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“North Dakota is Trump Country Today”: John Hanson and Rob Nilsson on the 4K Restoration of Northern Lights
Northern Lights It would be easy to call 1979 a red letter Cannes for New Hollywood: Apocalypse Now got Francis Ford Coppola his second Palme d’Or (split with Volker Schlöndorff for The Tin Drum), Terrence Malick received Best Director for Days of Heaven. Outside of the spotlight of official competition, another American film playing in the International Critics’ Week walked away with the second ever Camera d’Or for best first feature. Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, Northern Lights returned the pair to their North Dakota roots by documenting 94 year-old Henry Martinson, a socialist organizer instrumental in the victory of the left-wing Nonpartisan League, set up by and for farmers, which won control of the governorship of North Dakota in 1916 and established state-run grain mills and elevators, as well as state-run banks working to protect farmers against predatory foreclosures.
Through Martinson’s recollections, the film turns to fictive recreation, following the rise of the League in 1915 through the grassroots campaign of getting League member Lynn Frazier to first win the gubernatorial primary for the Republican ticket, then the governor’s seat in a stunning victory for left-wing organizing in the United States. Shot in textured black and white by Judy Irola, Northern Lights is predominantly made of vast images of the prairie contrasted with intimate close-ups of its Norwegian homesteaders. While its central trio are played by professional actors—with Robert Behling and Joe Spano playing the brothers Ray and John Sorenson, and Susan Lynch grounding the film’s heart and sacrifice as Ray’s bride-to-be Inga Olsness—most of the cast is made up of North Dakota locals, lending an easy naturalism to Northern Lights’ brand of American Neorealism.
The League was largely a forgotten political moment in the ’70s; Northern Lights was produced by Cine Manifest, a Marxist film collective that existed in San Francisco from 1972-1980 and sought to make populist cinema outside of the money-machinations of Hollywood. Northern Lights was the collective’s biggest breakout success, but also served as one of their last as they amicably dissolved to pursue different artistic and political ventures. Like the League’s story, there’s something to be gleaned from the successful times of Cine Manifest, and their story is worth a revisit. I sat down with John Hanson and Rob Nilsson over Zoom to talk about Northern Lights and their time at Cine Manifest on the occasion of the 4K new restoration by IndieCollect, screening as a part of the Revivals at NYFF62.
Filmmaker: The new restoration looks really good. I’ve only seen the movie before on a DVD that my friend from Fairview, Montana bought from one of you guys years ago. Seeing it this way, there’s so much texture to the film—obviously in the landscapes, but what really struck me was the faces. You shoot a lot of this movie in close-ups. How important was that portraiture to this film?
Nilsson: They were the subject. Looking in the eyes and faces of the real thing was the thrill of it beyond almost anything, including the terrain, which John knows so well—he grew up there. And my grandfather was the first filmmaker in North Dakota, so it was a return to origins.
Hanson: Rob and I were both great lovers of Bergman and Neorealism, and there were certain influences we agreed on. You noted that the film was shot in close-ups and very wide shots. That was very intentional. You weren’t seeing zooms, you weren’t seeing pans, you weren’t seeing a lot of handheld camera. It was a formally shot film. Because I grew up in North Dakota, I knew that landscape well. People had never seen it before on the screen, I didn’t think. That was so important to us, to have the images be very powerful to complement the story and people.
Nilsson: John was primarily responsible for the visuals and I worked with the actors, so we had a very good partnership that exists to this day. The occasion for the movie was based on “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” the Marxist idea we share. That right, John?
Hanson: True. Speaking of North Dakota, where I grew up: my grandfather was a member of the Nonpartisan League. He was the one who told me stories about it when I was a boy. We weren’t taught it in school. It wasn’t until Cine Manifest, where we each had a project we were developing, [that] I got onto that subject because it was something I knew well—I knew the state well, I knew the landscape, I knew the story. I started researching it, then Rob joined me because of his North Dakota roots. We were lucky enough to discover this Norwegian community up on the Canadian border where they were still speaking Norwegian. The farmers were incredible and fearless. Because it was scripted, they had to learn their lines just like the rest of the actors.
Filmmaker: Did integrating non-actors as a key part of the film help lend an authenticity to the professional actors?
Nilsson: Oh sure, we swapped juices of all sorts. Without being able to socialize and have a little time with the people, I think it would have been a leaden exercise. But their openness, and their ability to show their past and their present with their kindness—you know, it’s a hospitable culture up there. When John and I first showed up at the meeting at the historical society, the farmers were sitting in a circle and looking us over, and it takes a couple minutes—these city guys, what do they know? After that, it was everybody in the community coming together to help us in every possible way. Of course, the authenticity in Bob [Robert Behling] and Joe [Spano] and Susan [Lynch], and Marianna [Åström-De Fina] as well—it was essential that they have that kind of contact, and we got it without reservation.
