A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, November 8, 2025

Northern Lights (John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, 1978)

Joe Spano, Helen Ness, and Robert Behling in Northern Lights

Cast: Robert Behling, Susan Lynch, Joe Spano, Marianna Åström-De Fina, Ray Ness, Helen Ness, Thorbjörn Rue, Nick Eldredge, Jon Ness, Gary Hanisch, Melvin Rodvold, Adelaide Thorntveidt. Screenplay: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson. Cinematography: Judy Irola. Film editing: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson. Music: David Ozzie Ahlers. 

Northern Lights is a tribute to endurance and persistence, not only that of the North Dakota immigrant farmers whose story it tells, but also to writer-director-editors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, and cinematographer Judy Irola, who endured the hardships of the northern plains in winter to tell it. The story is not a commercial one, dealing as it does with a populist movement seeking solidarity of farmers against capitalists in the early years of the 20th century, but Hanson and Nilsson were determined to make it. It works, too, a moving portrait of unsung lives. 

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