Director Jan Troell on the
set of Here’s Your Life (Här har du ditt
liv), 1966
HERE’S YOUR LIFE (Här har du ditt liv) A
Sweden (169 mi) 1966
d: Jan Troell
A beautiful example of a young filmmaker’s first feature film,
though Troell was 27-years of age at the time, but he’s also the
cinematographer, the editor, and the co-writer of the screenplay along with Bengst
Forslund, adapting the second semi-autobiographical novel Romanen om Olof (A Novel of Olof) in a series of four novels by
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Eyvind Johnson.
The film has a greater reputation in Sweden where the epic three-hour
drama was originally seen on Swedish television and was immediately pronounced
a masterpiece, with Ingmar Bergman calling it “one of the uncompromising
masterpieces of Swedish film history,” a searingly realistic coming-of-age drama
of a young 14-year old working class boy Olof Persson (Eddie Axberg) as he
grows up in a small village of Norrland province in the north of Sweden during
the First World War. Winning the Gold
Hugo for Best Film and another for Best Director at the Chicago Film Festival
in 1967, the film was cut considerably for the American release a year later, cutting
as much as an hour, which is unthinkable, where the film has rarely been seen
in its full version outside Sweden. Born
in Malmö, Troell worked professionally as a teacher in a Malmö school for nine
years, while at the same time making amateur movies. His film career started with television,
making educational films and shorts for children before working as a
cinematographer on several Bo Widerberg films.
What’s immediately striking is his visual style, obviously influenced by
the French New Wave, using freeze frames, jump cuts, changes of speed, and
spectacular location shots, as the sparsely populated Norrland province is
known for wide forests, large rivers and untouched wilderness. Opening with several different freeze frames
of a bird in flight, the film follows the journey of a young boy who is about
to leave the hospitality of another family to return home to see his sick
father. As the family can’t afford to
provide for him at home, Max von Sydow plays a friend of his father who helps find
him a job and a place to live in a remote lumber mill, where the intimate
portrait of these veteran workers is startling, seen hauling around trees in
the snow in preparation for the industrial saw.
Shot in black and white, these early close-up shots of workers
performing their jobs in the immensity of the natural splendor all around them
are among the best sequences in the film, reminiscent of Alexander Dovzhenko’s
EARTH (1930), one of the most impressive films of the Soviet era, a film that
pays tribute to peasants working in the fields, elevating their work to a kind
of cinematic high art.
After an even younger boy gets killed in an unfortunate
accident at the mill, Olof develops some deep-seeded resentments against the
indifference of the owner of the plant, who expects the men to get back to work
afterwards as if nothing has happened, telling them in the most patronizing
manner that they ought to be more careful, never once acknowledging that the
worker killed was only a child.
Eventually Olof gives the owner a piece of his mind and sets off for the
city, where he meets Lundgren, Bergman actor Gunnar Björnstrand, who runs a
movie house, hiring Olof to sell candy and bon-bons to theater customers while
also pasting up flyers around town of upcoming events. Here he’s able to wander around town and get
into discussions about the role of the working man in society, where one
amusing point of view is that workers are better off uneducated, as the more
educated they are the more likely they’ll turn into socialists. Olof is seen reading at every available
opportunity and becomes a devout believer in worker’s rights, where one of the
more intriguing shots is his first march in a May Day parade, where the rousing
music played interesting enough was La
Marseillaise, France National
Anthem - La Marseillaise (Instrumental YouTube (1:19), signifying an end to
war in Europe. Sweden was subjected to
food shortages and severe economic hardships during the war, as the Allied
forces blocked trade with Germany, one of their largest trading partners, a
situation that only grew worse when the United States entered the war and
utilized submarines. The visible
deprivation seen throughout the land is one of the unforgettable aspects of the
film, where there is no discussion about the family turning away Olof during
hard times—it is simply a fact of life. At
14, he is expected to drop out of school and earn his keep as an adult, even
though it’s clear he’s still a child.
Still working for Lundgren, he’s again taken under the wing of another
eccentric character, Nicke Larsson (Ulf Palme), who’s like an old sailor back
on the high seas as they go on the road together projecting hand-cranked movies
in small towns, where they actually have to light the lamp of the projector,
but audiences are shocked by what they see on the screen, from newsreels to
melodramas, where they are brought to tears by some of the stories. Olof is more shocked by Olivia (Ulla
Sjoblom), one of Larsson’s sultry old flames working in a circus shooting
gallery, who takes on the characteristics of a Fellini woman that young men are
expected to have their first sexual experiences with. But rather than be goaded into it, Olof
passes, but doesn’t forget, as he returns to her again much later under
different circumstances as her business partner.
Instead he’s back on the road again, this time working for a
blacksmith who has beautiful sirenesque daughters at home, where Olof decides
to tell them he’s on vacation, as this seems like an idyllic paradise to any
young boy. It’s here that he has his first
sexual encounter, frolicking in the woods free as a bird, INSTANTES: Här har du ditt
liv aka Here's Your Life (1966 ... YouTube (3:07), where he’s quickly on
his way again afterwards. Reading Homer’s
Odysseus, Olof’s life is another
episodic journey from one adventure to another, where the people he encounters
along the way are fully written, broadly developed, world weary characters that
help him overcome his adolescent fears and develop his own worldly views, where
he grows from being a passive observer to an active participant, freely
expressing his views, all set in the bleak economic conditions of the
times. Often playful and humorous, with
a feeling of drifting through life, the film adds a deeper complexity when he
begins projecting early cinema shows, as his own journey parallels the birth of
cinema, where the vintage clips couldn’t be more fascinating and are
beautifully integrated into his young life.
Using abrupt mood shifts, some of his own flashback thoughts are
rendered in color, while that bird in flight becomes an animated image that
follows him on his journey, where perhaps the most prominent visual theme is
the impressive scenic beauty, where the unique splendor of the natural environment
covered by a blanket of snow can be breathtaking. Unlike the populated cities of the south,
there is a harsh realty in the rugged, individualistic work ethic that each man
must confront in the north, as this test is traditionally how a man measures up
in society. Olof’s propensity for
reading and educating himself however helps him make the progression to a more
independent thinker, whose view of man transcends brute physical labor, where
his sense of societal injustice forms his political and social consciousness,
where a man’s value is ultimately based on what he can contribute to social
change. Carrying cinema as his message,
Olof’s future is wide open as the road ahead of him is surrounded by the most
incredible expanse of unexplored wilderness.