Hanson: We lived with the farmers. During production we stayed on the farms. I think there was only this one little hotel in town, some people stayed there. But we stayed with Ray and Helen Ness [who play Henrik and Jenny Sorensen in the film], and the actors were staying with other farmers. So, there was a very close bond, which made everyone relaxed when we were together with the camera there because we already knew each other well. The farmer that Ray wrestles with in the barn was nearby and we got to know him in the bar. Yes, they were non-professional, but they were as good as any of the actors.
Nilsson: I think they were better. I think you can’t fake who you are, really, as an actor, as a human being. I prefer the term “be-er,” because they were be-ers of their own reality. For that matter, actors that can’t reach that are wooden and not very interesting regardless of who they’re playing. So, John, should we tell him about how we decided to name the film Northern Lights?
Hanson: Sure!
Nilsson: Well, here’s a story. After being in the bar at night we drove out and had to stop to stop and pee. As we stood in the open meadow relieving ourselves, we saw the sky and the northern lights, so we said, “That’s it then.” If you can pee above the northern lights, you gotta honor those lights. It seems like an obvious title, but it wasn’t that obvious to us then. Right, John?
Hanson: No, and it was much better than the working title we had.
Nilsson: What was the working title?
Hanson: If We Stick, We’ll Win, which was the Nonpartisan League’s slogan.
Filmmaker: There are a lot elements of documentary to this, with people playing—or, I guess, being—themselves to an extent, but there is also Henry Martinson who bookends the film. John, as you point out, the Nonpartisan League wasn’t taught in schools. Near the end of the picture, Henry says, “Not everyone forgets. Not everyone refuses to speak.” That seems like the big political calling of the film to me.
Nilsson: Henry was the spirit of the resistance with humor! He wasn’t a hardass guy with Marxist credentials. He was able to accept a lot of the defeats they had to undergo with grace: “I got time, I can wait.” That’s Henry. What an inspiration to us, and hopefully to others.
Filmmaker: I love that the film closes with “I got time, I can wait.” I’m sure in the ’70s it seemed like the Nonpartisan League was so far removed from the present day. Now we’re almost 50 years away from the making of the film and it seems like such ancient history, even though things like the grain silos and banks are still there. I wonder if helping people remember can help change things.
Nilsson: Absolutely. What do we have [available] to face these fools that we now have to deal with? People saw through them all those many years ago. These are the very people that Henry Martinson despised, and I despise also—crooks and grifters that have somehow gotten into our politics. I mean, what else do we have other than our own good sense, and hopefully empathy for others, and a sense for what justice and character is?
Hanson: All through the life of the film, when it’s re-emerged every so often and we have screenings, it still reaches people very strongly. I’ve been in audiences who didn’t know a damn thing about the Nonpartisan League, and they are very inspired by it and the story. So, it’s still relevant today We wanted to give voice to people who didn’t have it, not just in Northern Lights but in the other films we were making in our collective. I’ll be really looking forward to sitting in the audience with New York and seeing what they think of it.
Filmmaker: A lot of this [contemporary] political strife comes out of this idea that people reach for radical conservatism when they’re in states of desperation, and this film posits that you can do the opposite. In the poorest of times, workers can come together and strike their biggest victories instead of sliding into nihilism.
Hanson: The irony is that North Dakota is Trump country today. Farmers drank the Kool-Aid just like the rest of the people. It really makes me mad and sad. Trump doesn’t care about them; he’s not gonna do anything for those farmers. Yet when you go out there and roam the prairie, which I’ve done a lot over the years—go into the little towns, go into the cafes. People are as generous as can be. There’s a duality in the personality in some of these people out there—good heartland people from the earth, but at the same time they’ve been duped by Trump. It drives me nuts.
Filmmaker: Similar to how the Nonpartisan League has become this blip in history, I think Cine Manifest too got washed out in the history of American independent film by the resurgence of the New Hollywood studio systems. These more politically radical films ended up falling by the wayside.
Nilsson: We were a group of radical-minded filmmakers who decided, “We gotta join forces here.” The money wasn’t gonna be there for the kinds of movies we wanted to make, so at the time we were a collective model. We shared salaries, we shared duties, we had self-criticism. We had these weird thermometers that we put up on the wall where we had to fill in how close we got to fulfilling our duties. We studied Cinema Novo, we studied Italian Neorealism, because we felt we had to know and have the strength to make movies that come from the heart of people in resistance to the predations of capitalism. It was a wildcard deal, and who can say what is the measure of whether we are known or not? I think we had the effect at the time of changing and helping and creating new thoughts in a country that is not very well-known for its educational opportunities. So yeah, I don’t care whether we are known or not. We fought our fight. It’s up to you guys to do your fight. That’s my hope: That there are enough of you, and enough of us following along, that we can overcome, at least for a while, this malaise that affects us. Of course, the thing is this keeps coming again. We don’t seem to be able to stay in a good place when we reach a good place. It seems that we forget everything and have to relearn it. There’s a lot to relearn now, and I think we are doing it. I don’t think Kamala is the be-all and end-all, but she is the one we gotta get behind. I would prefer someone more radical and thorough in their interests in how to change society, but this is what we got and we gotta support it.
