SAGOLANDET
["Land Of Dreams"]
A Film Review by Manavendra K. Thakur
Copyright 1989 by Manavendra K. Thakur and The Tech
Reproduced with permission.
1987 185 mins. Sweden English & Swedish with English subtitles Unrated Mono Color 16mm/1.33
With Johanna, Rollo May, Ingvar Carlsson, Tage Erlander, Gert Wilen, Lars Svelander, Timo Nilsson, Henry Karlsson, Dorte Hansen, Per-Olof Hakannson, Harold Lundstrom, Einar Carenfeldt, Stig Karlsson, Anita Grede, Seved Werntoft, Lars Norrman, Hideaki Yoshiguchi, Britta Nylander, Anna-Lisa Floren, Nils Erik Ahmansson, Edvin Bladh, The Sprung Family, and many others.
Credits: Directed and photographed by Jan Troell. Executive producer: Bengt Linne. Assistant producer: Goran Setterberg. Assistants: Mischa Gavrjusjov, Botvid Kihlman, Agneta Ulfsater. Original music by Tom Wolgers.
Production companies: Bold Productions AB / Sveriges Television AB, Malmo /
Svenska Filminstitutet / Polyphon Film-und Fernsehgesellschaft MBH
Distributor: Svenska Filminstitutet
PO Box 27126
S-102 52 Stockholm
SWEDEN
(08) 65 11 00
Ever since Ingmar Bergman retired from active filmmaking, most Americans have had precious little contact with Swedish cinema. In fact, Lasse Hallstrom's MITT LIV SOM HUND ("My Life as a Dog") is the only Swedish film to have recently gained commercial distribution in the United States. Ironically, that charming and poignant film reintroduced Americans to Swedish cinema just as a wave of quality Swedish filmmaking was ending. Swedish cinema went into a slump in the mid 1980s, and -- like the state of American cinema during the 1930s -- quietly ambitious documentaries like Stefan Jarl's UHKKADUS ("Threat") have since become the prime source for innovation and vitality in Sweden today.
Jan Troell's SAGOLANDET ("Land of Dreams") is another of these new documentaries, but there is nothing quiet about it. In less than ten minutes it completely surpasses any expectations one might have for a 185-minute documentary about life in modern-day Sweden. At once intensely personal and of universal value, the film is a masterpiece of lyricism that transcends its immediate relevance: the film not only keeps the spirit of originality and creativity alive but also sets a new standard of excellence for documentary filmmaking. The film is so successful as a whole that its momentary lapses are easily forgiven and quickly forgotten.
Time and time again, Troell's film paints a bleak picture of Sweden as a nation where order, rationality, and efficiency take precedence over happiness, joy, and imagination. Troell also protests that the long record of human violence against the environment has in turn dehumanized humans themselves, and the film yearns for a "Land of Dreams" that would encourage people to explore their individual potential rather than stifle it. This theme might be summarized as the value of imagination versus the benefits of rationality, and Troell addresses it with considerably more thought and attention than the typical get-back-to-nature message or simplistic anti-technology diatribe. Furthermore, Troell is eminently successful in translating the film's thematic generalities into terms particularly relevant to the Sweden of today.
Sweden can be rightly proud of its rich artistic heritage, considering that it has produced such international giants (among others) as Strindberg in the theater and Sjostrom and Bergman in the cinema. It would be easy for foreigners to conclude that any country able to produce such world-reknowned artists must have something special going for it, and there is indeed something fascinating about Swedish culture. It is difficult to pin down, but part of what makes Sweden so intriguing is its strong liberal tradition. Following that tradition, the country has made giant strides toward securing political and economic security for all its citizens. In fact, progressive reformers in other countries have long pointed to Sweden as the success story of the modern welfare state.
At the same time, however, few foreigners seem to realize that Sweden's longstanding material prosperity has brought along with it a certain sense of coldness, emptiness, and even sterility. This is the fundamental contradiction of Swedish culture, and Troell astutely recognizes that it has several dimensions, ranging from the broadly political and economic to the personal and practical. As a Swede himself, Troell explores all of these considerations from inside out and gives passionate expression to their implications.
Because Troell engages his viewers with both personal and cultural introspection, his film is already praiseworthy in and of itself. If that were all he wanted to do, however, he might as well have written a book or acted out a drama on stage. What makes Troell's work into into a particularly valuable work of cinema is the intimate and symbiotic relationship between the film's cinematic styles and Troell's reasons for making the film. Each benefits the other, and Troell consistently manipulates the two brilliantly.
Consider, for example, just the first five minutes of the film. The film begins with a ground-level closeup of a red flower waving back and forth in the wind. An unseen adult male narrator (presumably Troell himself) says in Swedish that "As a child I would stand in the grass with outstretched arms, my face toward the sun. Then I'd close my eyes, and spin 'round, 'round... I felt then, that I experienced God." The film cuts to a slow-motion shot of a young boy jumping around in a field of white flowers in obvious delight. On the soundtrack, a piano softly plays "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."
Then the film cuts to a right-profile shot of a well-dressed elderly man who speaks in English with an American accent: "Joy is the experience of something new, that one has not known before. Happiness is the fulfillment of one's past aims. The joy is the the discovery of new aims, the sense of being in a new country." The film cuts back to the young boy jumping and twirling about, again in slow motion. This time, two puppies cavort at his feet with him, and the final movement of Beethoven's Choral Symphony is heard joyously on the soundtrack.
Abruptly, the music stops and the film cuts to a full-body shot of a scarecrow made of some black clothes erected on a wooden cross. Ominous synthesizer chords begin to play on the soundtrack. The camera zooms back slowly to show the bleak, barren landscape that the scarecrow guards. Then the title SAGOLANDET appears on-screen, written in large black letters that are split vertically in half like early computer printout characters. The letters fade and the film continues on.
