Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The New Land
1972 · Jan Troell · The New Land on Sightlines
Start with a cabin at night. There is one flame, and around it a darkness Jan Troell makes no attempt to fix. You can barely see Kristina's face. Outside there is wind, and in the morning the axe will start again. Most period epics would light this room so we could admire the carpentry. Troell lights it the way it was actually lit, which means we have to lean in and let our eyes adjust, the way the people inside it had to.
That leaning-in is the whole film. The New Land continues the story that began in The Emigrants: Karl Oskar and Kristina, Swedish peasants, now on a Minnesota homestead, with the old country behind them and nothing in front but ground to break. Troell shot it himself, edited it himself, and co-wrote it, and you can feel one pair of hands on every frame. The camera is often handheld or loosely supported. It drifts, then settles. Long lenses watch faces from a distance, so the actors seem caught rather than performing. Max von Sydow plays Karl Oskar as a man who meets every difficulty with more work, and whose feeling shows up as stillness. Liv Ullmann plays Kristina as homesick and devout, holding on through her faith to a country she can no longer see.
On paper this is a Western. There is a frontier, a gold rush, and the U.S.–Dakota War of 1862. Here Gilles Deleuze turns out to be a useful companion, because for him the Western was the purest case of what he called the action-image. That is cinema built on a simple circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation. In its large form, a whole milieu, the desert or the town or the territory, surrounds the hero and presses on him until he takes a decisive act. Deleuze's name for that surrounding, pressing world is the synsign, the encompassing situation that calls action forth.
The New Land keeps the synsign and throws away the duel. The prairie is everywhere, flat and huge, buried in snow, bursting into a short green summer. It presses on these people constantly. But nobody answers it with a gunfight or a stand. They answer it with chores. Clearing land, raising walls, bearing children, planting the apple seeds carried over from Sweden. The milieu doesn't call for one decisive act. It calls for the same act every day, for years, and the film's drama lives in that repetition.
This is where the film moves toward what Deleuze called a cinema of the body. In that cinema, the body's postures and daily gestures carry time; we read duration off a back bent over a plow, off hands that know a tool. Troell stages labor with what you could call a dignified monotony, and his editing makes it carry time. Years of homesteading can pass in a few cuts of seasonal work. Then a single passage of ordinary life is allowed to run past the point where its plot job is done. That surplus is what Deleuze calls dead time: the stretch where nothing advances the story and the everyday is simply held. A Hollywood editor would trim it. Troell keeps it in, and the texture of a life, rather than its incidents, becomes the subject.
The film is not a pure time-image, and it shouldn't be described as one. Karl Oskar acts all the time. What breaks down is the link between action and history. The gold rush pulls his brother Robert west. The Dakota War breaks into the territory. These events reach the family without ever becoming the family's story. Deleuze describes a crisis of the action-image in which big situations no longer connect to the people living inside them, and the links between events slacken. Troell films the war with the same plain specificity he gives a kitchen. History doesn't arrive as pageant. It arrives the way weather does, as something that happens to you while the real work goes on.
The long lenses add one more layer. Troell often isolates a face against a softened field, and in those shots we are close to what Deleuze calls the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face but not yet turned into action. Von Sydow is ideal for this. His Karl Oskar doesn't explain himself. The emotion sits in his jaw and in his eyes, and the telephoto distance keeps us respectful and watching, never prying.
To place this in film theory, the obvious name is André Bazin, who argued that cinema's power lay in respecting real duration and real space rather than chopping them up for effect. The film's ancestors make the debt clear. Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North restaged real subsistence work, building shelter and hunting, so that a way of life could take dramatic shape without a conventional plot. Troell's homestead scenes inherit that method directly. Dovzhenko's Earth treated soil, harvest and bodily toil as the story itself. Visconti's La Terra Trema, a film Bazin championed, let the rhythm of a fishing economy set its tempo. Closer to home, Arne Sucksdorff's The Great Adventure gave Troell the Swedish habit of patient telephoto watching of nature and the seasons, half documentary and half fiction. And Bergman's Winter Light, shot by Sven Nykvist in available light with von Sydow's restrained, near-wordless playing, taught the house style these lead performances carry. The Emigrants, shot in the same long production, is less a predecessor than the first half of the same body. Watch them as one work in two movements.
What Troell did to the Western was turn it inside out. The genre's classic form tells conquest from the hero's saddle, as destiny. Troell tells settlement from the laborer's cabin, as a hard bargain, and declines to frame the Dakota War as savagery against civilization. He came to this from the outside, a Swede adapting Vilhelm Moberg's beloved novels, and that outsider angle let him see what the American form had trained itself not to see: that settling a land is mostly waiting, working, enduring, and missing somewhere else.
So here is the question to carry into the film. When the decisive act never comes, where does the meaning go? Watch the hands. Watch how long Troell lets a season last. Wait for your eyes to adjust in that dark cabin, and notice how much of the story is happening in the time between events.
Concepts in play
- the encompasser (synsign) — The flat, immense prairie, the burden of snow and the short northern summer press on the settlers as dramatic forces, but they call forth daily labor instead of a decisive act
- cinema of the body (attitudes & postures) — Staging grounded in physical labor: clearing land, raising walls, birthing children. Drama emerges from tasks rather than declarations, composed for the dignity and monotony of work
- dead time (temps mort) — Troell's editing lets scenes breathe past their plot function, so the texture of a life rather than its incidents becomes the subject
- crisis of the action-image — The gold rush and the Dakota War intrude on the family without ever becoming the family's story. History arrives as lived experience rather than pageant, staged with the same unglamorous specificity as a domestic interior
- affection-image — Telephoto compositions isolate a face against a softened field. Von Sydow's Karl Oskar registers feeling as stillness, caught by an observational camera rather than delivered