The New Land (Nybyggarna). Jan Troell, 1972.
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Edition screened: Criterion Blu-ray #797 and packaged with The Emigrants #796, released 2016. Swedish language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 202 minutes.
Summary: Animal slaughter.
Details:
1) Robert brings home a rabbit he has caught and killed, 7:26-7:31. (Not a graphic depiction.)
2) Both The New Land and The Emigrants have occasional scenes of fish butchering and cleaning. Most are typical kitchen action, but a particularly gory scene occurs here, 25:00-25:32.
3) An ox is murdered by blows to the head, then slit open as a means to warm a freezing child, 1:19:16-2:48:25.
4) Goose slaughter and butchering, 2:47:43-2:48:25.
Many themes are explored during six-and-a-half magnificent hours of these two films. One motif, if a viewer cares to notice, is that people’s fates can mirror their treatment of animals. The Emigrants introduces the grandest presentation of this idea early in the film when young Robert is appropriately guilt-ridden for the cruel drowning of his cat. Years later he remorses that the animal suffered and wonders if he can be forgiven. No, in fact. Robert suffers the rest of his life from excruciating nerve damage and recurrently endures the cruel fate of The Fool. Most overtly at the end of The New Land, we see a goose that has been butchered by a gash to the neck, and the next scene is a human-on-human attack in which a man is shot through the neck. He falls and grasps at the plucked goose feathers to try to stop the blood that gushes from his wound.
I do not think Troell intends a strong tit-for-tat message about animal cruelty. It is more just an aspect of very good writing, to help express the larger theme of human interaction in the larger world. Early in The Emigrants Robert has a small textbook about Natural History, given to him by an elder who explained that natural history contains all the wisdom that need be known. Robert reads to his family an example passage that limply explains how water, like wine and blood, cannot be grasped in the hands because those things are “wet”. The Swedish family and friends that we follow for 60-odd years across the Atlantic Ocean and most of North America never make much progress in understanding the natural world.
The inability to work with nature, or the lack of flexibility to rebound from the blows nature deals us all, is their recurring downfall. Sometimes the incidents are beyond the family’s control and are appropriate reminders to us all: Despite years of body-crushing labor to remove massive stones from your field, you will break your delicate wooden plow on a barely-submerged boulder. Other times their stupidity and stubbornness is their own undoing, as with the continual pregnancies despite their poverty and warnings by a doctor of the mother’s fragility.
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