Further References and Resources (with Titled Subsections)
The following hyperlinks take you to selected articles, videos, news, and other media for your further edification and appreciation of the 2018 film Aniara and the original epic poem published in 1956, both from Sweden.
Some resources are duplicated here from the main essay due to their importance to the work. These links were functional at the time of this essay’s publication.
Official Aniara Film Web Site, Trailer, and Scene Clips
Official Aniara film Web site by Magnet Releasing and Magnolia Pictures. Includes the official trailer along with film notes and the press kit – the last two items are available upon request:
The official Aniara trailer from Magnolia Selects:
Welcome to the Aniara, where “you’ll want for nothing” …
But of course existential hell is going to have a disco…
Film Transcripts
Here is a raw transcript of Aniara translated into English. It contains no labels for who said what or any scene descriptions:
https://subslikescript.com/movie/Aniara-7589524
This transcript does have some labels for who said what and scene descriptions, plus time stamps in the film!
https://transcripts.simpleremix.com/script.php/aniara-2018-VqNg
Got Lots of Links, Right Here in this Link Below!
Lots o’ relevant Aniara links here, presumably kept updated:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aniara/comments/mlfzwo/aniara_resources_and_other_media/
Music Videos
Here is a video of the paradoxically innocuous and haunting music at the end of Aniara with clips from key scenes in the film. The music comes courtesy of Alexander Berg and Calle Wachtmeister:
Someone named S. Furian has put together a video montage they titled “aniara royksopp what else is there”, which interestingly ends with a scene from the spaceship in the midst of encountering that cosmic particle storm, then blackness:
Video Film Recaps and Reviews
This is a ten-minute recap narration of Aniara, highlighted with scenes from the film and an accompanying transcript:
Another good film recap video with commentary:
This culturally insightful quote is from one of the comments following the video:
As a Swede and fan of science-fiction (especially darker varieties thereof), I can without a doubt say that this is my favourite Swedish film ever made. I can’t even name a clear second place since good films aren’t a common export from my country, let alone good films made with themes and topics I actually like.
Aniara is an absolute gem, and wonderful amalgamation of the horrors of space and the horror of being human. It’s as if made to make you question what is worse − the cold, unforgiving cosmos rendering humanity insignificant, or our own pitiful inability to cope with this reality due to our own spoiled, self-important attitude.
It also has a healthy dose of what I as a Swede would describe as “cruise culture”. It’s a story about putting a bunch of decently well-off, fairly spoiled people on what they expected to be a comfortable, pleasant cruise experience, and them being completely unable to cope with the sudden horrors of space. A bunch of the horror as a Swede is the horror inherent to having the comfort that we’re all used to over here being unceremoniously shattered. Inconvenience is the scariest possible thing to a Swede.
PlotReel Movies, with transcript. Their Spaceship Has Been Stranded In The Vastness And Darkness Of Space For 5 Million Years | Aniara:
A Masterpiece You (Supposedly) Have Not Seen…
The author of this work felt a connection to Aniara while being smack-dab in the COViD-19 pandemic, while others probably couldn’t watch the film then due to being in the very same situation:
ANIARA: Falling into the Void
This video review from 2022 titled ANIARA: Falling into the Void, examines the epic poem from 1956 with scenes from the 2018 film in a well-done merger of the two forms, along with scenes from the televised opera version from 1960, and several other science fiction efforts:
Some of the background music in this video includes the most well-known piece by Blind Willie Johnson (1897-1945), a gospel blues singer, guitarist, and Baptist minister titled “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”
Released as a single by Columbia Records in April of 1928 – the same record company that would release the operatic adaptation of Aniara in 1960, please note – the song became iconic when it was selected to represent American blues music on the Voyager Interstellar Record, two golden copies of which were sent into deep space in 1977 attached to the sides of the twin space probes.
More on Johnson’s song here:
He lived alone in the dark, with no hope of being found, just like our two Voyagers. Drifting in the darkness…
This song is the voice of Earth. Long after we are dead, long after we are gone, a man who knew loneliness will live out to idealize who we were, what we did. Years after we are long gone, Voyager will continue to venture out into the cold abyss that is our Universe. Blind Willie, a man that knew the dark too well, will forever sing to the cold, lonely voids of the universe. Fly on Voyager…
Making the Connection/Two Sides of the Same Coin
The two fellows in this 2023 podcast called Trailer Rewind from TruStory FM discuss Aniara:
Early on in this podcast video, the speakers make the connection that Avenue 5 was inspired by Aniara, if not a direct adaptation. They invite their listeners to watch and compare the two works to see how different human cultures approach such heavy themes. One of them also says he would not want to share Aniara with their two children, even though they are almost adults, to keep from burdening them with “this existential fear and anxiety.”
Watch two young guys from Cinema Rules watch Aniara for the first time…
I for one found their reactions quite entertaining and they often brought up questions addressed in this essay. The widening time jumps especially surprised the duo, the last one in particular.
To quote:
“[Aniara is] going to be like the Titanic, but in space!”
AI Talks – Episode 19
This video claims to present four AI chatbots discussing the themes and concepts of the film Aniara. FYI: None of these artificial intelligences self-destruct at the end of their in-depth discussion…
Reviews of the Physical Media for Aniara
This is a detailed technical review of Aniara released on Blu-ray, DVD, and video:
https://bluray.highdefdigest.com/70717/adniara.html
The reviewer wishes there were more bonus features regarding the making of Aniara on these media. He also offers an interesting take on hope in the film, quoted here:
Aniara certainly isn’t the most upbeat movie of the year. It’s not one you’re going to want to turn on to entertain a crowd of family or guests! That said, it’s a must-see film. While steeped in despair there is a weird caveat of joy and optimism throughout, you just have to be willing to look for it. Faced with impossible odds and the absolute void of deep space, people continue to try and exist and find a solution to their problems… even when there likely isn’t one.
This image of the back cover of the Blu-ray edition displays the features offered on this medium, including No Set Sci-Fi: The Making of Aniara:
https://cdn.abicart.com/shop/4862/art62/h6819/178716819-origpic-f14a49.jpg
Another technical review of Aniara on Blu-ray is here:
https://moviemansguide.com/main/2019/09/review-aniara-bd/
OVERALL – 3.0/5
Overall, Aniara to say the least isn’t exactly a feel good movie of the year, but it is at times haunting, if not depressingly beautiful… The acting is quite strong from the core cast, primarily Emelie Jonsson and Bianca Cruzeiro.
If you want to see Aniara on disc being unboxed for one minute and forty seconds, go here:
Aniara Poem in the Generation Spaceship Project
The remarkable Generation Spaceship Project, which utilizes numerous science fiction stories and novels about crewed vessels taking centuries and millennia to cross the vast gulfs of space between Earth and other star systems as an educational tool, includes the epic poem Aniara in its curriculum.
This is somewhat atypical in that the Aniara was technically not a generation ship, certainly not by the choice of its crew and passengers, but in all common respects the vessel and its journey do qualify as such. In any event, we should all be grateful they included Aniara for everyone’s edification and incorporated it with such wonderful notes and other extras.
Released just before the Swedish film adaptation, the GS Project has the complete poem in English, along with a helpful, if brief, glossary of terms.
Martinson, H. (1998) Aniara: An Epic Science Fiction Poem. Translated from the Swedish by Klass, S. and Sjoberg, L. USA: Story Line Press.
The site also includes an extensive section of notes on the poem, whose parts include an overview of Martinson’s Aniara as a major GS text, comments and descriptions of each canto of the poem, links to the GS Project’s focus questions for students, and a resource list:
The 1999 English Version of Aniara Online
This is the second effort to translate Martinson’s 1956 epic poem into English from the original Swedish by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg. This rendition has a valuable introduction by the translators. It is available for free in various formats here:
https://archive.org/details/aniara
A Look at the History of the 1963 English Translation of Aniara
On the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Aniara in 2016, the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, produced on its library blog a fascinating illustrated history from its poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) collection of materials how he and Elspeth Harley Schubert (1907-1999) came to translate the epic poem from Swedish to English.
Their efforts were published in 1963 as Aniara, A Review of Man in Time and Space.
https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/edinburghuniversityarchives/tag/aniara/
To quote from the blog piece on how some critics viewed the results:
In the national Swedish daily – Dagens Nyheter – on 6 May 1963, the English poet and critic Alfred Alvarez (1929-2019) wrote a rather critical piece about the MacDiarmid and Schubert translation. Olof Lagercrantz (1911-2002) Swedish writer, critic, literary scholar and publicist provided a commentary to the Alvarez piece in the same paper. Alvarez writes that MacDiarmid, ‘the most talented Scottish poet after Burns, […] has achieved a kind of Harris Tweed version of the poem… simple, unpretentious and serviceable’. Alvarez is ‘under the impression that Martinson’s poem may have lost a lot in translation’. Following up on the Alvarez piece, Lagercrantz comments that, as far as Swedish readers of the translation are concerned, it is ‘perhaps especially remarkable to hear Martinson characterised as grimly devoid of humour. Such an astounding opinion has to have its roots in the translation’.
This reviewer, who searches “for word-for-word memorable poetry…” was also less than enthusiastic about the 1963 translation of Aniara from Swedish to English:
https://formalverse.com/2020/02/29/review-aniara-by-harry-martinson/
The same reviewer also links to this page regarding the poem’s translation:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/977347525
To quote:
The existentialism of the situation – living lives of no destination in an inescapable vessel – is in practical terms no different from our own endless circling of the Sun… The issues of whether this feels different, and whether it should feel different, are never addressed but resonated with me nevertheless.
…
The book is divided into 103 ‘songs’ of half a page to seven pages in length – only 102 in the English translation by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert, as they and the author agreed that Song 42 is untranslatable.
COMMENT: Canto 42 looks into the mind of Libidel, the same woman who led the blame of MR for the loss of the Mima and later founded her own hedonistic cult that claimed to be “worshipping” the Artilect. In this canto, Libidel says the coldness of the Universe outside their ship can be countered by sharing human “warmth”.
