Northern Lights (Film Essay)

　

　
The Nonpartisan League

North Dakota was granted statehood in 1889. At that time, the State was a patchwork of immigrant communities from the Balkans, Scandinavia, Germany, and, even, Iceland. A community of Syrians had build a town with mosques. In central North Dakota today, the tiny hilltop cemeteries are, often, studded with ornate metal crosses, grave markers for Eastern Orthodox Christians. At the time of World War One, the State had the highest percentage of foreign-born citizens of any place in the country.

Economic conditions in North Dakota before World War One were bad. The land was too dry for reliable subsistence farming and so the people depended upon cash crops for their livelihood, mostly wheat and flax. Commodity grain had to be shipped to terminals and milling operations in Minneapolis. In effect, North Dakota’s agriculture was subordinate to grain milling in Minneapolis and, by the time, that rail transportation and mill fees were paid, the farmers in North Dakota made no profit on their labor. Indeed, the system was so corrupt that many North Dakota politicians lived in the State only seasonally – during the winter and spring, they managed their affairs from mansions in Minneapolis.

These abuses led to the formation of the Socialist-leaning Equity Cooperative Exchange. The Equity Cooperative Exchange advocated the development of State-owned banking and milling infrastructure in North Dakota and, by 1910, had developed some banking services in the State although in a vestigial form. Members of the Equity Cooperative Exchange founded the Nonpartisan League (NPL). The NPL’s agenda was simple – it was a grass-roots organization that selected local candidates for local offices running them under the auspices of both the Democratic and Republican parties. In other words, the NPL used the existing structure of the two partisan parties to run candidates on its platforms. It was the NPL’s position that the two existing parties were equally corrupt and controlled by monied interests. Therefore progressive NPL candidates bearing both party affiliations were promoted for public office.

In 1916, NPL candidates won a majority of the seats in the North Dakota House of Representatives and elected a NPL governor as well as Attorney-General. The sometimes fractious and ethnically divided communities in North Dakota had come together under a Socialist banner. By 1918, the NPL had established not only a state-operated bank, but also state operated grain storage and milling operations intended to compete with similar services in Minneapolis. Women auxiliaries were formed and, after suffrage in 1920 became an important part of the NPL. In 1918, like a prairie fire (this is the standard metaphor), the NPL expanded dramatically, fielding many candidates in 12 other states, most notably Minnesota, and establishing inroads into Manitoba and Alberta.

In Minnesota, still reeling from violent Teamster’s strike in 1916, the NPL ran Charles Lindburgh (the father of the famous aviator) in the Republican gubernatorial primary in 1918. The race was a violent one, with many fistfights and NPL organizers tarred and feathered in some towns. When it appeared that Lindburgh might win the primary, the Republicans implored Democrats to vote in the Republican primary to defeat the insurgent candidate. Lindburgh lost the primary but it was a very close things.

With power comes corruption. In North Dakota, NPL politicians were over-confident and scandals followed. The NPL governor Lynne Frazier was recalled in 1921 in the first election of that kind in the country. Frazier was undeterred, however, and he ran for State Senate in 1922, a job that he held for many years. In effect, the NPL in North Dakota had commenced a trade war with Minneapolis and when the State Bank and Mills needed loans, Minneapolis bankers turned them down. Thus, the NPL was weakened. Severe drought and economic hardship debilitated the influence of the NPL in the twenties and thirties – the Depression started around 1923 in North Dakota. Poverty is apolitical and many farmers drifted away from the NPL in the years before World War Two. Nonetheless, the NPL continued as a viable political force in North Dakota through the fifties and, even, early sixties – by this point, the NPL had become partisan: it represented a progressive wing of the Republican party through 1956 when it shifted allegiances to become a part of the Democratic party. To this day, Democratic candidates in North Dakota are identified as "Dem. - NPL." North Dakota’s state-owned cooperatively run milling operations and grain elevators remain in existence today.

　

　


Northern Lights

Northern Lights was released in 1978. It is an independent film shot on location in North Dakota and produced by John Hansen and Rob Nilsson. The film was favorably reviewed and won a prestigious award in Cannes, the Camera d’Or.

