Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Emigrants
1971 · Jan Troell · The Emigrants on Sightlines
Troell keeps going back to hands. Hands in the thin soil of a Småland field, hands breaking bread, hands on a rope, hands laid against a face in the dark of a turf-roofed cottage. He held the camera himself, and you can feel him drift in toward the work being done, as though the drama sat in the wrists rather than in anybody's decision. Three hours of this. Sweden's own founding story, the million-plus who left, and the film spends it watching people handle things.
That is the invention, and it comes from one man doing two jobs. Troell photographed The Emigrants and cut it. Eye and tempo are a single sensibility, trained in documentary and short film before he took on Moberg's novels. Most epics are assembled by someone organizing events. This one was assembled by the person who stood in the cold while it happened, which is why its rhythm follows a body's attention instead of a plot's.
Deleuze has a name for what that produces. Late in his second cinema book he describes films that stop putting time into the story and start putting it into postures — attitudes, he calls them: how a person stands, waits, carries, sleeps sitting upright. Call it a cinema of the body. Normally we know time has passed because the situation changed; here you read time off the body itself, off what a winter of stones has done to a back. Von Sydow's Karl Oskar is built almost entirely this way. He is not eloquent about leaving. He is land-hungry and stubborn, and the performance is a set of physical refusals to be beaten.
Now the part the lens actually earns. Deleuze's first regime, the movement-image, runs on a circuit: a character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the world reorganizes around the act. The Western is its cleanest architecture. A vast encompassing milieu — he calls that encompasser a synsign — presses down on a man until he does one decisive thing, and the film breathes between the big country and the taut line of the duel.
The Emigrants is filed as a Western, and that is right, because it runs the machine backwards. It shows what manufactures a pioneer: rock-strewn fields, a failed harvest, a state church with no room for Kristina's dissenter uncle Danjel. The encompasser is fully present. What is missing is any decisive act inside it. You cannot out-duel the soil. This is the crisis of the action-image arriving in period dress: people who perceive their situation with total clarity and have no adequate response to it. Emigration is what is left when acting on the world is off the table. You don't fix the situation. You walk out of it.
And when they walk out, the film changes regime in front of you. The Atlantic crossing is Deleuze's pure optical and sound situation: nothing to do but look and listen. Steerage is a hold thick with bodies and sickness, and Troell shoots it as such, in candle-dark and available light, the track given over to wind, water, creaking timber, the noise of people being ill. Almost no score. When music refuses to tell you what to feel, duration does it instead. Ullmann's Kristina is the film's seer in Deleuze's exact sense: not an agent but a watcher and endurer, played through interiority and tiny physical registers, hurt more deeply by uprooting because she was the one who was rooted.
What holds those stretches is dead-time, temps mort, the passages where nothing advances. Troell's cutting is elliptical about events and patient about process. He drops connective tissue a plot would need and stays with monotony, and that choice is a claim about history: from inside, it is not a chain of decisions but weather you have to survive.
This puts him in a tradition. Bazin argued that some films earn their truth by refusing to carve the world into dramatic units, and the ancestor Bazin himself pointed to sits in Troell's family tree: Renoir's Toni, migrant labor filmed on real terrain with unglamorous faces. From Nanook of the North comes the processual survival epic, long respectful attention to the exact steps of staying alive — Troell's version is stones lifted out of a field. Sucksdorff's The Great Adventure gives him his literal method, the Swedish nature-documentary patience with seasons, animals and rural work in whatever light exists. Dovzhenko's Earth gives him soil as a moral force, which he secularizes into hunger. The Virgin Spring hands over von Sydow's interior stillness and the Nykvist-school trust in unadorned daylight on a face, pushed here from allegory toward document. Kazan's America America supplies the shape: an immigrant epic built as accumulation, hardship after hardship, all of it aimed at a gangway.
There is a Bergsonian point underneath this. Deleuze says cinema's real gift is that it samples the ordinary instant — the any-instant-whatever — where older arts posed the privileged, decisive one. The Western is a factory of privileged instants. Troell builds three hours almost entirely out of ordinary ones, anti-picturesque, trusting accumulation, letting the peaks come from illness, death and birth rather than from anyone's choice. He also keeps isolating single intensities for their own sake: soil, bread, skin, water. Not symbols. Qualities, held long enough to be felt.
And America? America is never in the frame. Deleuze separates the relative out-of-field, the room next door, from the absolute out-of-field, something beyond the image that cannot be located in space at all. For most of this film America is that — a rumor of abundance carried in letters and talk. Robert, the restless younger brother, believes it hardest, and he is fabulation in action: Deleuze's word for people caught in the act of legending themselves. A story moved a family across an ocean. Then Minnesota arrives, green and seemingly idyllic, and the film stops on a threshold instead of an ending. Its true heir is its own second half, The New Land, where the bill comes.
What did it do to film? It proved an epic could be made out of the wrong material. Not battles and turning points but stages, and inside the stages, labor — a trajectory linking places that have nothing to do with each other, a parish, a dock, a hold, a prairie, held together by nothing but a family moving along it. After this, a historical film can trust weather and hands to carry three hours, and can be shot and cut by one person standing in it.
Watch the hands. Then watch the places where nobody can act. The film doesn't treat them as dead spots. It treats them as where the time is kept.
Concepts in play
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — Characters are constantly shown at labor in authentic, confining spaces; von Sydow plays Karl Oskar as stubborn, inarticulate endurance rather than declaration, so duration registers in the body rather than in plot.
- crisis of the action-image — The Nilssons perceive their situation exactly — stony Småland soil, crop failure, hunger, religious intolerance — and no decisive act is available inside it; emigration is departure from the situation rather than transformation of it.
- the encompasser — The film's declared Western frame plus landscape treated as a moral and material force (rock-strewn fields, the vast indifferent ocean) sets up the classic encompassing milieu, then withholds the decisive act it normally calls forth.
- pure optical & sound situations — The squalid, deadly Atlantic crossing in a ship's hold thick with bodies and sickness, shot in available light with the track given to wind, water, creaking timber and shipboard misery, and almost no non-diegetic music.
- the seer (voyant) — Ullmann's Kristina, rooted in home, faith and belonging, works through interiority and small physical registers rather than declamation, enduring the uprooting rather than acting on it.
- dead-time (temps mort) — Patient, frequently elliptical cutting that holds on process and duration — the slow accretion of hardship, the monotony of the crossing — while eliding conventional connective tissue.
- any-instant-whatever — Anti-picturesque staging that trusts the accumulation of observed moments, with emotional climaxes emerging from endurance and loss (illness, death, birth) rather than from posed decisive beats.
- qualité-puissance (pure quality/intensity) — Troell repeatedly isolates physical detail — soil, bread, skin, water — presenting each as an intensity held for itself rather than as a plot token.
- out-of-field-absolute — The whole film is oriented toward the rumored abundance of North America, a place carried in talk rather than shown; arrival in Minnesota is staged as threshold, not resolution, with the settling reserved for The New Land.
- fabulation (legending) — Karl Oskar's restless younger brother Robert, the America-dreamer (Eddie Axberg), for whom the rumor of America is a story told about himself before it is a destination.
- vector (line of the universe) — The epic of stages — privation in Småland, the decision, the ocean crossing, the overland passage, arrival — links disconnected spaces by a single family's trajectory rather than by causal plot.