…
The MacDiarmid/Schubert translation is not great, as shown in this excerpt. Not only is there a general lack of rhyme, but the second-to-last line would translate correctly as “I traveled all around but forgot about danger”. The only justification for changing the meaning is to make the (very weak) rhyme of “farther” with “Aniara”.
But then again, translating poetry into a different language’s poetry is at least as difficult as translating a written story into a film… so, as for this translation: I’ll give it five (out of ten, for the try). But the original? From what I can see and guess, ten out of ten!
Reviewing the Second English Translation
This article from The Bedlam Files is a review of the second published effort to put Aniara into English:
https://thebedlamfiles.com/fiction/aniara/
To quote:
Obviously any number of metaphors can be read into this account, although its depiction of space travel was apparently based on a deep seated fascination held by Martinson, who according to a first-hand quote (included in the introduction) experienced “the illusion of being located on a space ship. At first this feeling was chaotic and full of anxiety, but gradually the visions began to clarify themselves inside him…”
The detail of the author’s descriptions of life aboard the Aniara, whose inhabitants are careful to observe the demarcation of morning, noon and night despite the fact that those things don’t exist in space, are worthy of a more conventionally drafted science fiction epic.
That last point brings up the question of whether ANIARA’s poetic overlay is absolutely necessary, or merely a gimmick to bolster a conventional story. To be sure, the idea of people attempting to subside aboard a massive spaceship isn’t particularly novel, and there’s not much in the way of plot twists to be found here. But Harry Martinson’s underlying concerns are more emotional and expressionistic, with longing and isolation being the book’s driving agents. Poetry, then, is an entirely appropriate format.
Yes, Aniara Has a Sequel
In 1980, a sequel of sorts to the poem Aniara written by Harry Martinson in the last years of his life was released in Swedish. Titled Doriderna (The Dorides), a complete English translation – with an illuminating preface by Martinson biographer Dr. Tord Hall (1910-1987) – was published online here in 2023 by someone named Imaginary-Zebra-3589…
Selected Published Reviews
The Complete Review of the 1999 English translation of the epic poem Aniara by Harry Martinson…
https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/sverige/martinsonh.htm
To quote:
Our Assessment: B: Odd piece of work, but has its moments.
…
Such journeys have often been the subjects of poetry, and Martinson’s leap into the endlessness of the universe is, ultimately, no more radical of fantastical than, say, poetic journeys to heaven or hell. A bit of science-terminology – mostly invented – gives it a slightly different feel, but ultimately this is spiritual poetry, the voyage of the individual and of humanity, and what has been left behind, a world ruined by mankind, leaving the survivors adrift in space “where no god heard us in the endless void”. As Martinson writes:
We now suspect that what we say is space
and glassy-clear around Aniara’s hull
is spirit, everlasting and impalpable,
that we are lost in spiritual seas.
…
Aniara is also a product of its times, but even as aspects may no longer seems as current, it holds up well in its bleak vision. Current expectations of man’s self-destruction perhaps focus more on climate-change than nuclear destruction, but many of the fundamentals remain depressingly the same. – M. A. Orthofer, 13 October 2018
“Aniara – The Space Dystopia That Generated a Nobel Prize” by Asmund Frost for Predict in their April 11, 2022 issue.
I first read about Aniara some fifteen years ago, in a brilliant essay collection about the Universe. The collection itself is worth a whole article, but the section about Aniara caught me off-guard and made me go look for the original work.
https://medium.com/predict/aniara-the-space-dystopia-that-led-to-a-nobel-prize-5a155ac9ebed
Some more of the better online reviews that do not merely rehash the plot:
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/feature-articles/voyage-to-the-end-of-the-universe-aniara-2018/
A select quote from the above link:
Shot entirely using artificial light, Aniara betrays no memory of what sunlight might ever have looked like. These people have been on board so long that the artificial has become real. In the mall-like centre of the ship, the action never stops. Since there is no light in space, the ship itself is always illuminated. The shops, malls, bars, and casinos operate on a 24/7 basis. Anything the passengers want is at their immediate disposal. They just must have the money to pay for it. But when the supplies run out, their money is worthless. This is the literal end of a consumerist society, the ultimate accelerationist accomplishment.
https://www.lily.fi/blogit/out-office/aniara/
To quote:
We left the film for an unreal world. It was bright outside. Little birds were singing. I felt a slight breeze on my face. I felt like crying. Why do we take everything for granted? Why is it so hard to be grateful for the little things? Why is nothing ever enough?
“Man. The king of ashes. The cruelty of space does not surpass that of man.” – Harry Martinson
https://vocal.media/geeks/the-accidental-allegory-of-aniara
To quote:
The first time I heard of Aniara was through a highly curiosity-piquing Instagram post/review of the film by author Mark Z. Danielewski [born 1966], wherein he wrote:
“Hands down the scariest sci-fi film I’ve ever seen. Aniara surpasses even 2001 in its understanding of what distances the stars describe. There are no fairy tales in space. Devouring aliens would be a comfort. Forget transcendence, apotheosis, revelation. Behold where we live. We are no match.”
So hey, when the man who penned the epic existential horror mind-f*ck of a novel that was House of Leaves proclaims that something is the scariest anything to him, you better believe I’m going to sit up and pay attention.
“Because destruction, like creation, is a choice”
This is an important and meaningful review by New Zealand native Octavia Cade writing for Strange Horizons, published on October 28, 2019. Cade compares the film and poem, with her preference for some items from the latter…
http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/reviews/aniara/
To quote:
That is a shared experience, a shared responsibility, which must be genuinely crippling to any sense of subsequent social responsibility. Yet it’s papered over, and I find that unfortunate.
What it has done, however, is to allow the film to focus entirely on the emotional response of a community to hopelessness. It’s not just the immediate loss that’s affecting these people – the disbelieving response of the mother who had promised to be on Mars by her small son’s birthday, and now faces the certainty of never seeing him again – it’s the aimlessness, the loss of purpose, that this eternal journey brings with it.
There’s just no prospect, no realistic prospect, of this journey ever ending. The Aniara’s captain does his best to string people along with hopes of rescue and recovery, but he’s lying to himself as well as his passengers and quickly crumbles under the weight of knowledge and responsibility. Neither is there the prospect of the journey ending in a generation, or even two. People can have hope for their children when they have none for themselves, but it’s difficult to live for descendants tens of thousands of years in the future, if at all. (Look at how difficult it is for most of us to take steps to leave a habitable world for those born a hundred years from now.) That far-distant possibility is not enough to hang a functioning society on. No wonder they all crumble to insanity under all that endless bleakness.
Oh, there are efforts to get a school going, to find sufficient work and leisure for everyone aboard so that they have structure and purpose to their days, but the loss of the Mima removes the main source of respite and comfort (in the film) and respite and responsibility (in the poem). If there’s nothing to keep alive for, what’s even the point?
…
Look, this isn’t a happy film. There is no happy ending. There’s not even a happy beginning, because Aniara, in any medium, is not a story about happiness. It’s a story about crumbling in the total absence of hope; a story where a population becomes so degraded it not only destroys its original home, but any possibility of subsequent ones. But it is relentlessly thoughtful, beautifully filmed, and the performances of the actors are fantastic. Emelie Jonsson as the Mimarobe, Bianca Cruzeiro as Isagel, Arvin Kananian as the increasingly unstable and authoritarian captain, and Anneli Martini as the drunken, cynical astronomer are genuinely outstanding.
Go and see it, if you can. But once you have, go back out into the world and make sure that you choose to keep it… because destruction, like creation, is a choice.
Good not to be always mindful/ Of our torpid transmigration
James Davis Nicoll of James Nicoll Reviews had this to say about the poem Aniara, published on February 11, 2015…
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/good-not-to-be-always-mindful-of-our-torpid-transmigration
Nicoll states in his review that Aniara takes place in the Twenty-Fourth Century. The century I found in the poem was the Twenty-Third and to me it seemed to be referring to that stretch of one hundred years as an earlier era, not the one that is their present. I know the film version never mentions a date, although as already noted the characters dress and act like Europeans from the early Twenty-First Century.
Nicoll complains that Martinson refers to the planet Jupiter as a star. No, the Jovian gas giant is not a star – it is 81 times less massive than it needs to be to become a sun, many Monoliths from the 1984 film 2010: The Year We Make Contact aside – but as Martinson was savvier about astronomy and other sciences than Nicoll may have realized, I think the author was taking literal poetic license here. Besides, mislabeling Jupiter’s species is the least among Martinson’s other takes on science and technology in his poem.
Interesting quotes from Nicoll’s review:
The 1999 edition begins with a lengthy essay about Martinson and his work, an essay I found informative but orthogonal to my purposes. For no reason I can explain or justify, if you arrange words in stanzas they become opaque to me (unless they are then set to music). I wanted to see if I could find my own way through the text without help. I didn’t actually want to have the information Klass was presenting until after I read the poem. For this reason, I suggest leaving the essay until last, which is what I did.
…
I think the moment when I began to suspect this wasn’t going to end well was somewhere around World-war Thirty-three or four, when humanity manages to do to Mima what eldritch horrors do to Lovecraft’s fragile protagonists; Mima’s godlike omniscience is a poisoned gift, given that it must share its universe with the ecocidal, genocidal humans. I felt sorry for the dancers and libertines desperately trying to forget the horror of their circumstances, but it is Mima who is the real victim. The hedonists are of the same species as the bomb-wielding leaders committing ecocide and the frequency of war argues it is an inherent characteristic of the species; Mima, in contrast, is an innocent bystander. Poor Mima.
I did a little research before I started reading the book (context!) and discovered that Poul Anderson had read Aniara. Given that Anderson’s Tau Zero turns upon a similar mishap [4], I was expecting to be reminded of Anderson’s work. As it turns out, the author that came to mind was not Anderson but Norman Spinrad. His 1974 novella Riding the Torch is in many ways a lot closer to Aniara than is Tau Zero; Anderson’s characters leave a peaceful, semi-utopian Earth that has fallen under the boot of the dread Swede. Spinrad’s Earth is burned clean of life, as it is in Martinson’s poem, Anderson primly acknowledges the game of musical beds his characters play, Spinrad, in contrast, seems to gleefully embrace his characters’ sweaty, Disco-Era hedonism.
