Back to the Past: review of three movies from Jan Troell. "Everlasting Moments", "The Emigrants" and "The New Land".

The appearance in 2008 of "Everlasting Moments" (Maria Larssons ögonblick Evigan), of Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell, gave back to the cinephiles of the world the opportunity to marvel at the miracle of the  moving image, in a succession of sepia photographs and social realism.

Troell's strategy is to place a character inside a family in an historical context, and let them develop within that past in evocative vignettes and small scenes of a deep didacticism. In "Everlasting Moments" our guide for the early decades of the twentieth Century in Sweden is Maria (Maria Heiskanen), wife and mother who discovers the aesthetic possibilities of the world through a camera. The camera as an object joins Maria and her partner in marriage, and its use releases her of the misfortunes of daily living, including the domestic violence partly derived from proletarian enslavement, a mixture of Soviet realism and Dickensian misery. Some film critics say that Maria bears the chauvinism prevalent in his time as a dominated female complicit with its own tormentor. Despite this impression, Maria takes the necessary steps for the continuity and progress of her family, that finally comes when her husband Sigfrid becomes a capitalist. It is then that she can stop feeling guilty about using her camera, which until then was an escape to the bourgeois world personified in her potential lover, owner of a photography shop. 

This assertion of individual power in pursuit of family progress is shared by the Swedish immigrants to whom Troell dedicated two films in the 1970s, "The Emigrants" and its sequel "The New Land". In these two films, Liv Ullman and Max Von Sidow leave an authoritarian and petrified Sweden where nature does not give respite towards a free America, for anyone who wants to take the land stolen from the aborigines. The road is arduous and full of disease, and the reward seems to be just more hard work, but Troell does an excellent job on emphasizing the tangible progress for the rural farmer, the daily optimism and dedication of the pioneer that believes more in his own capabilities than in an uncaring God who takes the most beloved. Although the viewer might think that the ultimate goal is money, being precisely an item highlighted throughout the second film, is not the mad pursuit of extraordinary profits represented by the California Gold Rush, but the traditional work ethic that ultimately pays. The pioneer has left all his sweat on the ground, and though his family has suffered the cost, in the final moments we have a peek at the beginning of a great American lineage, already in the era of the modern proletariat. Some scenes in "The New Land" are dominated by psychedelic drums and zooms from the seventies, while the horror genre music interspersed in "The Emigrants" is subtle like a sledgehammer, but given these warnings and used to the leisure pace, these two films offer an essential sociological and audiovisual experience not to be missed. 

Note of interest: there is a scene in "The New Land" taken entirely by George Lucas for "The Empire Strikes Back".  Many science fiction sagas are just allegories of the conquest of the West. 

Links:

"Everlasting Moments" (Maria Larssons ögonblick Evigan), 2008.
"The Emigrants" (Utvandrarna), 1971.
"The New Land" (Nybyggarna), 1972.