[1972] The Emigrants

I still have no idea where Småland is without looking at a map, and even when I do, it’s not immediately obvious what I’m looking at. I’m told it’s an historical province located in the Southwest of modern-day Sweden. I’m also told that provinces have no administrative functions but serve as cultural heuristics for fellow countryfolk. Outside Småland, Swedes have certain opinions of Smålandians. Folks who live in Jönköping and beyond, or whose heritage emanates from the adjectives that describe its place, Småland is something else. It really makes one think about what’s important when it comes to identity and place. I’m curious if assumptions from 50, 100, 200 years ago still hold. Which brings us to place, identity and otherhood in 1971’s The Emigrants: American critics saw enough in this movie to nominate it for Best Picture even though I’m sure most of them couldn’t pick out Småland on a map, let alone Chisago County, where our characters wound up after a very long journey. (To them and, at over 3 hours, to us.)

It’s curious because, to this point, the Academy hadn’t paid very much attention to non-English speaking film, outside Best Foreign Language film. In 41 years up to the 1971 awards, The Emigrants was only the 3rd non-English film to grab a nomination: Z in 1969 and La Grand Illusion in 1937, and still one of only 13 ever. The trajectory of The Emigrants and its language-successor, Cries & Whispers feels very “anointing the other,” in a quest to promote diversity. This pattern was self-indulgent and short-lived: the next foreign-language film to earn a Best Picture nomination was 1995’s Il Postino and 2019’s Parasite was the first foreign-language winner. What do these examples prove? Very little, except that if we look even a little bit outside American cinema, there’s dozens of other countries’ film industries to dig into, which all have incredible origin stories. The theory of American film exceptionalism is more a story of quantity over quality.

[1973] Cries and Whispers

There’s enough copy out there about how Ingmar Bergman drenched his feature, Cries and Whispers in red (röd). He chose red (especially after the majority of his earlier work was monochrome) for its striking visuals, color theory, and connection to Swedish history. If nothing else, in Sweden a specific red, Falu Rödfärg, colors a significant number of buildings, especially in the countryside. Red, across cultures, symbolizes passion, lust, desire, etc. It’s also the least visible of the color spectrum, so I’ll offer that Bergman chose to oversaturate the film with it to stand it out. It’s the first thing you’ll notice about this movie.

That’s really all there is to say about the color red and Cries and Whispers. There’s lots of scholarship about it. That’s enough.

The not-so-secret fact about the Oscars is their Americanness: of the 566 films to ever have been nominated, 12 have been filmed in a language other than English. This isn’t surprising–the Academy voters are mostly native English speakers, American audiences overwhelmingly see movies performed in English, and despite the premise that the Oscar winner should best represent the gestalt of the year, what we really mean is the zeitgeist of American culture. The road to global reach is unpaved, likely, but we’d like to think that language is the one phenomenon we can overcome; there are subtitles.

But alas, Cries and Whispers was the last Swedish movie to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture (but not first! “The Emigrants” was nominated just a year earlier. The Emigrants, however wasn’t wholly Swedish, either. It’s a Swedish-rooted story about America).

Swedish, as a language, is sort of bonkers to decipher, and nagging to the native English speaker because of its Germanic roots and bouncy gait. Its structure, like any language spoken by millions of people, follows a pattern, and there’s more than a few cognates. But there’s still great distance between Swedish and English, and it’s an effective barrier between the two cultures. Cries and Whispers is incredibly Swedish, incredibly Bergman, but also full of universal tones ahead of their time: the quiet tragedy of women.