A ten-minute study of wild animal life in a Swedish forest; stoat, fox, hare, and owl, who stalk and savage one another, are photographed with extraordinary vividness and intimacy. It is perhaps the most striking of Sucksdorff's animal studies, in spite of an abrupt introduction and ending.
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A stark, dramatic scene unfolds on a winter's night between four creatures in Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff's hypnotic ode to animals as an untamable, enigmatic life force. A Divided World is shaped by Sucksdorff's remarkably intimate camera which creates a hyperrealism able to bring the viewer startingly close to animals who it transforms into otherworldly, even mythic beings. The heightened realism of A Divided World makes the viewer question not only what they see but also the safe, judgmental distance that has traditionally defined animals in film as characters in a clear and usually cautionary narrative. A Divided World could, in fact, be seen as a critique of such a mode of cinema through the eerie presence of a distant church that is clearly an artificial miniature used to cast a foreboding, fatalistic tone and force the question of whether this film is a moral fable, or a cautionary tale. Perhaps A Divided World ultimately reveals the animal to be more firmly grounded in a moral pragmatism than the human whose belief system is revealed to be as ethereal as the organ music, unable to fully grasp the real mortal struggles that stain the night snow with blood and consequence. (Haden GUEST | Director, Harvard Film Archive)
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Harvard Film Archive | mhjohns@fas.harvard.edu
Arne SUCKSDORFF
