The New Land

I watched this the day after watching The Emigrants. They're really one film cut into two very long halves. I suppose Kill Bill 2 also is a standalone movie, but no one would recommend seeing only that and not watching Kill Bill 1. It's the same for The Emigrants and The New Land. Certain relationships in this movie only have power because of the backstory found in The Emigrants, such as Robert and Arvid's close friendship, why Kristina is so attached to Kristina despite religious differences, and even why Uncle Danjel is relevant.

The cinematography in this film felt more jarring and experimental, particularly with respect to Robert's trip out west. The movie is incredibly long and drawn out, and the timeline can be hard to pinpoint. An hour may be spent on days or weeks and then years suddenly pass between camera cuts.

This film does excel at showing both the impact of loss and how commonplace death was on the frontier. Danger never was far away, and seemingly distant occurrences suddenly could have local impact, whether the Civil War or strife with the Indian tribes. The New Land a pretty good film, but it suffers even more so than The Emigrants from overlength and without quite as much punch.

"The New Land" is the second half of a story started in Troell's "The Emigrants," which depicted the struggles of a band of Swedish peasants in their move to America. Here, several of the settlers- such as the priest and the prostitute- move away in the first half-hour and reappear here and there throughout the rest of the film. The plot focuses on Karl-Oscar, his wife Kristina, and the family they try to raise in the Minnesota wilderness.

Von Sydow and Ullmann are given a chance to embellish on their characters, and they both do excellent work. Axberg also does a fine job of lending more depth to the character of Robert, Karl-Oscar's rebellious younger brother. There is also material worked in that examines the mistreatment (and eventual uprising) of local Native Americans and the futile searches for gold in the north. These other elements do not always seem to fit with the central story, but they effectively add to the sense of time and place anyway.

"The New Land" does not have the same emotional impact that "The Emigrants" had, but it develops the two central characters more and intelligently explores how they learn to adapt to their new life. Put together, these two films convincingly illustrate the plight of those who forged our frontier.

This is an extraordinary film, which I gave 10 out of 10 even if Warner Brothers, the film's theatrical distributor, cut the film in half for its American release. If ever this film (and its predecessor, "The Emigrants") makes it to DVD, I sincerely hope those 102 minutes are restored, so that I can at last see the film that Jan Troell intended for me to see.

As it looks on video, "The New Land" is still magnificent - its depiction of Swedish immigrants settling in frontier Minnesota outdoing every Western ever made. Be sure to look for the scene that George Lucas stole wholesale where Max von Sydow slaughters an ox and places his freezing son inside it during a snowstorm.

"The New Land" finishes the story begun in Jan Troell's "The Emigrants," which was released the year before. It's a longer and bleaker film. "The Emigrants" was harsh, but at least in that film the people making the arduous journey to America had the promise of all that America had to offer (or at least what they thought it had to offer) to get them through the tribulations. But in "The New Land," they've settled into that life, and their new home proves not to be the utopia they dreamed.

It's astonishing how authentic these films feel, and it's hard to remember while watching them that they were made in the early 1970s. "The New Land" has some really difficult passages to watch, namely one involving the murder of a settler family at the hands of a gang of Native Americans -- including the horrific death of a baby -- and another an extended segment that details the nightmarish fever dream of a journey two of the settlers take to mine for gold in California. This story line started to feel long to me, and in a film that clocks in at nearly three and a half hours I wouldn't have minded this one being left on the cutting room floor. But it doesn't mar the overall brilliance of this film as a stand alone story, or the entire two-film saga.

And unlike "The Emigrants," which I only found in a dubbed version, "The New Land" is subtitled in English, which makes for a much more pleasant viewing experience.

"The New Land" was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1972 Academy Awards, in the same year that "The Emigrants" was nominated in four categories, including Best Picture.

Grade: A

In 2016 after years of waiting, Criterion Collection has released this two-part epic in Blu-Ray and standard DVD. For fullest effect, the two segments should be played as in the original, theatrical release: "The Emigrants" entirely in Swedish (with English subtitles), "The New Land" in English. It is in itself quite an achievement that the cast of both is virtually identical yet are competent in the new and old languages. Scandinavian immigrants to the Minnesota Territory in the 1850's--before the US Civil War-- found conditions both familiar and alien. The cold climate was like their native land but the soil of the New World was more fertile and not so stony. It was a place of open spaces and vast pine forests, few towns and no cities to compare with Stockholm or Oslo.

In the story, friendships are tested, some broken over issues of religion. Family life isn't always smooth or predictable. There are generational conflicts. Historical events are alluded to such as the Civil War or depicted, if briefly, like the 1862 uprising of the Eastern Sioux, starving on their Minnesota reservation, with deadly attacks on surrounding settlements until put down by the US Army. Yet the Indian side of the conflict is given play, also, with the emigrants coming to understand that The New Land had belonged to others before them.