Once again, the principal characters are Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann), who left their family farm in order to own their own land in America. Karl Oskar is determined and resolutely self-sufficient, while Kristina is a strong maternal presence in both her Christian devotion and her sometimes Job-like patience (although, as in The Emigrants, she loses her cool at one point when it is demanded that she cease being friends with a woman who married the wrong kind of Christian). Their family continues to expand as Kristina has more children, but Karl Oskar’s dream of owning and working his own soil seems to be coming to fruition, as he builds the family successively bigger homes and has to answer to no one but himself. The other characters with whom they journeyed from Sweden, including Kristina’s brother Danjel (Allan Edwall), who left due to religious persecution from the dominant Lutheran church, and Ulrika (Monica Zetterlund), a former prostitute and one of Danjel’s followers, become more secondary; although they are still present throughout much of the film, they tend to recede to the background.

This is not the case, however, with Karl Oskar’s headstrong younger brother Robert (Eddie Axberg) and his best friend Arvid (Pierre Lindstedt). Ever the dreamer who sees nothing but silver linings, Robert becomes fixated on leaving the new family farm and chasing fortune in California mining for gold. Much of the film unfolds during the early 1850s, the heyday of the California “gold rush,” and early on Robert and Arvid head West. Given the prevalence of death throughout the two films, young and old alike, it would not be surprising to learn that Robert had died out in California, but he reemerges years later, looking sickly, but holding a sack full of money, the explanation of which is slowly revealed during a series of jagged flashbacks that chronicles his and Arvid’s journey out West and what they found there. Troell, who acted as both cinematographer and editor in addition to being the director and co-writing the adaptation of novelist and historian Vilhelm Moberg’s four-novel series, stages Robert’s stories as a kind of experimental film-within-the-film, shooting primarily with unsteady handheld cameras, intercutting frames to produce a hypnotic, surreal effect, and eliminating all dialogue in favor of a strange, percussive jazz score by Georg Oddner. The effect is alternately fascinating and nightmarish, with the overall impact being profoundly tragic.

Tragedy is writ large in The New Land, as The Emigrants’ closing shot of Karl Oskar resting beneath a beautiful tree after having staked his claim to a perfect piece of land—the literal embodiment of all he and his family had suffered to attain—is deeply complicated by the hardships involved in forging a new life from untrammeled nature in the raw. There is the literal, physically backbreaking work of clearing land, building houses and barns, supplying food, and earning money to buy necessities. One of the film’s most memorable scenes finds Karl Oskar and his young son caught in a sudden snowstorm while plowing, which forces the father to slaughter the family’s ox and gut it to provide a place of safety for his child. It is a grand, visceral moment in which a father is willing to do literally anything to protect his child (the ox, after all, is not just an animal, but an absolute necessity for their survival as farmers, and its loss will be felt). In addition to the physical work, there is also the cultural work of assimilating into a new social order that moves differently, holds different values, and speaks different languages. The New Land is not so much a rebuke to the ideal of America as a cultural melting pot as it is testament to the fact that the melting and merging of cultures is a long, difficult, sometimes ungainly process that, in the end, produces “Americans,” but Americans of many different stripes.

The film also grapples with the place of Native Americans in a rapidly changing landscape, particularly the Sioux, who had been forcibly relocated to Minnesota, only to find the U.S. government selling parcels of their land to the new settlers like Karl Oskar and his family. Troell is clearly sympathetic to the Sioux’s plight, and they are depicted primarily as people who have been dragged against their will to the lowest levels of existence, forced to subsist in ways that are frequently beneath their dignity. Karl Oskar and the other white settlers are generally friendly to them and share resources, but events eventually transpire that result in gruesome bloodshed. Troell, a deeply poetic filmmaker who is able to express depths of feeling and thought with images as simple as hands working on a bowl, seems somewhat uncomfortable with the violence, and some of it is staged and shot with an awkwardness that undermines its visceral impact. Aside from one disturbing shock cut, the moments of outright violence feel decidedly out of step with the film’s better, more intimate scenes.

“Intimate” is a good word to describe both The New Land and The Emigrants, as Troell is able to bring us deep into the lived experiences of his characters while also maintaining the epic scope of their physical and existential journey. The combined running time of the two films is immense—more than six and a half hours—but the investment is worth it because Troell uses every minute to enhance our empathy with all the characters, even those who are at odds. He is not afraid to depict good people acting badly or to show empathy for those who are seemingly undeserving. Troell is a profoundly humane director, and his feeling for character and environment is what makes these two films so powerful in their depiction of the immigrant experience, something that is fundamental to the history of human society and, as we see today, prone to simplistic generalizations and demonic politicizing. Troell shows us the human face of the ordeal, balancing tragedy with comedy and intimacy with scope in a way that few filmmakers have accomplished.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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