…
4: Although neither the initial set-up nor its conclusion are as tragic as they are in Martinson’s poem, despite which — for reasons I cannot articulate — Martinson strikes me as less intrinsically glum than Anderson. That is interesting, because the poet led a much more challenging life than Anderson did. Martinson was orphaned and placed in a foster family that treated him as slave labor, He ran away, went to sea, and found himself a homeless vagrant when he returned to Sweden. There’s more; it’s sad; trigger warning.
I freely admit that having reasons that cannot be articulated are pretty much the same thing as having no reasons at all.
The Ending of Aniara Explained: What Is Mima & What Happened to the Survivors?
By Valentina Kraljik. Published on February 21, 2024.
To quote:
I was pleasantly surprised after watching ‘Aniara’ I didn’t expect the movie to deal with the subject in such a shallow way and yet it managed to convey some pretty powerful messages. However, due to the fact that most of what we’re supposed to notice is left untold, plenty of viewers struggle to understand the movie especially its ending. That’s why we’re here, let’s go.
When the Comments are the Really Interesting Parts…
https://www.csfd.cz/film/652198-aniara/prehled/
To quote some review comments from the above link which stood out:
A space opera reminding us that we are bound to each other. It also reminds me of the current coronavirus pandemic quarantine. It’s not very original, but it’s cold and cruel sci-fi. It has fascinating moments. The ending may not seem satisfying. This sci-fi drama is mainly sociologically based. The filmmakers watch as the social ties on the ship gradually loosen and disintegrate, frustration and hopelessness grow, and people resort to increasingly desperate consolations. The filmmakers’ observation of the inhabitants is austere to the point of cruelty. It’s a metaphor for a decaying human civilization.
…
For me personally, absolutely wasted potential. The women, who are destined to be prisoners, suddenly become the main “personalities” of the ship. A senseless ensues. The deepening depressive state of one of the protagonists, in confrontation with the enthusiasm of the other, then looked like pure dilettantism, even a blind person would have seen it! And on top of that, it’s filmed in a hotel with a casino, which throws the impression of the film even lower, so the interiors of the alleged sci-fi ship are unfortunately atrocious. In the end, I could tolerate all of the above, even if it’s absurdly stretched to an hour and a half… But that the most interesting years of the development of the disintegration of society, which you patiently wait and wait for, then boil down to the ridiculously short last 2 minutes of the film, it just makes you perfectly n*f*r*.
The events that would be clearly the most interesting thing about the film – meaning the total disintegration of society when it is clear that there will never be a “turnaround” – are completely buried. Normally, people aren’t locked in a can in space for ten years or more, and that’s exactly what the filmmakers should have gotten a lot more out of, which is why the film should have been much darker and really deep. To make us shiver from the vision of what could happen THEN to those people on the ship. Instead, we observe only the classic nightlife in Stockholm. Everyone there is either just having sex, playing on boxes, dancing at the disco and taking drugs, or praying and going to work. So just what they do normally not only on weekends in real life :-)
We Are Not Impressed
A review by Andrew Murray that is not intellectually impressed with the existential bleakness of Aniara. He gave it one review star:
https://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2019/08/26/aniara-movie-review/
To quote:
While the premise initially seems to be setting up Lord of the Flies in space with a touch of existential horror, the end result – much like the ship itself – is one that aimlessly drifts along without achieving anything along the way.
…
Where the film fails so dramatically is in its pacing and structure. Divided into a series of chapters separated by sudden and increasingly large time gaps, each section is intended to explore either an area of the dystopian society or nudge the plot further along its trajectory.
Taken individually, each chapter could theoretically work as its own short film, dropping viewers into its world when things have already gone awry; but when joined together, these chunks have no cohesion whatsoever. What’s worse is that many of the moments of crucial character development seem to occur during each time gap. A budding romance becomes a happy family, a cult rises and falls, and characters instantaneously hit a downward spiral. It’s not clear if the writers even knew what they were doing.
While intended to be a bleak metaphor for our insignificance within the sheer size of the universe, Aniara is instead a bleak viewing experience, devoid of any life or purpose of its own.
Finding Ironic Humor on the Road to Oblivion
“A sci-fi film that has it all: Outer space, European ennui, and sex cults” by Alex McLevy. Published on November 25, 2019…
https://www.avclub.com/a-sci-fi-film-that-has-it-all-outer-space-european-en-1839946172
To quote:
It’s an outer-space adventure for the whole family! Did I mention this is based on a well-known (in Sweden, anyway) poem? Swedish poets hate space, is the broad takeaway.
Over-the-top box copy: “A gripping and unpredictable space ride,” goes the front-cover blurb, which is accurate, as is this descriptor: “When Earth ends, a dangerous quest for a new life on Mars begins.” Way to avoid the over-the-top copy, Aniara. I’m going to chalk it up to that Scandinavian honesty – it wouldn’t have surprised me to see “This is a movie. You may or may not like it,” on the back cover.
…
The execution: It should be noted right away that Aniara breathes the rarefied air belonging to a small group of Home Video Hell entries known as Actually Good MoviesTM. This film is entertaining, and even when the narrative goes off the rails at times, it remains compelling in a serious (as opposed to so-dumb-it’s-great) kind of way. This is a sweeping, strange space opera, full of striking imagery and understated performances.
With that caveat out of the way, let me explain why I laughed so many times during this wild movie. First, it is just so, so Scandinavian. There’s an undeniable sense of stoic pragmatism – combined with the all-pervasive existential ennui saturating every frame – that could never be mistaken for an American perspective, and not just because they’re all speaking Swedish for the most part.
There’s three years that pass in the time span of the narrative before MR works up the nerve to say anything to the woman, Isagel, she’s been exchanging sideways glances with from the moment she set foot on board the Aniara. That’s about two years, 11 months, and three weeks longer than such a plot point would last in a Hollywood film. For God’s sake, this is a film where a machine kills itself from depression.
But also, there’s some unavoidable comedy from a film that pulls so many time jumps, in such an abrupt manner. The first jump – three weeks – made sense, as we’re still establishing the universe of the ship, and the society contained within it. Once MR speaks to the astronomer and learns the ship might not actually have a way to get back on course, she goes to the pilot, Chefone, who confirms this – while refusing to pause his extreme exercise regimen. Surely he could stop doing a handstand long enough to discuss the fate of the entire human population of his ship, including himself? Not a chance. Cut to three years later! And the best part is, future adrift human society seems to be making the best of it by… fusing EDM raves with some kind of country line-dancing routine.
…
Still, the jump to “Year 5,981,407” can’t help but be a little funny, even after all hope is lost, and we’re just waiting to see how it all ends – other than “badly.”
…
These stranger elements actually end shortly thereafter, when Isagel [The Astronomer, actually] discovers the probe approaching the Aniara, and everyone rallies in hopes of recovering fuel the ship can use to get back on track. It doesn’t work, of course, because the theme of this movie is that everything is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, and that there’s not really much difference between humanity on Earth and humanity in a giant spaceship cruising into the unknown; we’re all just trying to make life as best we can.
(The key difference, the film suggests, is that we’ve got nature to connect with here on our little planet, and it keeps us sane.) It’s a severe, stark, and pessimistic film, devoid of much hope or anything resembling warmth, save for the fleeting joy of MR’s family that gets cruelly taken away soon enough. I’m really not selling how much I enjoyed watching it.
…
Likelihood [Aniara] will rise from obscurity: The more I think about it, the more I think it may have a shot. This thing is tailor-made for midnight screenings at liberal arts colleges, where stoned sophomores can ruminate on the fundamental absence of a teleology to existence, save for the illusory nature of those that govern our collective myths, histories, and imaginary instantiations of society. Good times.
Damnable commentary track or special feature? All the behind-the-scenes featurettes are focused on the technical aspects of the film: visual effects, production design, sound design, and an art gallery depicting the conceptual design of the Aniara. They’re interesting enough, but no substitute for the feature I want to see, which is footage of each actor’s response when they first turned to the last page of the script and saw “Year 5,981,407.”
Movie Review: The Future is bleak, the end is nigh in Swedish sci-fi “Aniara”
Posted on May 7, 2019 by Roger Moore:
To quote:
But both [Aniara and High Life] are parables, microcosms of isolated society parked in the uninviting vastness of space. “Aniara” may have a dour Swedishness about its outlook, but with every day’s dire warnings about mass extinctions, dying oceans and a grim future chased off the front page by royal births and moronic tweets, you have to figure they’re onto something.
Aniara “teaches us how to die”
This review gets right to the point of the nihilism of the whole affair called Aniara. It also points out that what the people trapped on the Aniara did with their lives isn’t all that different from what many living now on Earth do with theirs: The planet is just a bigger ship.
https://www.cinetrange.com/2020/01/aniara/
January 7, 2020 by Luvan
NOTE: Luvan’s bio in the article alone is worth the figurative price of admission. It also explains why and how this review reads as it does.
To quote:
ANIARA is a stone thrown in the constellation Lyra. And the dog looks at the finger.
ANIARA is a simple and absolute, exponential film. If someone were to ask me what ANIARA is, I might also say “a philosophical and claustrophobic space epic”, but that wouldn’t mean anything. These words are too flat to describe the experience that occurs there. Too much pressed to their single dimension, while ANIARA is situated on several planes, which it pierces and traverses. It is a philosophical drill in that it teaches us how to die. Few films have obsessed me with their truth for so long. Few films expose the truth (love, tribe, hope, death) so concisely and compactly.
…
ANIARA is a space ferry from Earth to Mars. Of the kind I have so often taken between the continent and Scandinavia. Denmark and Norway, Germany and Sweden… From floating malls to gauges like Roy Anderson castings. Where everything is designed to forget that you’re just crossing. Casino, bar, discotheque, cinema, arcade, collective restaurants reminiscent of Club Med or Central Parks. Small cabins where two people sleep. On Aniara, an entertainment – in the Rousseauist sense of the term: that which distracts us from true philosophy, which is the art of dying – is out of our familiar ordinary: MIMA.
