and Jonas Petter select nearby tracts of land to farm.  After hearing that terrain along the shore of Lake Ki Chi Saga is even better, Karl Oskar continues his journey solo.  According to local custom, he carves his name into a tree to claim for his family a tract of land close to the lake.

The Emigrants left me impressed but unsure that the film had fully justified its great length.  It’s true that Troell needs time to convey, as well as the ordeals of life in Småland, the duration of the arduous ocean voyage, and, to a lesser extent, of the journey from New York to Minnesota – but does he need as much time as he actually takes?  The question becomes all the more pressing during the first hour of The New Land, which takes up the immigrants’ story in 1850.  I settled down to watch the second film thinking it would be easier going than the first because I already knew, and was interested in, the characters but I soon got restless.  Troell’s description of life on the Minnesota farm has the same tempo as the corresponding section of The Emigrants even though he clearly doesn’t mean to present the Nilssons’ circumstances in America as comparably harsh.  That said, he does convey, through the very paucity of dramatic incident, a real sense of domestic routine and of time passing often uneventfully.  The narrative style shifts from the point at which Robert surprisingly returns from his Gold Rush adventure and suffers extended flashbacks to his and Arvid’s travails in the California desert.

Troell seems less comfortable with this kind of storytelling and the results are melodramatically conventional.  It’s pretty obvious, as soon as Robert comes home alone and explains uneasily that Arvid preferred to stay in California, that his friend has come to a bad end:  it transpires that, when the pair got lost in the desert, Arvid died after drinking poisoned water.  Robert’s guilt-stricken recall of this is encased in bad dreams that also feature an incident from The Emigrants for which he still feels remorse:  his nasty employer Aron forced him to drown a cat, which yowled horribly in the process.  Back in Minnesota, Robert has a persistent cough, as well as the ear pain that’s also part of Aron’s legacy.  The flashbacks, accompanied by sonic impressions of the tinnitus from which Robert suffers, go on to reveal that he caught yellow fever from a Hispanic guide in the Sierra Nevada.  The dying guide gave Robert a sack of coins, which he subsequently exchanged for bank notes.  He was cheated:  the paper money, as Karl Oskar discovers from the local bank, is worthless as legal tender.  A broken man physically and psychologically, Robert dies soon afterwards.

There are powerful and resonant elements in The New Land.  In some cases, their effect is amplified by association with moments in The Emigrants, such as Karl Oskar’s repeated construction of wooden crosses and coffins after a death in the family.   There are also one-offs that amount to more than particular incidents:  they seem to symbolise something larger in the story.  When Karl Oskar and his little son Danjel, the first of three children born to the Nilssons in Minnesota, are caught in a blizzard, the man saves the boy by killing the ox pulling their cart and placing Danjel in the warmth of the animal’s slit-open belly while Karl Oskar goes to get help.  His heroism virtually encapsulates the central theme of the Nilssons defying the odds to survive and striving to give their children a future.

On the whole, though, the second half of this second film is less convincing than what’s gone before.  You’re no longer starved for incident, which seems like good news but feels increasingly false to what appeared to be the essential rhythm and purpose of Troell’s undertaking.  The intersection of the immigrants’ lives with major events of contemporary American history is only partly effective.  After becoming an American citizen, Karl Oskar is eager to fight in the Civil War; his disappointment at failing the medical (he walks with a pronounced limp) and Kristina’s contrasting relief work well enough.  The Sioux Uprising scenes, though, are serially problematic.  The first of these is introduced by text on the screen:

‘On 17^th August 1862, there arrived at Fort Ridgeley a payment of 70,000 dollars which the starving Sioux tribes had long been claiming from the government.

The payment arrived one day too late.’

That portentous punchline sets up Troell’s (which may well be Vilhelm Morberg’s) version of an actual incident of August 1862 in which ‘four young native men killed five white settlers in Acton, Minnesota’ (Wikipedia), with the victims of that assault turned into Danjel Andreasson and his family, including his two sons and his pregnant daughter-in-law.  These killings are followed by reconstruction of the execution of thirty-eight Native Americans, in punishment for a series of murders of white settlers.  (As further on-screen text explains, much greater numbers were condemned to death but reprieved by Abraham Lincoln.)  Taken together, these sequences illustrate the difficulty of suddenly expanding a film narrative that has concentrated on a few individuals into the larger historical context of their lives.

The text about the long overdue payment may well mean to acknowledge the Sioux’s justified resentment of white settlers in their territory but viewers can hardly feel the reasonableness of that resentment as we watch the Andreassons being killed.  These victims are people whose company we’ve kept for several hours.  When Danjel is murdered, we see his screen life flash before our eyes and are appalled that, after all the hardship endured, his life should end like this.  It doesn’t help that the gruesome imagery of the farmhouse attack is overly designed (this is more salient because it’s uncharacteristic of Troell).  The opening shots of Danjel’s daughter-in-law gutting a chicken anticipate blood-and-feathers mayhem when the Sioux intruders raid the henhouse and the whole episode’s macabre concluding image.  After killing the young woman, her assailants cut the baby from her womb.  The foetus is hung as a trophy on the farmhouse door.  Flies buzz round it in the August heat.