Clearly, Troell is combining lyrical moments with strong documentary footage in these scenes, and he makes the most each element: The opening narration over the red flower immediately stresses the value of childlike imagination and wonder. Troell drives home the difference between joy and happiness by delimiting the elderly man's observations between shots of the boy twirling about happily. (The man is, by the way, the American psychiatrist Rollo May, and Troell relies on him heavily throughout the film.) The bleak field suggests the spiritual emptiness of the rational landscape because it allows environmental folly, exemplified by the barren field, to occur. Finally, the computer-like font of the title letters creates tension by suggesting that the film is a down-to-earth documentary examination of a thoroughly mystical or magical place -- the "Land of Dreams."
The above analysis, though, barely begins to convey the tightly coherent structure Troell has created by editing 80 hours of raw footage down to 185 minutes. Just after the opening credits are over, for example, Troell includes footage of a dog show. Some time later, the film shows loggers using a large machine to cut down forest trees in less than 10 seconds each. Another sequence follows a professional dogkiller (at a dog pound) as he calmly explains their policy on putting stray dogs to death. A third sequence explains how loggers use a powerful bolt gun to shoot glyphosate capsules into birch and aspen trees. The glyphosate slowly kills the trees to make room for more profitable pine trees. The same bolt gun, the film shows, is used by the dog pound to dispatch stray dogs "instantly" and "painlessly." These seemingly disparate moments are in reality closely related because they show how the single-minded pursuit of efficiency can transform passive dominance (of humans over nature) into active destruction. Troell is at his poetic best while pointing out such relationships, and the above sequence is but one example of how intricately Troell has linked segments of his film together.
In terms of overall structure, the film is divided into several sections. Each section focuses on a specific place, idea, or group of individuals and then cuts back to quiet philosophical commentary by Rollo May (the American psychiatrist) or political arguments between Ingvar Carlsson and Tage Erlander. With impeccable documentary technique, Troell gets his subjects to open up to the camera, and his editing zeroes in on the essence of each conversation. Who is being interviewed is nowhere near as important as what he or she is saying, and so most Americans won't realize that Carlsson is the prime minister of Sweden and that Erlander is a former prime minister -- which is as it should be. Neither look like, talk like, or act like typical politicians, which is probably why Troell was interested in interviewing them in the first place.
Also seen throughout the film is Johanna, Troell's young daughter, whom Troell began photographing from birth. In the film, he shows her learning to walk, climbing stairs, riding happily on a circus merry-go-round. Not once, however, does the film resemble a home movie. Rather, Troell photographs Johanna to express his own joy -- in the true Rollo May sense of the word -- at becoming a father for the first time at age 50. Troell can share his intensely personal emotions with viewers in a meaningful way because espousing the value of those feelings is precisely the point of Troell's film. The presence of Johanna throughout the film powerfully underscores how inseparable Jan Troell is from his film. The two are one and the same.
No other filmmaker in recent memory has created an intimate document with so broad a value as this. SAGOLANDET supplants factual objectivity with poetic creativity and therefore works in markedly different ways from the typical cinema verite documentary. While one might not wholly agree with Troell's point of view or the film's numerous arguments, the film that flows from Troell's convictions -- judged as a work of art -- is an indisputable masterpiece. In addition, the film embodies the very same qualities that it says are missing from Swedish society, and therefore the film preserves its integrity and consistency at the same time that it adopts a leadership role. Few documentaries can claim to accomplish as much. For all of these reasons, and for many others left out, SAGOLANDET is a crowning achievement of international cinema and a supreme personal triumph for Jan Troell. One can only wonder to what heights Troell might climb from here.
Filmography of Jan Troell: [English translation and alternative titles in brackets. 'S' indicates a short film.]
STAD [Town] 1959 S
SOMMARTAG [Summer Train] 1960 S 13 mins.
POJKEN OCH DRAKEN [The Boy and the Dragon] 1961 S 20 mins.
BATEN [The Boat] 1962 S 12 mins.
DEN GAMLA KVARNEN [The Old Mill] 1962 S 12 mins.
PORTATT AV ASA [Portrait of Asa] 1963 S
JOHAN EKERBERG 1964 S 23 mins.
UPPEHALL I MYRLANDET [Stopover in the Marshland] 1965 S
HAR HAR DU DITT LIV [Here is your Life] 1966 170 mins.
OLE DOLE DOFF [Eeny Meeny Miny Moe /
Who Saw Him Die?] 1967 110 mins.
UTVANDRARNA [The Emigrants] 1970 191 mins.
NYBYGGARNA [The New Land] 1971 204 mins.
ZANDY'S BRIDE 1974 119 mins.
BANG! 1977
HURRICANE 1979 120 mins.
INGEJOR ANDREES LUFTARD
[The Flight of the Eagle] 1982 140 mins.
SAGOLANDET [Land of Dreams] 1987 185 mins.
Jan Troell is a veteran Swedish filmmaker who is well-known for lyricism in his work. Born in Malmo in 1931, he taught in an elementary school in Malmo during the early 1950s and made instructional films for children in the late 1950s. He began making documentaries for Swedish television in the 1960s and made his feature film debut in 1966. He belongs to the generation of Swedish filmmakers (such as Bo Widerberg) that came of age in the 1960s, and he photographs all his films himself.
Manavendra K. Thakur
{rutgers,decvax!genrad,uunet}!mit-eddie!thakur
thakur@eddie.mit.edu
thakur@cfa.harvard.edu
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