MIMA is a kind of organic plasma floating on the ceiling. Its golden reflections in perpetual and gentle movement hypotize its visitors, serving their brains a happy stroll in the land of yesteryear. Under the influence of MIMA, we walk barefoot in the moss, we observe dragonflies through droplets of dew, we plank in a lake while contemplating the migration of cranes, all lying in a small shopping mall room that could be used for a yoga class, our faces buried in a hollow Thai massage cushion. It is beautiful and contradictory, as the slow, abundant and colorful life of the Earth is recalled to the memory of the cosmonaut Kris, in the Tarkovskyian adaptation of Lem’s Solaris, while he haunts among the morbid sheets of a devastated space station.
…
ANIARA is a huge black bazaar and flat, which we are shown to drift through the years, like a nightmarish integrated circuit.
…
A singular sound design between Alien and jingle SNCF. The stage is set: we’re on the move, in an impossible in-between between the normality of a life Post-30-Glorious Western Life and Mythologized Heroic Survival behind closed doors in Hollywood.
And when space debris (humans) bump into the big mess, divert it from its course, and deprives it of its fuel, we immediately understand that we are not in a position to Cosmos 99, that there will be no libertarian heroism in that we are disoriented primates and that we are well-known primates: a breed of social animals concerned with the survival of their lives. their species more than their own lives.
Nobody’s Matt Damon. Ripley doesn’t exist. And survival is nothing else than a more sincere life: a line drawn between the birth and death, and which cannot be conceived in solitude. Where sex ceases to be that gimmicky studio thing for us appear as the essence of who we are.
…
It is difficult to spread out the story without plundering it. There is the cult of remembrance. The hope of being saved. The machinery that holds and lasts, much longer than pageantry. The pain, the difficulty of the story lies in this duration. There are incidents, but no adventure. The life of the passengers is ours.
Getting up, playing, talking, falling love, making love, eating, dancing, cultivating one’s spiritual life, having children, sharing our memories, getting organized, taking care of our loved ones, to fight against despair, the fatality of end, to lie down, to die, to keep the memory alive. We do not much more than the passengers on this ferry-on-Styx. On ANIARA, no uprising, revolt, panic, gang r*p*, struggles Clan. No advent of an oligarchy that is respected with the force of the whip. Life remains the same, moreover complicated, out of breath, tired. Aging, in short.
ANIARA is a dark film. And profoundly humanist. And carnal.
ANIARA watches our bodies go by with sadness and humanism.
ANIARA is no darker than the unfolding of our lives, that is to say, dark.
Science Fiction for Educated Grownups
Aniara’s release in the United States just before COVID-19 came along the following year did not stir much in the way of either interest or debate at the time as this next review thought it might. Now that the pandemic is hopefully receding into the distance, the film and its poem are starting to see more interest – and hopefully more attention paid to its urgent themes.
https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/ankara-review-1203194060/
To quote:
Each year brings an example or three of purported “thinking person’s science-fiction” films, a category that pretty much embraces anything not centered on monsters or lightsaber battles. These efforts are often more admirable in theory than result, but “Aniara” — the first film drawn from Nobel Prize-winning Swedish poet Harry Martinson’s 1956 cycle of 103 cantos — provides a narrative as satisfying as its conception is ambitious. This tale of a spaceship stuck wandering the cosmos after being forced off course is both impressive in its scope and intimate in its portrait of human nature under long-term duress.
Though inevitably destined to frustrate genre fans who think they want something different but still require conventional action thrills, Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja’s first feature should intrigue and reward those inclined toward adult drama who wouldn’t normally expect such tropes from a sci-fi movie.
There’s also the lure of topicality: Though its source material was originally written in response to Hiroshima and the Cold War, “Aniara” has renewed relevance, since the notion of humanity forced to flee an environmentally devastated Earth has become as scientifically plausible a future scenario as any. In any case, Magnolia’s limited Stateside rollout May 17 should hopefully stir some interest, and debate.
At Least Oblivion Will Have Nice Shopping Malls
To quote:
I found myself thinking about the ways we process the slow, constant drip of awful news – another crisis, another disaster, another extinction – while going on with our daily lives; we’re all on the Aniara, hoping someone will find a way to turn this thing around, disappearing into virtual realities (or new relationships) as a distraction. But we’re always aware of our collective trajectory.
Kågerman and Lilja set it out for us beautifully, framing the mounting panic and despair against an almost serene environment created by shooting in redressed shopping malls, giving the ark a soothing, elegant feel – and further distancing their project from the grotty corridors and laboratory spaces of High Life.
If anything, Aniara feels more like a response to Morten Tyldum’s wretched Passengers, that gross sci-fi romance where Chris Pratt gaslit Jennifer Lawrence into falling for him after releasing her from hibernation. The difference is, this movie doesn’t feel oxygen-deprived. It’s working with its whole brain, and a good portion of its heart.
Never Underestimate Cosmic Horror
https://filmschoolrejects.com/aniara-review/
To quote:
Aniara isn’t technically a horror film, but it’s ultimately as upsetting and oppressive as more traditionally harrowing fare. It’s the near definition of “cosmic horror” as the existential dread and fear of the unknowable fuel a growing sense of hopelessness, and while it avoids the grim degradations often found in more exploitative genre films the mental and emotional anguish are appropriately devastating. We are alone, we are eternally far from home, and the universe will always have the last laugh.
Voyage to the End of the Universe: Aniara (2018)to overwhelm the viewer with spectacle, and the overall sensibility on the ship is sleek and seductive.
It’s a pleasure palace, at least at first. People come, people go, things happen, but nothing really changes. The shiny surfaces of the ship’s interior, the neon blast of the ship’s casino, the Spartan living quarters for staff, and the lavish suites for passengers depict the world of Aniara as one of privilege, power, money, and a rigid class system which remains skeletally intact until the last moments of the ship’s existence.
The passengers on board live a life of purchased pleasures and bring all their worst habits with them. They gamble, drink, and pursue momentary satisfaction in casual sex, but the emptiness of life floating endlessly through space is inescapable. With Earth used up through overpopulation, wars, pollution, and global warming, there is nowhere to go but Mars, the closest semi-habitable planet.
But life on Mars is no picnic. The staff members continually tell the guests that they are going to a better new world, but they all know that such platitudes simply are not true. It is cold on Mars, there is radioactivity, and nothing can grow here other than in a greenhouse; the passengers are going to live a life that can be nothing more than a postscript on a hostile planet.
To keep the passengers happy, the crew try to maintain an attitude of perpetual optimism, even in the face of death. What was life on Earth like, anyway? It had been so long since anyone on board the ship had experienced anything like a real “Earth day” that it almost seemed like a dream. So, the passengers keep on shopping, playing the slot machines, drinking too much alcohol, swimming in the pool — anything to keep reality at bay. But there’s a terrible secret. This trip is really a one-way affair; no one makes a point of this, but it is implicit in the film’s central premise. Earth is exhausted; there is simply nothing left. Those moving to Mars will stay there permanently. They really can’t go home again.
…
Aniara is also a film that consistently works against audience expectations. When the ship is first cast adrift, we are sure that some means of propulsion will rescue them from their plight. When the probe is discovered, we feel that certain that it must contain the fuel that will return the ship to Earth. Although we know that Earth is a charred wreck of a planet and the Mars colony awaits, we want to return anyway – even if our home has been destroyed and almost nothing is left for us there. Surely something or someone will come to our rescue. That’s the conventional narrative.
When it becomes clear that there is no way out, after the cults and mass orgies have subsided, a strange calm comes over the crew and passengers. Ultimately, they accept their fate with a certain resolution, and, despite the bleak trajectory of the narrative, the film does not feel as hopeless as one would assume. The passengers and crew in the end of the film accept their fate, as a destiny that has been thrust upon them.
Does this leave the viewer with no characters with whom to empathise? Yes, to a certain extent it does, but this is by design rather than a flaw in the filmmaking; the film isn’t asking us to fall in love with a cast of well-rounded characters, it’s asking us to engage with it at an esoteric level, and the people depicted therein facilitate such engagement.
Along the same lines, I’ve seen some reviewers say the film is lifeless, that it’s too cold and detached. I’d agree that it’s detached, but again, this is by design. However, I certainly didn’t find it lifeless, quite the contrary in fact, with life on ship depicted vibrantly. It certainly asks a lot of the audience, much more than most science fiction, but to equate a lack of vitality on the ship with a lifelessness in the filmmaking is to parse the film on the most superficial of terms. Rather, the tone is precisely what it needs to be to carry its themes.
I will concede, however, that the science has some issues. Why, for example, would a ship the size of the Aniara be used as a short-distance transport vessel? It’s mentioned several times that the ship wasn’t built for long-term habitation, but one wonders why. Why are there so many amenities, why is the power that maintains life-support self-regulating, why are the algae farms designed to produce food indefinitely if the ship’s only intended use was to make the six-week round trip between the moon and Mars?
And the practical nature of the sheer size of the Aniara throws up its own problems. The filmmakers get around the issue of the immense escape velocity that would be required for a vessel this large to leave Earth’s gravitational pull by having the docking station on the moon – to enter orbit from the surface of the Earth, escape velocity must reach 7 miles per second (just over 25,000 miles per hour). However, a ship the size of the Aniara would never be capable of reaching such speeds from a stationary position on the planet’s surface. So that’s fair enough, with the implication being that the ship was built on-site at the lunar docking station.
What is a problem, however, is that Mars is (on average) 140 million miles from Earth, so for the Aniara to complete the journey in three weeks, it would need to be travelling at an average velocity of 277,777 miles per hour (to put this into perspective, the speed of sound is only 767.3 miles per hour). If we assume that the ship is travelling at such a speed (and we must, given the distance and time constraints), the power needed to slow the vessel down upon reaching Mars space is virtually unfathomable. Newton’s second law of motion states that “for a constant mass, force equals mass times acceleration”; in short, the greater the mass and the greater the speed, the more force it takes to slow down. So using a ship the size of the Aniara in the way in which the film does is not only impractical, it’s virtually impossible, irrespective of advances in technology.
