Arts & Manners: American Odyssey

Europe’s passage to America in the nineteenth century represented one of history’s greatest migrations: The poor, the tired, the huddled masses Emma Lazarus wrote about, voting with their feet, leaving behind the vestigial feudalism of the old country, transformed the United States into that pot whose melting propensities we yet debate and of which we may eventually despair. Curiously, American film has rarely given masterly expression to this unparalleled phenomenon. But this year and last, a young Swedish director, Jan Troell, set out to document the European conditions inspiring that desire for escape, carrying the emigrants from homeland through the ocean passage and to the new land, there to follow their progress, their heartbreaks, glories, accommodations.

The Emigrants, issued late last year (and reviewed in NR, January 5, 1973), was the first half of Troell’s epic—an overworked term, granted, but fitting for this masterpiece derived from Vilhelm Moberg’s four-volume novel. Now The New Land has arrived, a glorious, stunning conclusion to his two-part, five-hour chef-d’oeuvre. Once again, Troell’s hand is everywhere: He directed, edited, co-authored, and is credited with the cinematography. Like The Emigrants, The New Land, which begins in 1850, utilizes a stately pace, an unhurried exposition of themes and developments, a camera seeing, not just looking at, a fine Swedish family adjusting to the settlement, as earlier to the departure and voyage, a metamorphosis of the subjugated into the free. The United States was in fact, not just in theory, the promised land for Europe’s discontenteds, although, as Troell makes abundantly clear, it was also a hell for the Negro, and a cheat, a betrayal, a degradation of the lustrous rhetoric for much of the Indian population. Troell preaches nothing, he brings (I believe) no rigid ideological passion to this stupendous cinema achievement, he tells not only universal truths but the particular truths of the American experiment, and his movie succeeds as has no comparable film before.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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Europe’s passage to America in the nineteenth century represented one of history’s greatest migrations: The poor, the tired, the huddled masses Emma Lazarus wrote about, voting with their feet, leaving behind the vestigial feudalism of the old country, transformed the United States into that pot whose melting propensities we yet debate and of which we may eventually despair. Curiously, American film has rarely given masterly expression to this unparalleled phenomenon. But this year and last, a young Swedish director, Jan Troell, set out to document the European conditions inspiring that desire for escape, carrying the emigrants from homeland through the ocean passage and to the new land, there to follow their progress, their heartbreaks, glories, accommodations.

The Emigrants, issued late last year (and reviewed in NR, January 5, 1973), was the first half of Troell’s epic—an overworked term, granted, but fitting for this masterpiece derived from Vilhelm Moberg’s four-volume novel. Now The New Land has arrived, a glorious, stunning conclusion to his two-part, five-hour chef-d’oeuvre. Once again, Troell’s hand is everywhere: He directed, edited, co-authored, and is credited with the cinematography. Like The Emigrants, The New Land, which begins in 1850, utilizes a stately pace, an unhurried exposition of themes and developments, a camera seeing, not just looking at, a fine Swedish family adjusting to the settlement, as earlier to the departure and voyage, a metamorphosis of the subjugated into the free. The United States was in fact, not just in theory, the promised land for Europe’s discontenteds, although, as Troell makes abundantly clear, it was also a hell for the Negro, and a cheat, a betrayal, a degradation of the lustrous rhetoric for much of the Indian population. Troell preaches nothing, he brings (I believe) no rigid ideological passion to this stupendous cinema achievement, he tells not only universal truths but the particular truths of the American experiment, and his movie succeeds as has no comparable film before.