Journal of Scandinavian Cinema - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2021

Jan Troell’s Sagolandet (Land of Dreams) (1988) presents itself as a documentary about 1980s Swedish society, but is also a film about filmmaking, the imagination, memory and autobiography. The film has multiple narrative levels: interviews, home movie footage, autobiographical anecdotes and imaginative sequences. Commentary and guiding themes are drawn from the theories of psychoanalyst Rollo May. These strata and themes have associated musical motifs and/or sound effects, which, as the film progresses, serve as an ontological bridge between the different strata. Land of Dreams is structured as both a multistrand and multiform narrative with the intercutting of multiple stories with multiple protagonists (multistrand) mixed with dream worlds and internal-subjective perspectives of Troell (multiform). The different narrative strata invite metalepsis, a type of narrative ‘transgression’ that occurs across the boundaries of distinct narrative worlds. In Land of Dreams, voice, music and sound effects act as metaleptic agents, transgressing different strata through four interrelated techniques: (1) metaleptic ‘i-voices’; (2) musical structures made up of ironic and disjunctive musical textures; (3) musical motifs transgressing narrative and ontological boundaries and (4) musical metaleptic warps. Musical metalepsis in Land of Dreams functions in a way that is emblematic of how political decisions and public policy infiltrate the private sphere, human consciousness and even dreams of the future.

The article features an interview with Copenhagen-based filmmakers Marianne Hougen-Moraga and Estephan Wagner, directors of Songs of Repression (2020), the latest documentary film to tackle Colonia Dignidad, a sectarian German enclave founded in Chile in 1961. The dialogue revolves around the film, but it also illuminates some general problems documentarians must face when encountering trauma, among them ethical responsibilities towards protagonists and narrative strategies to employ. The interview is preceded by an introduction that sketches background information on the notorious colony, explains how the film originated, examines the role of music – a central motif of the film – for Colonia’s functioning and situates the work in a wider context of documentaries that confront human rights abuses. The political, religious and moral complexities of Colonia Dignidad are salient because they point to the way the inadequacy or total absence of processes of redress and reconciliation may ultimately prompt the re-emergence or re-establishment of sinister practices.

Anne Sewitsky’s biopic Sonja (Sonja: The White Swan) (2018) is an example of authorial intervention that prioritizes a character-centred narrative rather than historical context. The article focuses on the musical score and the contemporary pop songs that contribute to building the psychological–emotional portrait of Norwegian-born Sonja Henie, champion figure skater and Hollywood star. In Sewitsky’s narrative strategy, non-diegetic music, sometimes deployed anachronistically, is used both to comment on the protagonist’s motivations and behaviour and to express her inner states of mind. By foregrounding Henie’s psyche through music, the film balances her negative and positive sides and presents her as complex and sometimes contradictory individual.