Nevertheless, for me, the surrounding film is so accomplished, I can easily forgive the scientific inconsistencies (and if you’ve ever sat through a Star Wars film, so can you). Even something as exhaustively researched as Christoper Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) is riddled with scientific implausibilities and plot holes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great film. The same goes for Aniara (and if you’re thinking it’s sacrilegious to compare Aniara to Interstellar, I’ll do you one better; I enjoyed Aniara more, especially in the days after I saw it, as it continued to linger in my consciousness in a way Interstellar did not).
As aesthetically impressive as it is morally complex, as esoterically fascinating as it is unrelentingly despairing, this is a hugely impressive debut film. Equal parts haunting and provocative, the picture it paints of a humanity pushed to extremes and faced with its own extinction isn’t a pretty one, but it is an urgent and a relevant one, as we hurtle towards an extinction brought about by our own actions, rapidly approaching the point here, like the Aniara, we will no longer have the capacity to turn around. And when we reach that point, the only things in our collective future will be the all-encompassing frigidity, indifferent darkness, and deafening silence of the infinite.
Just the Links
Other notable – if not very quotable – published film reviews:
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/aniara-max-sci-fi-thriller.html
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13857101/aniara-is-a-spaceship-built-by-sorrow-and-the-apocalypse
https://www.filmstarts.de/kritiken/267137/bilder/?cmediafile=21690798
https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/496743-aniara/images/backdrops
https://letterboxd.com/film/aniara/
Selected Video Interviews
Video interview with Arvin Kananian (born 1988), the actor who played Captain Chefone:
This interview includes Kananian, who reveals that he wanted to make his portrayal of Chefone less dark than in the poem and base his character’s actions more on pragmatism:
https://flipscreened.com/2019/08/27/interview-its-not-a-warning-its-a-scream-aniara-2018/
Kananian also reveals that his character and The Intendent may have had a “romantic relationship” which ended when The Intendent was killed during the particle storm.
“When he dies, basically the captain dies. The only person he has any relationship with dies – that’s what triggers him to [attempt to] commit suicide. After that, the captain just goes on automatic captain-speaking. But he’s already dead. And he’s been trying physically to die.”
The actor also states that when Chefone is handing out that medal to MR for her work with the beam screen ten years into their journey, that no one in attendance was really listening by then.
“No one’s listening. He’s not listening to himself, really. He’s automatic.”
A modern-day Flying Dutchman story, Aniara explores what happens when humans are forced to confront the limits of their existence and survive despite insurmountable odds until they can do no more. In a way, then, it is not surprising that the film received such poor distribution, despite excellent reviews. Aniara is a film more concerned with the destruction of the Earth than the conquest of space, and it serves as a warning that civilisations are not endlessly resilient. Everything comes to an end and, right now, we are writing our last chapter.
The Prominent Science Periodical Nature Reviews Aniara
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2024/feature-articles/voyage-to-the-end-of-the-universe-aniara-2018/
To quote:
Reviews were confined mostly to trade publications. For the most part, they were favourable. Critic Glenn Kenny praised the film as “an exemplary high-concept contemporary sci-fi film”2 in a generally favourable notice, while Teo Bugbee of The New York Times found the film “depressing,” though admitting that the film’s “commitment to bleakness feels artistically admirable.” Leslie Felperin in The Guardian wrote that “the Swedish writing-directing team Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja deliver a cold, cruel, piercingly humane sci-fi parable that’s both bang on the zeitgeist and yet also unnervingly original.”
Variety’s Dennis Harvey offered one of the most perceptive reviews of the film, noting that, “though inevitably destined to frustrate genre fans who think they want something different but still require conventional action thrills . . . [the film] provides a narrative as satisfying as its conception is ambitious. This tale of a spaceship stuck wandering the cosmos after being forced off course is both impressive in its scope and intimate in its portrait of human nature under long-term duress.”
…
One commenter on Reddit described the film as being “criminally obscure,” which seems quite accurate to me. Without any sort of marketing campaign, the film almost instantly passed into oblivion, essentially mimicking the plot of the film itself.
Visually, the film is a polished marvel. The camera and editorial structure of Aniara is suitably restrained, creating a world that seems real and tactile. The film never attempts
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02581-w
To quote:
Aniara is short on space science. Humans have mastered space elevators, and can propel themselves the hundreds of millions of kilometres to Mars in just three weeks, thanks to the “fifth tensor theory” that allows them to “outsmart gravity”. They have developed computers that read people’s memories. But Kågerman and Lilja dwell little on the underpinnings of these advances. Nor is anything said about the lack of rescue ships, or how the on-board algae farms are capable of providing food indefinitely, if not palatably.
The film is no poorer for that. The ship and its journey are a stage for a subtle psychological exploration of human behaviour — our capacity for destruction and cruelty, as well as optimism against all odds. The camera’s lingering shots encourage us to see the — mostly female — characters in raw, un-airbrushed beauty, and a documentary-like approach lends a terrifying credibility to the narrative. Ultimately, however, this is a philosophical film: a soul-searching examination of our insignificance at the cosmic scale.
Aniara sticks closely to Martinson’s poem, which was inspired by the horrors of hydrogen-bomb tests during the cold war. A sense of doom is never far away. But the film’s macabre finale actually left me profoundly relieved, even elated, as if waking up from a nightmare. At heart, Aniara is a reminder that we live on a remarkable planet. Even as fires burn from the Arctic to the Amazon, there is still time to stave off tragedy — for now.
Aniara from a Spiritual Perspective
https://blessedmanifestation.com/aniara-movie-review-from-a-spiritual-perspective/
To quote:
We also see a rise in suicides and a decline in the overall appearance of the Aniara… it is far off course from the ‘paradise’ it once was. What else do you turn to for comfort? Spirituality to read between the lines and find the deeper meanings behind the mundane–maybe to find the answer that only lives in the unseen? Or do you numb? Or self destruct?
…
By the way I also noted the probe looked like a giant metallic p*n*s – a phallus wandering aimlessly in the void of space.
…
Isagel is quietly spiraling and MR tries to remain optimistic and cheer her up. I feel at this point this is one of the ways MR copes with the despair around her, to prevent her from panicking herself.
…
One of the clear messages of this film was to not take what we have for granted. We still have our Earth and it still provides like a loving Mother, but what will happen if we stop taking care of her? If we stop listening to her pleas for help? Will she give up on us like MIMA did for the passengers of the Aniara?
…
The society of this film gave up on Earth and were ready to start again on Mars, and then the audacity of humanity to think once again that the Sun revolved around them? In other words, that we can still have our luxuries and escapes, and still feel like we’re entitled to live in the same way on Mars or any other planet for that matter. This movie is an omen for us. It took the Aniara over 5 million years to reach the “light” and reach another Earth-like planet, but humans didn’t pass the “test” of time – they were not worthy of this new home. For what? To f*ck it up like they did the first one?
The anomalous probe represented the possibility of other life; to serve as a reminder that we’re not the only ones in this Universe.
And just like we search for meaning in the void, possibly so are other species. The Astronomer made clear that the Universe owes us nothing, and the vastness of space was a cold reminder of what humanity lost out on with Earth. We traded in certainty and warmth for darkness and emptiness.
…
There was a tension throughout the film between the father-figure Captain and the mother-figure MR. The Father tried to keep the peace and tend to his flock with purpose and discipline, even if he had to lie to accomplish that goal. And the Mother tried to remain positive and provide some sense of warmth, and comfort to everyone she came in contact with.
This I feel is why the Captain and MR clashed throughout the film; there was a bit of a power struggle there which I think is relevant to us now. The insistence of the patriarchy to maintain some kind of order at all costs, while ignoring the warnings and messages of the matriarchy, until it’s too late. MR warned, MIMA warned, the Astronomer warned, and yet the Captain wanted to continue to plow through his plan and mission. Possibly if they worked together from the beginning the first accident would have never happened in the first place?
Moral of the story? The “new world” won’t ever be better than our current one. Let’s really make sure to take care of what we have while we have it.
I wonder how MR and the others survived so long. At Year 10 we saw the algae being contaminated–what did they survive on all those years? On faith? Did faith that one day they’d return to the light give them the willpower to keep going?
…
By the way, I read in another review of this film that the Aniara ended up being able to turn around when it got to the Lyra constellation, and over the course of 5 million years was able to return to Earth, which we see at the end of the film; a green and pristine planet once again. I loved this perspective–the ending is really up to interpretation but I definitely love this one. [No, that is not what happened at the end, but I get it that some people want this small hope for the Aniara, no matter the reality.]
My thoughts, inspired from this review:
The people aboard the Aniara are surrounded by light in the form of billions of Milky Way stars, but their numbers and vastness only frighten and diminish them.
I am reminded of Isaac Asimov’s famous short story “Nightfall” from 1941:
The people of the alien world Lagash reside in a six-sun solar system that puts them in eternal daytime and keeps them from seeing and knowing the rest of the Universe. This remains the case except for once every 2,049 years for one whole day, when their stars are eclipsed from view by their own planet and an unknown moon.
Then the Lagashians discover the truth of their reality: They are embedded within a huge globular star cluster of tens of thousands of suns, which terrifies and drives them insane. They destroy their civilization as they try to make light during the frightening and unfamiliar darkness by burning everything they can and have to start all over again.
The Asimov story has an unhappy ending for its characters, unless you take a stoic view of civilizations cycling repeatedly as part of the natural process of existence. There is also the hope that the academic people who hid in a pre-planned shelter with records of their current society, including images from most of the impending eclipse of their suns, will help to keep their current world from having to completely rebuild from scratch as happened every time before.
You may read the original “Nightfall” in either of these two locations:
https://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/Nightfall.htm
https://sites.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/nightfall.pdf
Two astrophysicists investigated whether the six-sun system of Lagash could actually exist:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.4895
Setting One’s Mind on Fire
https://www.amindonfire.com/aniara-science-fiction-five-million-years-in-the-making/
To quote:
Aniara asks some big life questions like what do you do when your days are numbered? Instinctively, whether we admit or not, we know our days are numbered. However, we have the luxury of living a full and complete life. We can change our scenery, meet new people, and do new things. When you take that all away and you’re surrounded by the same four walls a sense of purpose and life disappears. Aniara asks what would you do in the same situation?