I recall seeing the film on PBS in the early eighties. The images of the old man doing calisthenics and other exercises have remained with me all my life.

John Hansen was born in St. Paul but raised in North Dakota. He attended Carleton College and, later, Harvard, where he obtained a post-graduate degree in architecture. Hansen lived in San Francisco for a time and with Nilsson founded Cine Manifest, a Leftist film production company. He and Nilsson are credited as producers of Northern Lights and they also wrote, directed, and edited the film. Hansen worked on four or five other feature films between 1978 and 1990. He is also a landscape photographer of some note. A recent book showing landscapes in the great plains region of the Dakotas and southern Alberta and Manitoba was published with an introduction by Patricia Hampl.

Rob Nilsson was born in Rhinelander, Wisconsin in 1938. He’s had an adventurous life, working in the American Civil Rights movement in the early 60's, and, then, making films in many different countries. Nilsson is the only person known to me to have lived on the tiny island of Fernando Po off the coast of the Cameroons – he apparently went there to write and paint. He has made a number of dramatic feature films, all of them unknown to me – one of them Heat and Light produced in 1988 won the Grand Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival. From his Wikipedia entry, he seems to have worked in all possible genres including "Made for TV" post-apocalyptic dramas (A Town has turned to Dust – based on a Rod Serling script and featuring an extended homage to High Noon). Working with a group of filmmakers called the Tenderloin Group, Nilsson produced 9 feature films (14 and ½ hours) all set in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco where he apparently lives. (Seven of the movies were premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2008 – the massive cycle of films, an epic in all respects that was shot between 1992 and 2007. These films initially motivated by Nilsson’s search for his brother who had vanished in the Tenderloin district a few years before production began.) Nilsson has filmed ballet performances for the San Francisco Ballet Company, documentaries about musicians including a film about a concert tour involving Brian Eno and John Cale, one of Nilsson’s close friends. (The gist of the film is that Eno hadn’t approved the proceedings and disliked being fimed.) His resume involves films with many well-known movie stars (Ron Perlman, Bruce Dern, etc.) and he has shot episodes for Network TV (a cop drama) as well.

Nilsson seems indefatigable and one of his most recent movies It Happened Here (2012) is a combination road movie and film essay about Leon Trotsky. (Nilsson’s self-aggrandizing Wikipedia entry notes that an Israeli ambassador said that this film was every bit as good as Shoah.) Nilsson reprised his role as a photo-journalist in the movie Heat and Light in 2015's Permission to Touch – an experimental film about a photo-journalist engaged to take erotic pictures of a beautiful young woman. (This seems like a good gig for the film-maker who was, then, 77.) He has made experimental pictures in London, Nigeria, and Israel. In 2016, he made no fewer than three feature films, two of them shot in San Francisco and one in Bologna, Italy. In 2017, he made The Fourth Movement, a fiction film about a group of jazz musicians watching election returns on the night Donald Trump was elected president.

Nilsson also writes poetry and paints. His master is John Cassavetes, although he has made innumerably more pictures than his hero. As they say in the Brothers Grimm, if he is not yet dead, then, he is still alive (and, presumably, shooting more movies).

　


Henry Martinson
The frame story in Northern Lights shows Henry Martinson resolving to write down the story of the Nonpartisan League. Martinson plays himself in the movie – he was 94 when the picture was made, a living and vibrant link to the era depicted in the film. Martinson was born 1883 in Minneapolis but moved to Minot to homestead a farm in 1906. The farm failed and Martinson became a painter. He read radical treatises with the predictable result that he became a Socialist and, then, prominent writer and editor of the Leftist journal, The Iconoclast. He was Secretary of the Socialist Party in North Dakota and a founder of the Nonpartisan League. He remained intensely active in North Dakota politics. In 1937, he was appointed Commissioner of Labor and held that job until 1965. He, then, ran for various political offices as a Socialist, always losing. He wrote poetry throughout his life and was named the Poet Laureate of North Dakota in 1975. He died in Fargo in 1982.