After the birth of her youngest child, Kristina is warned against further pregnancies:  a doctor explains that her insides are so damaged that a further pregnancy would be fatal.  The Nilssons stop having sex but Kristina eventually decides they should resume and trust in God.  She falls pregnant just as the Sioux Uprising begins and is soon on her deathbed, with Karl Oskar caring for her.  As might be expected, this is a powerful and moving part of the story.  An apple tree planted by the Nilssons soon after arriving in Minnesota is now bearing fruit – the red Astrachan apple (introduced to America by Swedish immigrants in the 1830s).  Karl Oskar brings an apple to Kristina in bed and she’s able to taste it just before she dies.   The moment not only chimes with her husband’s present of an apple that she enjoyed more vigorously on their arrival in New York.  The red Astrachan connotes Sweden and enables Kristina, perennially nostalgic for her native land, to say ‘I’m home’ and to die peacefully.  Troell cuts from Karl Oskar’s immediate distress straight to the Sioux executions in the city of Mankato.  These are compellingly staged but bound to lack proper impact when the audience is still absorbing Kristina’s death.

Whether or not the films are unduly protracted, it’s frustrating, given their length, that a few plot strands and themes aren’t followed through or sufficiently clarified.  In the course of the sea voyage, Robert persuades Danjel’s eldest daughter that she needs to learn English, as Robert is doing.  By the end of the voyage, the two are friendly and Arvid, in his dog-like devotion to Robert, appears to be frozen out.  Either I missed or Jan Troell doesn’t show what happens to end the incipient romance:  the girl disappears from the film and, at the start of The New Land, Robert and Arvid are as inseparable as they were in Småland.  The friendly Baptist pastor (Tom Fouts) who, in The Emigrants, helps the new arrivals find their way to Taylor’s Falls, marries Ulrika in the early stages of The New Land.  Others in the Lutheran immigrant community deplore this religiously mixed marriage and urge Kristina to have no more to do with Ulrika.  The two women are by now fast friends and Kristina angrily refuses to abandon Ulrika.  There are no evident consequences to this.  The Nilssons remain active in developing the local Lutheran parish.  Troell presumably wants to make the point that religious intolerance follows the characters from Sweden to America.  Having made the point, he drops it.

It’s unusual to see Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann in films of this era that aren’t Ingmar Bergman films, playing characters whose urgent circumstances leave no time for the existential reflection that Bergman typically supplies.  This makes you admire both actors all the more.  As Karl Oskar, von Sydow, forty when Troell shot the films, starts off younger than that and ends up several decades older:  magically and without obvious make-up to sustain the illusion, he always looks the right age.  His natural acting and the unassertive gallantry of his presence make von Sydow just the man for the closing shot of The Emigrants:  Karl Oskar, after marking his name on the tree, sits leaning against it in the sun, and grins as he pulls down his hat.  A similar blend of qualities is the hallmark of Liv Ullmann’s performance, too.  She’s playing a heroine but Ullmann’s radiant nobility isn’t remotely pompous.  She makes Kristina, who is prone to panic and not averse to moaning (albeit she has plenty to panic and moan about), completely real.  Eddie Axberg, though he’s likeable and works hard as Robert, isn’t in the same acting league.  The outstanding contribution in a supporting role comes from Allan Edwall.  When Edwall died in 1997, Erland Josephson wrote that ‘He was odd but, damn it, he managed to be odd in a universal way!’  Those words convey a sense of what makes Edwall’s portrait of Danjel Andreasson – highly eccentric, thoroughly human – so absorbing to watch.

Despite serious flaws, these two films are quite an achievement – a dramatised commemoration of an important part of Swedish national history, a vivid realisation of landscape in the characters’ habitat on both sides of the Atlantic.  The New Land‘s wintry, diminuendo coda is one of its highlights.  After his wife dies, as his children grow up and start their own families, Karl Oskar becomes an increasingly solitary figure.  He dies in his sleep in December 1890.  One of his neighbours writes a letter to Karl Oskar’s sister back in Sweden, informing her of her brother’s death.  Earlier in the film, Kristina is irritated when Karl Oskar proposes, as well as taking American citizenship, anglicising the family name to Nelson.  Kristina dismisses the idea as snobbish but Karl Oskar won’t be dissuaded.  By the time he dies, the process of Americanisation has moved on apace:  the letter to Småland has to come from an older neighbour because the younger Nelsons, whose parents couldn’t speak English when they left home, now no longer write Swedish.  The neighbour encloses with his letter a photograph – a family portrait showing the elderly Karl Oskar surrounded by, almost lost among, his many children and grandchildren.  New beginnings are central to Jan Troell’s two films but they lead to a strong sense of an ending.

24 April 2022, 30 April 2022