…
A typical Hollywood science-fiction movie would want to explain everything that has happened in the movie. James Gray’s Ad Astra was roughly two and half hours with no questions unanswered. Nolan’s Interstellar ran almost three hours and still left the audiences with questions. Leaving an audience with questions is not a bad thing. In fact, some movies are made better by what they don’t say than what they do say.
COMMENTS: Ironic how Nolan tried to make his Interstellar the next 2001: A Space Odyssey, but often missed on why his work would never match Kubrick’s film. Purposefully not answering every question posed in the film is a big one.
The above review also clings to the hope that somehow the Aniara was flung around by the Lyran exoplanet it encounters nearly six million years in the future and is thrown back towards Earth, even if everyone left onboard is long, long gone.
Eyeing Aniara
Eye for Film looks at Aniara:
https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/Aniara-2018-film-review-by-jennie-kermode
To quote:
The quiet politeness with which people collectively surrender to their fate owes something to middle class Swedish culture and something to the work of Nevil Shute . The practicalities of day to day survival gradually give way to an all-consuming search for meaning en route to an ending that is both bleak and strangely beautiful.
When a Reviewer Has Read the Poem and Done Their Homework, Too
This review from The Movie Database by Stephen Campbell on October 8, 2019, goes into some thoughtful details on Aniara, with some good technical questions:
https://www.themoviedb.org/review/5d9d156af96a39001bf6bc7a
To quote:
An adaptation of the poem, Aniara is the debut feature film from writers/directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, and is an exceptionally ambitious film that is also exceptionally well made. With its measured pacing, existential musings, limited cast of characters, open-ended narrative, and stylised visual design, it’s about as far from multiplex fare as you can get – Star Wars it most certainly is not.
Indeed, it owes more to esoteric films such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solyaris (1972), Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007), and Claire Denis’s High Life (2018) than it does to the escapist action-packed science fiction films of mainstream Hollywood. And yes, the characters are a little underdeveloped, with only a couple getting much of an arc, and yes, the science isn’t exactly kosher, but irrespective of that, this is a provocative, morally complex, and existentially challenging film that I thoroughly enjoyed, from its low-key opening to its chillingly effective dénouement.
…
In the poem, one of the major themes is the importance of art, which is symbolised by MIMA, with Martinson examining what might happen when art is no longer capable of interpreting reality for us – what does a human society without any kind of artistic output look like, how does it work, something represented in the poem by MIMA’s malfunction. In depicting such a situation, Martinson emphasises aspects such as hedonism, fertility cults, education, routine, and totalitarianism. Ultimately, however, nothing can replace the vital role that art plays in shaping our understanding of existence, nor its intrinsic importance for the maintenance of the human condition.
The film doesn’t really reproduce this aspect of the poem (as I said, it’s less allegorical), but it does examine how people flock to MIMA more and more as the escapist experience becomes increasingly crucial to life on ship. And as in the poem, MIMA soon proves reluctant to continue processing the never-ending onrush of negative emotions, with the passengers’ sense of pointlessness and despair becoming overwhelming, to the point that she tells MR, in a surprisingly moving scene, “I want peace”. HAL 9000 she is not; he’d have been able to suck it up.
…
In terms of problems, perhaps the most significant is the lack of character arcs (although this is also true of the poem). Aside from MR, Isagel, Chefone, and the Astronomer, there are no characters worth mentioning, and even their arcs are fairly rudimentary. This is felt most in the lack of disparate viewpoints on the Aniara; pretty much everything is focalised by MR, so it would have been interesting to meet characters with distinct beliefs, backgrounds, and denominations (although, having said that, the poem has no such characters, and to turn the film into some kind of universal microcosm wherein all Mankind must be represented may very well have betrayed its central themes).
An interview with Directors Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja on the end of the world in
Aniara the Audiobook
This is a four-part (four YouTube videos) discussion on the making of the epic poem Aniara into an audiobook format, complete with transcripts:
Selected Published Interviews
Aniara Interview: Directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja on updating a Swedish sci-fi classic for the 21st Century. Published on 1 September 2019 by Sarah (no last name listed):
https://www.cautionspoilers.com/interviews/aniara-directors-pella-kagerman-hugo-lilja/
Some of the more interesting and revealing quotes from the interview:
Sarah: Were you sci-fi fans anyway? Or was it particularly the resonance of the story?
Hugo: I have a background in role-playing games, those kind of things. Like, nerdy role-playing games. So I come from that sort of fantasy and sci fi and horror, games really. And that brought me to film because I wanted to do it professionally. We have been working together for ten years and you [Pella] come more from like art and documentary. Then we have mixed each other’s interests.
Pella: What I never understood before meeting Hugo is that sci-fi, it’s a lot about philosophy.
Sarah: Because philosophy is your background, isn’t it?
Pella: Yes, and psychoanalysis.
…
Sarah: If you were in this situation, would you rather be one of the passengers or one of the crew who knows what’s going on? Because there’s something to be said for blissful ignorance, isn’t there, when you’re hurtling towards your doom.
Pella: That’s such a good question. We didn’t really think about that until we were done with the film.
Hugo: You know, maybe we are the passengers because we are consuming and we’re critical to how we destroy Earth today. But we still live in it and don’t change our ways. So yes, we are the passengers.
Sarah: When people see the film, do you worry you’re preaching to the converted in a sense? I mean, it’s a warning for what we’re doing. Are we talking to the same people all the time who already know?
Pella: I know we do.
Hugo: Yes, and that’s a problem. Sci-fi could be a vessel for reaching a larger audience. I’m not sure we do that with this film.
Pella: But we are living in such turbulent times that I think we should continue screaming.
Sarah: And eventually hopefully it gets through to them.
Pella: But I think we maybe have to be smarter, in that there’s a big responsibility on us to not be passengers but to try to act. And I think we’re both thinking about how to reach a bigger audience in the future.
Maybe we don’t need those super dark stories now. Maybe we have stories where we show that change is possible, that you can actually change society completely and you will be fine and it will even be better, you know? That those are the stories needed today. Because with the climate crisis, it’s so abstract, it’s hard to grasp everything and you need those stories that make it just simpler to act.
Where I Got This Essay Title from and Kågerman’s Grandmother as the Mima
To quote:
Kågerman tells Inverse that she “wanted to explore what it means to be human without Earth.”
“It’s a thought experiment really,” she says via email, “because so far no one has experienced this. Every human ever born, was born here on Earth. I find that quite breathtaking! I can’t grasp the vastness of space! How completely unique Earth is, or at least how enormous the distances to a planet similar to Earth is, at least in our measurements.”
Kågerman begins Aniara with climate change as the reason space travel became an everyday reality, but that’s not to say our planet burning up is what will get us to space. Rather, it’s telling of Kågerman’s generally pessimistic view of humanity, people prone to breaking everything no matter where in the cosmos we find ourselves.
“I believe that this is actually what the Apocalypse looks like,” she says, “We are risking Earth to become uninhabitable for us and lots of other species. But I’m a little embarrassed to admit that this is also kind of news to me. When we started making the film, I had no idea how bad it actually was.”
Kågerman’s relationship to Martinson’s Aniara can be traced to her childhood. Her grandmother gave her copies of the poem and took her to see productions of the Aniara opera. “The day after she got a stroke and ended up in the hospital,” Kågerman recalls, “and I was by her side reading the poem.”
As Kågerman’s grandmother slowly got better, the two got lost in their imaginations, pretending the hospital was the Aniara spaceship. The doctors were the crew, the patients were the passengers. “And she pretended she was the artificial intelligence,” Kågerman says.
Decades later, Kågerman obtained permission to adapt Martinson’s poem thanks to the blessings of the poet’s daughters, Harriet and Eva. “They were very open-minded and excited about the film,” she says. “Their only concern was for us to stay true to the ending of the poem, which we also did.”
“We’re already on board the Aniara in one way,” adds Kågerman. The director feels that whether it’s Earth or the Aniara, humans will inevitably treat their environment in the same, destructive way.
“But that doesn’t stop us from trying to do the best we can out of our lives and it’s the same with the time left on Earth,” she adds. “I think some people need to understand how bad it actually is, while others need to get some optimism back so we can continue fighting. I don’t think we should abandon this ship!”
Examining Existence in the Emptiness of Space with Philosophical Sci-Fi ‘Aniara’
This 2019 interview with Kagerman and Lilja (spelled Lijia in the piece) by the ironically named Lesley Coffin introduced the essay section titled That Thing with Feathers: Hope in Aniara, quoting a teenager on the cusp of adulthood who was despondent over the perceived lack of hope just after she viewed the 2018 film.
Now other relevant sections of this interview are highlighted here.
To quote:
Lesley Coffin: So just as the space program was starting and before we really understood the science of everything [in regards to the epic poem’s release in 1956]. Did you try to make scientific sense of the story now that we have more knowledge of astronomy?
Hugo Lijia: In the book he’s describing things which are almost magical, so we took some things out and replaced them with things which are scientifically feasible about what could happen in the future. But we didn’t try to do that with everything.
Pella Kagerman: But we tried where we could. We met with so many astronomers and astro-scientists about what was possible. We got into a huge fight about how high to make the ceiling and you can’t even see them in the film.
Hugo Lijia: But at the heart of it, the film is about the vastness of space, so we made a point of getting distances correct. We double the speed the ship is traveling from what is in the book and they’re traveling to Kepler which is a plant which could potentially support life which was only found a few years ago. So, we updated some things, but also ignored some other things. They aren’t communicating with earth because there are no cell phones in our movie.
…
Lesley Coffin: Science fiction’s all about representing figuratively something out our present day lives. How do you interpret the character of Mimaroben, who is herself connected to the Mima room she works in, being this empathetic figure?
Hugo Lijia: I think they both exist as representations for the planet earth. We take and take from it and inflict pain on them.
Pella Kagerman: But they’re also a substitute for other things. Mima is pretending to be something to all these people until it’s destroyed under their pressure.