　


A note on regionalism in American Films
Hollywood wasn’t always the center of film production in the United States. Edison produced innumerable films in New Jersey, beginning with pictures made in his so-called "Black Maria" in West Orange. (A facsimile of this first film studio is still on the site.) Edison’s first films were made in 1892 and 1893. His production company reached its height around 1910 when it issued an elaborate adaptation of Frankenstein, one of the first horror films. Edison was famously venal and competitive and these characteristics led to the demise of his production company. He tried to bundle production with distribution and theater ownership. The result was a trust that was involved in litigation from 1908 to 1918 when the company ceased operations.

Edison’s chief competitor was Biograph, a production company located in New York City and that filmed many of its movies on Long Island. Biograph’s star director was D. W. Griffith. He went west in 1910 to make a film called In Old California. Griffith reported that the conditions for moviemaking were just about ideal in Los Angeles. (In those day, natural light in great quantities was necessary to make movies and this resource was something that Los Angeles had in spades.) The rest, as they say, is history.

But, periodically, efforts have been made to establish regional centers for film making apart from New York and Hollywood. The seventies were particularly fertile in this respect. Eagle Pennell launched the film movement in Austin, Texas with The Whole Shootin’ Match (19 77-1978). George Romero began making pictures in Pittsburgh, mostly low-budget but effectively produced horror films – The Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Crazies (1973), Martin (1978), Knightriders (1981), and The Dawn of the Dead (1978) were all made in West Pennsylvania. In fact, all of Romero’s pictures preceding Bruiser (2000) where shot in Pittsburgh or western Pennsylvania. These films are successful, in part, because they exploit the topography and villages of that region and are largely staffed with Pittsburgh actors. (Even when he didn’t make his films in Pennsylvania any more, Romero still set them in that area – for instance, his Land of Dead includes glittering overhead shots of Pittsburgh although the movie was made in Toronto. The films world premiere in 2005 to a packed house in downtown Pittsburgh.)

Horror films are cheap and can turn an enormous profit. And they can be made just about anywhere. In fact, the Austin, Texas film-scene was originally jump-started with Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). The picture showed other local aspirants to film making that a quality film could be made in Austin. Richard Linklater is an alumni of the Austin regionalist school and his best films are all set (and made) in Texas – Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), Bernie (2011) and Boyhood (2002 - 2014).

There were hopes, at one time, that Minnesota would develop as a center for regionalist films. Jerome Hill, the scion of the wealthy St. Paul family of "Empire-Builder" James Hill, was interested in film-making, had the resources to make movies, and, in fact, directed a number of pictures, financing them through the locally-based Jerome Hill Foundation. Hill was a world-traveler and most of his films are set in Europe. None of his pictures really explore the local scene. Northern Lights is an example of regionalist film-making centered in the upper Midwest, but nothing really came of that movie – it didn’t lead to other productions in Minnesota or the Dakotas. For many years, it was thought that Al Milgrom, the longtime operator of the University Film Society, would be the nucleus around which local film productions would gather. Milgrom was friends with everyone in the film industry – he brought Jean-Luc Godard to Minneapolis as well as Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. He was arrested in 1978 for showing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom. I was in the theater that night and saw the cops come to seize the film from the projection booth. Milgrom was buddies with the documentary film maker Les Blank and worked with him to produce a film about Czechs in New Prague and Lonsdale. And Milgrom had other projects on-tap. But he was famously irascible and an unpleasant man – I shouldn’t use the past tense: he’s still around and will celebrate his 95^th birthday this June. No one could really collaborate with Milgrom because of his prickly personality and so, despite a wealth of local talent, no film production group ever crystallized around him.

With advances in technology, just about anyone can make a movie today. Steven Soderburgh shot the entirety of his horror film, Unsane (2018) on a cell-phone (an I-Phone 7 plus with digital editing app.) and people who have seen the movie say that it looks great. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that regional films will be produced in the future in vast numbers. In the late forties, the famous French critic, Andre Bazin, argued that films were the product of the director in uniquely personal ways – the film’s mise-en-scene and camerawork reflected what Bazin called the camera-stylo (that is camera pencil) of the movie-maker. This notion seemed quixotic 60 years ago when moviemaking required large crews, heavy cameras, and complex lighting and sound recording. The fact that a feature film with Hollywood production values can now be made, more or less, on a cell-phone has finally brought to fruition the notion of the camera-stylo. Today everyone is a movie-maker.