Hanson: When we formed the collective, we couldn’t get a toe-hold in Hollywood, we couldn’t get our films seen, we couldn’t get our films made. We joined together so we’d have a stronger strength to try something, and we wanted to tell different stories than Hollywood. The year before Cine Manifest was formed, Steve [Wax] and I were working with Francis Ford Coppola, developing a project about the People’s Park takeover that Coppola had gotten the rights to. Steve was the writer-director, I was the producer and Warner Bros. was putting up the money. Steve and I went down to Warner Bros. and presented the script to the head guy down there, and he just laughed at us. The way we were treated was obscene, and then they pulled the rug out from Francis. There were 10 projects in development, some of which got made, and then we were on the street. So, what the hell? Did we want anything more to do with that? No. When I was offered the chance to join in the conversation of forming the collective, I jumped at it. It was really a way to not just survive but do something meaningful.
Nilsson: At the time I had made two or three personal films in Boston. I was kind of the least—maybe not talented, but I had the least amount of experience. The collective brought me in because of my beliefs, I think, and because I saw something in them that—it mirrored my respect for John Cassavetes, for example. Go ahead and do it with the means available, all your heart and strength. Tell your story. Give who you are to the world, because that’s what real artists do. Anyway, I was the neophyte. I didn’t know a grip stand from a… whatever, but they taught me. Now I’ve made 45 feature films, and I have to give John [Hanson] and the collective the credit for really getting me started. After Cine Manifest I spent 12 years in the San Francisco Tenderloin creating workshops for the inner-city residents, the homeless, local actors, and made nine feature films called 9 @ Night with them as the characters. I developed a system, which I call “Direct Action,” as a way of being able to take everyday people and bring out the intensity necessary to improvise feature films. I couldn’t have done that without Cine Manifest as a foundation.
Filmmaker: Why didn’t the Cine Manifest collective continue on?
Nilsson: Well, we lasted eight years. I don’t know what your view on it was, John, but any family has internecine issues. Personally, I felt I had to move and discover this world this world of cinema anew for myself. I felt that I had done my training and now I had to see what I could do that was maybe rawer and more Cassavetes-like, more on-the-pulse and in-your-face. That was my thing. John, what’s your thought?
Hanson: Well, eight years was actually quite a long time for a political group to stay together.
Nilsson: That’s true.
Hanson: With all the feuding that was going on. There were other groups: Newsreel was in San Francisco. I think it was actually quite amazing that we stayed together that long. Because you get a bunch of guys—and we brought women in as well—and we doubled the group in size. Because everyone had a project they wanted to make, at some point we were just taking on too much. We all started to get involved in other things, we were having children. It sort of was inevitable that we would break up. Also, once Northern Lights was completed, Rob and I were gone on the festival road. We self-distributed the film for a good while, so we really started to go off on our own paths. There was nothing that said, “To hell with you!” or whatever, it was sort of mutual. I think we all recognized that we’d run the course.
Nilsson: It was an amicable separation.
Hanson: We had a big warehouse in San Francisco that we rented for nothing in the old days. We had to deal with that. When we decided to disband, there were a lot of things we had to work together to do, and we did it as friends. All the remaining members are still in touch. Eugene Corr went on to make films, Steve Lighthill was head of cinematography at AFI, Steve Wax is out in California. It’s been a lifelong friendship for some of us. Rob and I, of course, are probably the closest of the team over the years.
Nilsson: There’s a lot of people in Hollywood that are caught up in the money. They think it’s their film until they start talking to the money people. What does that do to your soul, and to your artistic ability to flow and be real in your ability to create? It stultifies. I feel lucky that I was able to find two or three people that had the money to support me. [Making the 9 @ Night series] was a different kind of thing than Cine Manifest, but fully as human and satisfying. That’s what I’ve always pursued in anything that I’ve done: working with people down on the ground, who tell you the truth and have character. Even if they’re troubled, even if they’re lying in the gutter, even if they’re down to their last buck, we can still work together and make things. That’s why I’m very proud of the 9 @ Night films, which I think is my favorite set of projects since Northern Lights.
Filmmaker: Is filmmaking a similar exercise to political organizing?
Hanson: Might’ve been closer when we were in the collective to that. I mean, of course you have to organize all the people that help you make the movie. We get the credit, but on a feature there’s a lot of people working with you.
Nilsson: We put the finger up in the air and hope the lightning strikes. We’re the occasion for the brilliance of others. I don’t know if political organizing is that way. In a way, it’s like pushing a vehicle up a hill, whereas in filmmaking you’re allowing for the genius of other people to thrill you and open up other areas. So, in some ways it’s the opposite of political organizing, yet it is a way of organizing people towards values, towards belief, towards a way to live a decent life. I wish political organizing could be more like that and less mechanistic. When you read Marx you see, “Oh, right. All these things are true.” Yet what do people really want, and what are they really capable of at a given time? Very hard to know. But as an artist you can try to tap in and pull together discontents, their beliefs, their powers, and make something that hopefully makes the boats rise a little higher. We knew that already from experience that we had to stay out of the big town, because they would eat us alive if they had the chance, but they ignored us and we won at Cannes. Nobody would distribute us, so we did it ourselves.