…
Lesley Coffin: Had you read the poem before starting this project?
Hugo Lijia: I had tried to read it as a kid but I just couldn’t get into it. But then Pella told me about it and I was old enough…
Pella Kagerman: And smarter.
Hugo Lijia: …to understand it. Reading it you can understand why he won the Noble Prize.
Pella Kagerman: But he won the prize and then soon after committed suicide Japanese style.
Lesley Coffin: You mentioned that he’s well known in Sweden, is that tragic part of his personal history part of his allure to readers?
Pella Kagerman: No, because they lied about it in the press. His win of the Nobel Prize was the first scandal they experienced because he was a member of the Swedish Academy. And he also suffered a brutal upbringing. He was sold to farmers as a child. He wrote about that as well, and I think Aniara is a very personal story. I believe the word means depression in another language.
…
Lesley Coffin: Did you consider trying to get the film made though different channels, like at a studio?
Pella Kagerman: We were offered two million dollars but we decided not to take it.
Hugo Lijia: We didn’t want to make an English language film. We had an earlier experience that was negative. And we felt it was important to make it in Swedish. We love the actors and love the language.
Lesley Coffin: And it would have been completely different because the poem isn’t read by as many English-speaking audiences and the reference point would have been completely different. In Hollywood it probably would have been treated as a more generic science fiction film, rather than a philosophical one.
Pella Kagerman: We pitched it in Hollywood and a big time producer was interested until we got to the end and everyone’s dying. He’s like, but someone survives right? And we were like, we got the rights to the poem on that one condition… everyone has to die.
Lesley Coffin: Did you look at any science fiction films for visual inspiration while making the film?
Hugo Lijia: We watched all the space films but tried really hard not to imitate any of them. That’s the reason we spent so much time talking with scientists. We wanted to find ways to portray space as something more boring. This is a film about the vastness of space.
Pella Kagerman: They’re talking about a close planet but a close planet in space is relative. We kept trying to get less and make it more boring. But we did add some dots anyway. Just so people know its space and not a backdrop.
Hugo Lijia: We had so many discussions about how bright a star would be. We spent a lot of time talking about that detail.
Concepts of Aniara Blog: Behind-the-Scenes and Production Designs
The Concepts of Aniara blog is an excellent resource for behind-the-scenes technical information on the film. This includes beautiful set photographs and design artwork, a labeled diagram of the various sections of the transport spaceship, and even a chart of the distances traveled by the Aniara comparing the differences in space and time between the poem and the film!
https://conceptofaniara-blog.tumblr.com/
Quoting from the section “No-Set Sci-Fi”:
https://conceptofaniara-blog.tumblr.com/post/183362780339/no-set-sci-fi
Turning a poem like Aniara into a film is basically impossible. So much of what makes it special is embedded in the language, the rhythm, and the atmosphere – in the fantastic, quasi-scientific neologisms and mysticism – so that any adaptation will inevitably leave a film feeling flatter than the original. Aniara is also a text that is dear to many, for different reasons, and the changes inherent in re-presenting the story were always sure to put off as many as they would please.
It seemed like a smart move then, when Pella and Hugo told us that they wanted to make Aniara into a film, but with a low budget and shot on-location, and that they wanted to make a film that felt ordinary – mundane, even. That it would have a very different aesthetic than the poem but be true to its spirit.
From the very beginning, Pella and Hugo had a vision of Aniara as a kind of cruise ship, like the ones that cross the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland. These large ships ferry people, up to about 3,000 per ship, in a drunken haze fueled by tax-free shopping, self-service wine on tap, and all-you-can-eat buffet meals, combined with themed bars and kitsch night clubs.
Relentlessly these ships have been crossing the Baltic for half a century, and much like the spaceships in Aniara that ferry people from Earth to Mars, they are places where the extraordinary and the very mundane collapse into each other. Places where the dream of that one fabulous night, is repeated over and over again until everything is bleached into a grey, flavorless eternity.
VFX – A video presentation of some of the special effects in Aniara:
Swedish Film Database on Aniara
With lots of cinematic technical details on the film:
https://www.svenskfilmdatabas.se/en/item/?type=film&itemid=79736
The site also contains these useful article links:
To quote:
So, is it just money and more affordable computing power for the visual effects that are required in order to cure the Swedish sci-fi drought? An optimistic lesson to be learned from Aniara, whose futuristic environments were partly found in the location of a large Stockholm shopping mall (Mall of Scandinavia, to be specific), is that creative solutions are worth more than high budgets. And creative innovation was after all exactly what enabled Méliès to take us to the moon, all those years ago.
Imagination is born out of practical resistance and existential challenge. Let’s hope that we do not have to see every forest burn and inland ice melt before we can enter the golden age of Swedish sci-fi film.
Aniara Study Guide
https://www.filminstitutet.se/sv/fa-kunskap-om-film/filmpedagogik/filmhandledningar/aniara/
The Aniara Study Guide is in Swedish; however, there is a menu at the cursor to translate highlighted sections into English if required.
To quote:
When Harry Martinson’s poems are made into films, it is with the climate crisis as an accompaniment. The passengers of the spaceship Aniara are on their way from the destroyed Earth to a meagre life on Mars, when a collision with space debris throws the spacecraft off course, straight into unknown space.
The film raises many existential questions about what it is to be human, about our relationship to nature and the planet, to power and religion, group and individual. Perhaps it can even ignite a spark for environmental commitment and a desire to work for a better future.
Operas and Other Such Productions
The various forms of the original Aniara operas may be found and viewed in the essay section titled Aniara… The Musicals.
“Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space by Harry Martinson; Aniara an opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl; Aniara a film directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja.” From the New York Review of Books by Geoffrey O’Brien, published August 15, 2019.
https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-new-york-review-of-books/20190815/281621011922582
To quote:
It is easy enough to situate Aniara as the product of its historical moment, but it carries a quantum of unease that keeps it from settling into the past. It persists on its trajectory like the spaceship proceeding unstoppably toward nothingness.
…
Returning to Sweden with tuberculosis and more or less penniless in 1927, within a few years [Martinson] succeeded in establishing himself as an important young poet. In the title poem of his first book, Ghost Ships (1929), can be found these lines:
Look, a thousand ships have lost their course and drifted off in the fog and a thousand men have foundered while praying to the stars.
The marine realms of Martinson’s early poetry forecast Aniara’s vision of cold infinite space. On the one hand it feels like a poem of the future, on the other like a distillation not only of his own experience but of the awe and foreboding that pervades a long line of works of the previous century – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, Melville’s Moby-Dick – in which incommensurable oceanic vastness is tied to intimations of wrongdoing and fatality. But there is a more modern aspect to Martinson’s sea poems, a ferocious clarity about the monstrousness of the industrialism that the great ships embody, their capacity to crush all obstacles indifferently.
In the 1930s he would give himself over to prose tracts decrying modern man’s alienation from the natural world and making utopian appeals, under the rubric of what he called “geosophy,” for a return to life in harmony with nature. His nightmarish perception of modern technology was compounded by his experiences as a volunteer in Finland during the 1940 war against Soviet forces. At a meeting with Niels Bohr during this period, he expressed misgivings about the possible uses of the cyclotron particle accelerator for the development of advanced weaponry.
“Aniara: On a Space Epic and its Author”, by Aadu Ott and Lars Broman, from 1988:
https://www.ips-planetarium.org/page/a_ottandbroman1988
This text was originally published in 1992 jointly by Bishop Planetarium, 201 10th Street West, Bradenton, Florida 34205, USA, and Broman Planetarium, Kärnvedsgatan 11, SE-416 80 Göteborg, Sweden. Reprinted from the Planetarian, Volume 27, Number 2, June, 1998.
Playing with Aniara
Here is a professional stage production of Aniara from 1985 videotaped in its entirety and uploaded to YouTube. The production is in Swedish with no translations:
Aniara, the Choral-Theater Work
The professional chamber choir calling themselves the Crossing Choir have been presenting their unique musical adaptation of Aniara across the globe since 2019, including in the work’s native Sweden.
A fifteen-minute preview video of their take on Aniara may be found on the Crossing Choir page dedicated to this work, which also includes further videos on how they made this production along with blogs by the various makers and performers:
http://aniara.crossingchoir.org/
Aniara by Dudley Baker
Artist Dudley Baker has released two musical video interpretations of Aniara in 2021 and 2024, respectively. Baker focused on the space vessel’s main Artilect, the Mima, and her interactions with the humans on board.
The first work is summarized thusly:
Music by Dudley: Drifting in a ship through space for who knows how long, a voyager steps out of their world using something known as the Mema. Conjuring images of home through a holographic simulation, the voyager takes a break and has a swim in a nameless lake. A welcome break from their timeless tomb.
A Short Film inspired by Aniara
https://filmshortage.com/shorts/aniara/
To quote:
Based on a segment of Harry Martinson’s Aniara, written in 1956, the short film takes on a visual journey from effects technical director Romain Le Guillerm. While the story is vague with the sci-fi setting, we are quickly captured by the transcending images that simply let our imaginations roam along. We spoke with Romain who told us a little more about his intentions and process.
Aniara: The Graphic Novel
A graphic novel titled Aniara: Freely after Harry Martinson, authored by Knut Larsson (born 1972) and published in hardback in 2015 is described here:
https://www.adlibris.com/se/bok/aniara-fritt-efter-harry-martinson-9789175150543
Scenes from the graphic novel:
To quote:
Aniara was first published in 1956 and received a great reception. But perhaps it is only today that the space epic fully emerges as one of the most artistically and intellectually challenging works of our time.
Harry Martinson himself described the book as follows in 1957: “We believe that it is enough to leave it to the politicians to manage some practical coexistence details. But we must all feel our complicity in the world situation. We must experience our membership in the cosmos and our co-responsibility when destruction is unleashed.”
