By Robert St. Martin
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/16/23 – On Saturday at Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills, the Scandinavian Film Festival Los Angeles opened with a number of films, including Margreth Olin’s “Songs of Earth” (Norway, 2022), a splendid visual documentary about her own elderly parents and their appreciation of life in the Oldendalen Fjord in Norway.
Produced by Liv Ullman and Wim Wenders, this documentary is a unique tapestry of sound and image as Olin traverses the Norwegian landscape with her 82-year-old father Jørgen Mykløen in “Songs of Earth.”
Our journey through this rugged landscape in numerous sweeping aerial shots, which combine with close-up observation of flora and fauna to inspire a real sense of awe, is accompanied by orchestral songs based on the sounds of nature in Nordfjord. The film is Norway’s submission to the 2024 Oscars for consideration for Best International Feature Film.
The experience of watching the film – best described as a cross between a tone poem to a vast and imposing landscape and a meticulously photographed natural history documentary one might see from the BBC (who partially funded the film) – lived up to Olin’s assertion.
More than just a pleasant, atmospheric exploration of place and home, “Songs of Earth” doesn’t shy away from excavating history for its trauma. Neither adversaries nor victims, Olin places her family and home within a long lineage of survivors of, and bystanders to, the power of earth’s forces.
“Songs of Earth” finds an unorthodox way to consider them when Jorgen has lived long enough to see glaciers recede and landslides threaten and overtake the farms below. His longevity is surely admirable, but it also means he’s had to develop a thicker skin to deal with considerable loss.
Olin draws a sharp parallel with the terrain he treads, capturing the ways in which nature protects itself and wondering about what the earth can withstand as Jurgen’s own mortality is in question simply because of his age.
The film gets under the skin as well with Rebekka Kariford’s soul-stirring score and the care in which cinematographer Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo and drone photographers Herman Lersveen and Dag Asle Mykløen compose images that express how alive the landscape is, whether peeking over the top of a waterfall or pulling ice shelves into the deep focus where one can begin to see how fluid movement is within them, arousing all the senses when you can hear every pop and crackle in the intricate sound design.
Moving through the four seasons from spring to winter, there is the feeling that the ground is always shifting beneath one’s feet, but Olin affords the precious opportunity to stand still and take things in, entranced by the majesty of nature and all too conscious of its transience.
While “Songs of Earth” offer picturesque views of Norwegian fjords, stunningly captured in aerial drone shots by Lersveen and Mykløen, the film underscores nature’s might. The film tells of the Tafjord landslide of 1934 that devastated villages. Archival images show the destruction that occurred when the cliffs of Langhammaren Mountain collapsed and caused a tidal wave that razed homes and buried villagers. 40 people died, the film tells, and underwater shots observe an eerie graveyard – a literal ghost town – that endures beneath the water’s surface.
As Jørgen treks through the countryside, Olin tells how her father offered walks instead of fairytales. The moral here is that Jørgen taught his daughter to learn from her surroundings, rather than through fantastical fables. It’s through this keen relationship with the natural elements that Olin constructs an awesomely cinematic environmental fable: the glaciers are in retreat and nature is becoming more volatile. These disasters, nature advises, will happen again.
The father of director Margreth Olin describes in voiceover the corrective surgery he had on his feet as a child. It turns out that Jørgen, a prolific nomad, was born with his feet backwards. His heels pointed forward and his toes rearward.
However, the 84-year-old wanderer invigoratingly tells of the joy he felt after putting one foot forward after the next, defying the gods, nature, and fate with the life-changing cadence of heel-toe-heel-toe. Jørgen has many loves as his daughter shows in this sumptuous portrait, but his greatest affection might be for the simple action that too many of us take for granted.
These inevitable sadnesses of the human condition are compounded by a growing awareness of the climate crisis and brought into urgent focus by her parents’ advancing years. Olin has come home after several decades to spend time with her father, who is now an octogenarian, and unravel more of who he is while she still has a chance to talk frankly with him.
He takes her to Oldedalen, in the valley where he grew up and the family lived for many generations, battling to survive in an overwhelming environment of mountains and fjords that is as treacherous as it is magnificent and subject through the ages to fatal avalanches and landslides.
We begin to understand along with her that the urge h connect to a lasting family legacy feels especially raw and acute, even at times futile, in a natural world as immense and rapidly changing as this one.
The creaking of glacier ice as it fractures and breaks up is a sound that we hear intermittently in the film like a disquieting refrain, as the silence is cut through with the realization that this stupendous whiteness is not going to last. The waterfall that streams from the melting glacier has never been as big as it is now – a terrible indication, we can assume, that the climate crisis is altering the landscape that the family has defined themselves upon for centuries beyond recognition.
The glacier is dying, in short, and the underlying grief this brings to the superficially awe-inspiring vistas mixes with Olin’s recognition that the death of her parents cannot be far off. Her mother and father, who she films talking with each other in their living room, are very matter-of-fact about the pending reality of loss, as they debate who should preferably die first to leave the least loneliness in their wake for the surviving partne