Arne Sucksdorff - Det stora aventyret aka The Great Adventure (1953)

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Plot Synopsis from AMG by Hal Erickson

Cited by many as the most "personal" effort of Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff, The Great Adventure is also one of his few films to tie together its magnificent images with a dramatic narrative. "Adventure" means "life" to Sucksdorff, and that life is experienced by a group of Swedish farm children, two of whom are played by the director's own sons. The kids save a wild otter from a hunter, then attempt to tame the animal. When spring comes, the children realize without remorse that the otter will be happier roaming free in the wilderness. That is all there is to The Great Adventure (Det stora aventyret), but it was so gorgeously photographed and sublimely assembled that it earned the "superior technique" award at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival.

Review from New York Times

The Great Adventure (1953)
May 24, 1955
Screen: Picture Poem; 'Great Adventure' Is Paean to Nature
By BOSLEY CROWTHER
Published: May 24, 1955

IT isn't very often that a critic can confidently say of a motion picture about nature that it is a masterpiece. But that unrestrained designation cannot fairly be withheld from Arne Sucksdorff's "The Great Adventure," which opened at the Paris yesterday.

This lovely and sensitive contemplation of the wild life that fittingly abounds in the woods, the ponds and the meadows surrounding a Swedish farm is essentially a poem in pictures, a symphony of moods evoked with visual stimulations, supplemented with music and words. And its eventual concentration upon a simple and natural tale of two lads who make a pet of an otter falls aptly and charmingly within the whole.

Mr. Sucksdorff, the brilliant Swedish artist who has been widely and properly acclaimed for such fresh and evocative short films as "Symphony of a City" and "Shadows on the Snow," has said that the theme of this feature is "man's relation to the lost paradise." But that is a complicated concept of what is basically a literal report on the cycles of nature, the seasons and the magical moods of little boys.

What Mr. Sucksdorff is showing in this beautifully photographed film, which begins with the dewy dawn of a spring day on a Swedish farm, is the eternal symmetry of nature, in its many and fascinating forms and in its endless rotations of behavior on the part of its creatures—and men.

The mother fox preys upon the hen coop to feed her hungry cubs. The farmer, protecting his living, preys upon the fox. The farmer's dog chases the fox cub that returns, as did its mother, to steal a hen. The lynx, waiting quietly in the forest, preys upon the unguarded dog. An old man abandons his ice fishing to chase a hungry otter across the frozen pond. A small boy rescues the otter and buys fish to keep it alive. When spring comes, the boy leaves his family to live with his pet in the woods. The otter leaves the boy to live with nature. So the rotations go.

This bare enumeration of the spirals does not begin to suggest the transcendent beauty of the images in which they are recounted and revealed. From close-ups of dew-spangled grass stalks to sparkling glimpses of animal tracks in the crystal snow, Mr. Sucksdorff shows us nature's details as though they were polished gems. And from fox cubs tumbling in their rock den to birds wheeling high in the sky, he puts the natural forms and rhythms of creatures on lyrical, breath-taking view.

His film, which is photographed entirely in the old standard black-and-white, has an almost symphonic arrangement of dramatic motifs and moods. As the farmer goes out to the woods, for instance, to dynamite the foxes' den, there comes, against the crowd of natural noises, the sound of jet planes in the sky, and the sight of birds moving in the treetops is counterpointed with views of vapor trails. Later, when the lad and his otter go off into the woods to be alone, the sound of the jets intrudes slightly as an ominous overtone.

Mr. Sucksdorff's original commentary, translated into beautiful English prose by J. MacLaren-Ross and narrated by Norman Shelley in literate tones, has a fine expressiveness about it. A springtime battle of woodcocks is described: "... their passions exploding, like the coupling of dragons in the dawn of time." And the musical score of Lars Erik Larsson completes the symphonic form. A more completely integrated picture has not been seen in some time.

Let's not forget the human actors. The youngster, Anders Norborg, who plays the older keeper of the otter, is a wonderfully natural boy. And little Kjell Sucksdorff, son of the film's maker, as the 6-year-old pal of this lad, is an utterly beguiling exponent of the humor and innocence of a child. Mr. Sucksdorff appears ever so briefly as the father of these boys. And Sigvard Kihlgren is properly belligerent as the farmer who shoots the fox.

The end of the film, with cranes weaving frail patterns against a sunset sky, brings a mood of evanescence to the whole beautiful show. "Skeins of birds," says the narrator, "fading like the memory of one's youth."

Mr. Sucksdorff has given us a picture that we can cherish for years and years.

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Monday, May 10, 2010

Arne Sucksdorff - Det stora aventyret aka The Great Adventure (1953)

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