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A Stopover in the Marshland

Uppehåll i myrlandet

dir. Jan Troell / Sweden 1965 / 30’

subtitles: Polish and English

retrospective: Jan Troell 92,8 MhZ, A Stopover in the Marshland, As White as in Snow, Dancing, Everlasting Moments of Maria Larsson, Hamsun, Here’s Your Life, Il Capitano, Johan Ekberg, Land of Dreams, Love 60+, Peeping Tom, Potrait of Åsa, Presence, Reflexion 2001, Summer Train, The Emigrants, The Flight of the Eagle, The New Land, The Old Mill, The Ship, The Snail, Their Frozen Dream, Town, Troell’s Magic Mirror, Tune, Who Saw Him Die?, Yellow Tag Section index

Cast

Max von Sydow, Allan Edwall, Karl Erik Flens

Film description

The first professional film made by Jan Troell, the Swedish part of the Scandinavian cinema novella entitled: 4 x 4. This was an adaptation of a short story by the Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson and it was honoured by the presence of Max von Sydow, who played the main role. From this time on, von Sydow was not only Bergman's favourite actor, but Troell's as well. A story about a railwayman who one day has a whim to leave his train at a deserted station and walk along the tracks to enjoy the cheerful feeling of freedom. But it soon turns out that the trip's real goal is a huge rock. The railwayman throws it down a hill just to experience a moment of beautiful ecstasy. After this selfless effort, he returns to the monotony of his everyday life.

The railwayman's spontaneous gesture reflected an individual's rebellion against the routine of life subjected to spiritless discipline with no place for imagination, freedom, romanticism, poetry of life, admiration of the beauty of nature or desire to change one's fate, at least for a while.

A Stopover in the Marshland touches on the motifs that would be essential for Troell's later works.

Tadeusz Szczepański