Word: troell
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...Troell as a filmmaker has made himself responsible in the highest degree for every bit of preparation that sets a movie scene and all the film mechanics that go on afterward. People are his prime resource. He rediscovers the diversity of individual reactions to common social experience--something few directors have achieved since the height of Satyajit Ray's artistry and the works of the better Italian neo-realists. Troell's people move with the same apparent integrity as any in Devt or Open City. All that occasionally mars our complete perception of their actions is Erik Nordgren's music...
...Troell has also rediscovered some commonsense film knowledge with which the best filmmakers have always worked and which even most critics have forgotten. Stylization in film form is useful only if it is sustained by a complex narrative (Vigo and Eisenstein knew this. Anderson and Kubrick don't. When deliberately artificial means find their way into the telling of a film story which is rooted in veristic detail (as in lesser New Wave films, or those by such American ex-TV directors as John Frankenheimer and Sidney Lumet), the result is chaos. The film medium, integrating elements of every...
...EMIGRANTS is one of the great films that not only succeeds on its own terms, but could persuade new filmmakers to work according to its standards. It is the freshest film l've seen since Bergman's Passion of Anna--perhaps because writer director photographer-editor Jan Troell believes in examining human responsibility on his social scale as Bergman does on his less expansive but more involved psychological one. Troell and Bergman are not enthralled by suffering, but they know its depths and believe that their characters can take it. It is a rare enough attitude in the twentieth century...
...same criteria. Troell, in this single story from a larger epic we are promised he'll continue, has put together the most effective film in years to be based on the shared life of a social group. The films that usually get the kudos in this category are dreary affairs like Going Down the Road and Fat City, which reduce people coerced into drudgery into pitiable misfits, driven by brute biological urges and inchoate longings for a better way. (The directors are also inappropriately general because of their mistrust of the subject matter. They milk our sympathy with occasional gropes...
...rigorously simple and familiar saga, The Emigrants is made eloquent through the tone and the telling. Director Jan Troell gives life and substance to what Willa Cather called "the precious, the incommunicable past." Indeed, at its best, The Emigrants has the same feeling for landscape and incident (a man proud of a pair of new black boots, a death and burial at sea) that glistens in Cather's best work...