‘Here Is Your Life’ Launches UCLA Jan Troell Retrospective

Sweden’s Jan Troell is known for two splendid, straightforward epics: “The Emigrants” (1971), and its sequel, “The New Land” (1972), which compose the sprawling saga of a group of Swedes coming to America, and “Flight of the Eagle” (1982), about a gallant but foolhardy attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon in 1897.

As fine as these films are, they do not prepare you for the sheer distinctiveness and dazzling impact of the heretofore unknown pictures that launch the UCLA Film Archives’ “Jan Troell Retrospective.”

“Here Is Your Life” (1965), which screens Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in Melnitz Theater, is one of the great coming-of-age films, based on Nobel Prize-winning Eyvind Johnson’s semi-autobiographical novel and telling of the flowering of an impoverished but brilliant and persistent youth, born at the turn of the century. The way in which Troell expresses the imagination of Eddie Axberg’s Olof, as he matures from 14 to 18, is never less than magical; “Here Is Your Life” is a less-harsh “Pelle the Conqueror.”

The film is preceded by the half-hour “Stay in the Marshland” (1964), another adaptation from Johnson, which is, in its way, as sly and witty as Roman Polanski’s famous short, “Two Men and a Wardrobe.” Max Von Sydow stars.

Screening Sunday at 6 p.m. is the documentary-like “Eenie Meenie Minie Moe” (1967), in which the intense Per Oscarsson gives a thoroughly harrowing performance as a contemporary schoolteacher losing control of himself and his class.

Never has the plight of the teacher in the era of permissiveness been dramatized with such disturbing insight. That this teacher is miscast in his profession--he privately acknowledges that he “sides with his pupils againt himself”--throws in relief the love-hate that characterizes so many relationships between children and adults, yet Troell, himself a former teacher, leaves us with the sense that human nature at any age is finally an enigma. The second feature is “The Emigrants.”

Also commencing this week at the UCLA Film Archives is “New Hungarian Cinema,” which begins Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with Sandor Simo’s “Farewell to You” (1987) and Peter Bacso’s “Banana Skin Waltz” (1986).

The “Farewell” is a handsome, acutely perceptive, deeply sensual psychological drama centering on the residents of a fine old Budapest apartment house as they struggle to survive the ever-darkening war years. As a study of human nature under pressure, the film offers a cross-section of behavior, ranging from the heroic to the cowardly to the cruelly ironic. The film is marked by steamy sexual encounters, borne of desperation, and also by an unflinching depiction of a poisonous, ever-expanding anti-Semitism and a hysteria-charged Nazism.

A Yasujiro Ozu series starts Friday at the Little Tokyo Cinema 2 with a perfect double feature, “Early Spring” (1956) and “The Record of a Tenement Gentleman” (1947).

The first is one of Ozu’s many compassionate studies of the lives of office workers, in this instance focusing on a decent, nice-looking young man (Ryo Ikebe) whose brief fling with the secretarial pool flirt (Keiko Kishi) endangers his marriage, already haunted by the loss of an only child.

As Ikebe and his wife (Chikage Iwashima) struggle with their feelings, Ozu offers an unusually bleak view of the company man’s existence. The very adult “Early Spring” is not downbeat, nor is “The Record of a Tenement Gentleman” even though it is set in the harsh aftermath of World War II. It is in fact an amusing yet poignant encounter between a blunt, even tactless middle-aged widow (Choko Iida) and a little lost boy as stolid and stubborn as she is.

Information: (213) 687-7077.