‘Songs of Earth’ Review: Delicate Norwegian Oscar Submission Meditates on Mortality and Nature

Phrases like “Tone poem” and “meditation” are normally used by critics to describe works of art that are small and delicate.

Margareth Olin’s new documentary Songs of the Earth, Norway’s selection for best international feature film at next year’s Academy Awards, is certainly a tone poem and equally a meditation on everything from our relationship with nature to the bond between parents and children. The film, with Liv Ullmann and Wim Wenders as executive producers, is certainly a delicate film too, one that often feels like it benefits more from experience than from analysis or interrogation.

Yet Songs of the Earth is not a small film. It’s a documentary that should be seen on the biggest screen you have available – whatever shows off the epic cinematography to its full potential. Don’t sell Songs of the Earth in short, mind you, as an exclusively visual experience. The sound design and score are just as compelling, and that may be the key to experiencing the best of Olin’s film. Not everyone, or even most people, will experience this Songs of the Earth in a festival setting. But once the documentary makes its way to PBS or Netflix or whichever streamer acquires it, the better you can turn off external stimuli, the more you can let Olin’s film wash over you and the less you will be. inclined to let your thoughts wander.

We are unimportant, but extremely important. We are tiny, but we are huge. We are alone, but we contain multitudes. These thoughts, only a few of which were stolen from Walt Whitman, were what crossed my mind most often during the ninety-plus minute journey of Songs of the Earth, which has the simplest possible plot: Olin returns to the Oldedalen Valley in western Norway. Her goal is to spend some time with her 84-year-old father (and her mother, but less centrally), follow in his footsteps and try to understand him. It’s an exercise that he tells her will take an entire year, handily giving Olin the structure for her documentary (though there’s also an extended epilogue after four seasons, which felt like a structural cheat when I thought about it, so I usually didn’t).

In a literal sense, Olin learns about her father’s life; the tragedies that connected his family to the land; the astonishing, and astonishingly metaphorical, surgery that marked his youth (“When I was born, my feet were pointing in the wrong direction,” says the man who spends the entire documentary walking forward while his daughter leads him on a project to look back) ; her parents’ 55th wedding anniversary; and their expectations of death and mourning. There are stories of deadly avalanches and multiple weddings.

In general, however, not much in it Songs of the Earth that’s literally. Olin and her father speak in poems and whatever the Norwegian equivalent of a Zen koan is. Everything gives the impression of wisdom passed down from generation to generation, usually recited in voice-over as the camera floats over fjords and frozen lakes and tree-lined hills, over glaciers that laugh at the idea that 400 years of history is more than a blip. But unsurprisingly it is a documentary that is aware of the changes in climate, the changes in landscape, the idea that history and mortality can apply to a parent and to nature – all in very few shots that contain something ‘manufactured’ or “man-made” that imposes itself on the site.

This separation between humans and nature is of course unfair, because… Songs of the Earth is a modern technical marvel that can be attributed to cinematographer Lars Erlend Tubaas Øymo, but also to several drone photographers and a group of renowned nature photographers. That’s before you’re introduced to the sounds of whispering wind, gurgling masses of water and the unnerving yet completely natural popping and cracking of various ice formations, conceived by sound designer Tormod Ringnes and blended in seamless harmony with Rebekka Karijord’s score.

As Olin’s father says of their own aging, “The outside may be fading, but on the inside we are still healthy.” Viewers can hope that the Earth has a similarly healthy core, no matter how much the glaciers retreat and how pervasive the feeling is that whatever animals we see — soaring birds of prey, lumbering reindeer, pollinating bees — are not as plentiful as they should be. are. There is hardly a word spoken in the documentary or an image – Olin’s father’s face welcomes the smallest of close-ups, revealing gorges and crags befitting the most topographically dynamic fjords – that does not have double meaning.

Now that everything has a double meaning and the double meanings concern the relationship between humans and nature, there will be some thematic repetition. The same goes for the photography, as breathtaking as it is. The floating drone shots above the fjords are never completely perfect, but there are parts where they are true Songs of the Earth shows a lot of beautiful things that are beautiful in very similar ways and are recorded to accentuate the similarities to a soothing or soporific effect (depending on what other distractions you have available).

Or perhaps the film is trying to give a sense of how all this wonder and wisdom could be normalized if your experience of the landscape developed over a lifetime instead of 90 minutes. Disconnect and enjoy the quiet, albeit repetitive, depth.