NORTHERN LIGHTS (John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, 1978)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest English-Language Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Northern Lights, co-directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, attempts to blur the line between its historical fiction and documentary. Blending actors and nonprofessionals, it brings an achingly beautiful black-and-white immediacy to the American past and creates a stirring ode to the American labor movement.
     In the fierce North Dakota winter clime of the 1910s, farmers find themselves discounted by politicians and set upon by foreclosing bankers. The grain they work hard to harvest—in a snowstorm, no less, in one of the film’s most amazing passages—is sold for processing to grain elevators; the banks and railroad that control these pay exceptionally little. Thus the farmers unionize, in the Nonpartisan League. One of the organizers envisions their cooperatively owning their own grain elevators and becoming shareholders in state-chartered banks. Northern Lights, then, depicts the daunting circumstances the farmers face and the countervailing efforts of these new pioneers. It documents the retaliation they endure from the current institutions arrayed against their attempts at social change. It finds in dark, drafty rooms sparse though glowing light—a persistent symbol of hope.
     The narrative unfolds as the reminiscence of one of the League’s organizers. It is framed in the present. Sadly, the ringing optimism of the tail-end of this narrative frame would soon be erased by the pathological presidency of Ronald Reagan, and so, in our minds, we must add another coda to Northern Lights, however much doing so breaks our hearts.
     There is a spirit to this film that’s irresistible—and, in the extended context of the crippling of unionism in America, which Reagan launched but which considerable mismanagement by unions themselves abetted, this joyful spirit assumes a tragic dimension.