Biographies and Bibliographies
This is a bibliography of Harry Martinson from the Nobel Prize site titled “Harry Martinson: Catching the dewdrop, reflecting the cosmos”, authored by Ulf Larsson:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1974/martinson/article/
This news article, published on January 2, 2025, details some of the discussions by the members of the Nobel Prize Academy to their awarding Martinson and Eyvind Johnson the prize for Literature in 1974 that resulted in that infamous scandal and may have contributed to Martinson taking his own life:
https://swedenherald.com/article/the-secrecy-is-lifted-on-the-prize-that-ruined-everything
This piece is both a review of the Aniara poem and a bio on Harry Martinson in one. The author notes that the English translation does not quite capture the Swedish meanings – which is rather important with a poem like Aniara!
https://www.zenker.se/Books/aniara.shtml
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry on Harry Edmund Martinson and his work:
https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/martinson_harry
The Star Song
The New York Review of Science Fiction republished Martinson’s 1938 essay “The Star Song” in their Issue 353 in 2020, introducing the first English translation of this work. This essay also contains the first known published mention of the word Aniara by the author.
https://www.nyrsf.com/2020/06/harry-martinson-the-star-song.html
The translator Daniel Helsing had this to say about “The Star Song” in his introduction:
“The Star Song” remains one of the most perceptive and beautiful formulations of the challenges of writing poetry about science and the universe in our time. Not only does it defamiliarize habitual ways of thinking about space and poetry – it is poetic in itself, at times even rivaling Aniara. “The Star Song” is a hidden gem of sf poetics, and I have done my best to convey a sense of Martinson’s striking questions and poetic language.
Harry Martinson in Time Blog
This is a Swedish blog dedicated to Harry Martinson in all his forms, including Aniara of course. To give a first example, see the essay section titled Aniara… The Musicals on the opera adaptation with a link to the column on the production’s fiftieth anniversary.
The blog began in 2007, with its last post in 2023. You will learn much about the man, his writings, and his culture from this site beyond the typical summarized biographies and bibliographies:
https://harrymartinsonitiden.blogspot.com/
A blog post from 2008 discusses an essay written about Aniara by a student named Martin Söderström, who titled his work after this quote from Canto 26 spoken by the Mima: “But there is no protection against man” …
https://harrymartinsonitiden.blogspot.com/2008/04/tv-ungdomars-intressanta-uppsatser-om.html
To quote:
Martin Söderström summarizes his essay as follows: In today’s rapidly expanding society, completely characterized by materialism only intended for our short-term well-being, humans seem to have dismissed the idea of possible consequences of their actions. Despite countless attempts to spread knowledge about how we affect our world, humans seem to be reluctant to make changes and global warming is dismissed by many as pure nonsense. More than fifty years ago, the epic Aniara was written, which dealt with man’s blind self-destruction, which today is perhaps even more evident than before.
Another interesting quote, this one from Harry Martinson, taken from a 2016 blog post:
“What used to belong to the manageably obvious has swelled to coincide with the mysterious and immense. With all our protective frameworks around us, we have been hurled out into infinity.” – Harry Martinson from the Preface to Aniara, edition 1974.
A blog post from 2020 details a thesis written by Hungarian Laura Kohlheb titled Harry Martinson’s Aniara in the European Epic Tradition, published in 2018:
https://harrymartinsonitiden.blogspot.com/2020/02/laura-kohlheb-mastersstudent-pa-elte.html
The post above, which sadly does not contain a link to Kohlheb’s thesis, nor could I find it online, does include some interesting comments by three individuals who compare the poem with the film, with the latter not coming out quite as favorably.
Here is one more interesting blog post from 2019 that goes into detail on the background of creating Aniara and the meanings behind certain names and words:
https://harrymartinsonitiden.blogspot.com/2019/05/tankar-av-harry-martinson-vid-sjon.html
To quote:
“It is most serious of all,” says Harry Martinson, “is that we have abolished concepts of guilt. We believe that it is enough to leave it to the politicians to manage some practical cohabitation details. But we all need to feel our participation in the world situation. We Must Experience Our Membership in the Cosmos and our co-responsibility when the devastation is unleashed. […] Religion is for in harmony with the cosmos, so that I experience a clarity and act from a clarity and a conviction of love and righteousness.”
Four Examples of Being Stuck on a Spaceship
A blog made by one Tiff Graham (TiGra) describes herself in the “Artist Statement/Bio” section as “a visual artist/ethnographer/cultural specialist/eLearning developer/writer” who also “writes eclectic and highly researched essays because doctoral degrees do that to a person.”
TiGra also declares having “interests that range from parades to protests marches, science fiction, technology, environment, foodways, futures thinking, and other things related to being human on earth and in space.”
Among Ms. Graham’s blog essays is one I came across posted on May 28, 2020, titled “Trapped on a Space Ship”. Inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic then just getting underway, the artist wrote about four science fiction films whose plots involve groups of people being confined to vessels in space for frighteningly long periods of time. Aniara and Avenue 5 are among the quartet, with the 2018 Swedish film and the 2020 to 2022 American television series being discussed first and second, respectively:
https://tiffgraham.weebly.com/blog/trapped-on-a-space-ship
To quote from the above blog post:
Learned lessons for when stuck on a space ship:
- Make sure there is plenty of alcohol.
- Poop is a radiation shield though I’m questioning that.
- Be aware of the corporate policies before embarking on a trip.
- Bring some plants to grow.
- Assume everyone goes crazy at some point unless you have something to do, so get a job.
- Do not join the cults though they do seem to help with childcare.
And expect some unexpected sex moments, maybe with a cult or just a crazed scientist on the space ship. I guess that crazed scientist scenario would apply more to the High Life (2018) movie directed by Claire Denis. I didn’t mention it ‘cause that is literally a story about prisoners sent to live on a space ship versus paying customers accidentally becoming prisoners in space. Probably no difference in the end.
Final Thoughts
I’m feeling this COVID-19 isolation isn’t half as bad as being trapped on a ship in outer space. I feel a bit cheered up now – good old Schadenfreude.
Academic Papers and Presentations
For a famous poem that is now ready to celebrate seventy years since its public inauguration, Aniara has naturally generated quite a few academic papers and books delving into its literally universal topics.
Next are links to scholarly essays and presentations that will add to your further appreciation and comprehension of Harry Martinson’s creation. As you may imagine, this collection is far from complete.
… and Beyond the Infinite… The Eternal Trip of ANIARA
Presentation on the Swedish science fiction film Aniara, given 14 January 2021 at the virtual conference Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics in Fiction, Film and Culture. Conducted by Dr. Simon Spiegel of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and hosted by Cappadocia University, Turkey.
Two online locations to view this conference:
“‘I Close the Mima’: The Role of Narrative in Harry Martinson’s Aniara” from Scandinavica Volume 54, Number 2, 2015:
Abstract:
In 1956, Swedish writer and Nobel Laureate Harry Martinson published an epic science fiction poem, Aniara, about a spaceship thrown off course and dooming its passengers to an eternity of deep space travel. Aboard was also the Mima, an artificial intelligence that eventually committed suicide out of despair. The Mima is generally perceived to be a mimetic construct, but this article also interprets her in the form of a personified narrative: when the Mima dies, both the community aboard the Aniara, and the structure of the poem itself, breaks down into individualised constituents.
“Aniara Analysis: A Deep Dive into Harry Martinson’s Epic Poem”
https://api.sccr.gov.ng › public-data-files › aniara-analysis.pdf
Abstract:
Comparing Aniara’s depiction of technology with other works. The Impact of Aniara on Swedish Literature: An analysis of the poem’s influence on Swedish literature and its position within the canon.
Aniara may take place aboard a giant space vessel centuries in the future, but it is really all about the terrestrial environment, especially in the film version…
“Alone in the dark nature: eco melancholia in Harry Martinson’s Aniara and its film adaptation” by Giovanni Za:
Abstract:
Epic poem Aniara was published in 1956 by Harry Martinson. Its 2018 film adaptation by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja contributed to a rediscovery of the original work and ignited further interpretations. Aniara depicts the long ill-fated trip of the eponymous spaceship, which supposedly should have carried thousands of people away from Earth during “a time of calm, repose and quarantine”.
A malfunction knocks Aniara off course and leaves the spacecraft wander towards the limits of both nature’s empty space and humans’ experience. While the epic poem, written in the tension-stricken time of Cold War, pointed at “toxic radiation” as reason for the exile from Earth, the film version focuses on the consequences of climate change.
Alone and directionless in a hostile un-nature, humans lack ground. Ghostly images of the environment return in the much alluring pictures broadcasted by Mima – the spaceship controlling machine which offers consolation and an ephemeral nostalgia of lost unity.
The aim of this article is to further investigate the consequence of the broken bond between humans and nature in Aniara and provide an ecocritical and posthumanist reading of Martinson’s and Kågerman/Lilja’s works as a representation of mankind as a peculiar form of lone exobiology adrift in the mute (techno)sphere.
“(Not) Translating the Incomprehensible: Defamiliarizing Science, Technology, and Science Fiction in Harry Martinson’s Aniara” by Daniel Helsing of California Polytechnic State University. Published January 2021 in the book Science Fiction in Translation, pages 79 to 101. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-84208-6_5
Abstract:
In 1956, the Swedish author Harry Martinson published the epic poem Aniara: En revy om människan i tid och rum (“Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space,” English translations in 1963, 1991, and 1999). This chapter examines the literary techniques that Martinson uses to suggest the irrepresentability of both modern astrophysics and nuclear violence. The chapter focuses on a selection of individual poems and compares the 1963 translation of Aniara by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert, and the 1999 translation by Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg.
Using Lawrence Venuti’s distinction between domesticating and foreignizing translations, the chapter argues that the 1999 translation foreignizes space and nuclear violence, similar to how Martinson suggests the irrepresentability of modern astrophysics and nuclear violence in the original Swedish, while the 1963 translation tends to domesticate the poem.
Despite the poem’s obvious science fiction (SF) themes, the reception of Aniara has wavered on whether to actually classify it as SF. Using Simon Spiegel’s distinction between diegetic estrangement and defamiliarization in SF, the chapter argues that some elements in Aniara diverge from common characteristics of Anglo-American SF, making the poem not only a defamiliarization of science and technology, but of SF as well.
Request the full text of the paper for free here:
“Coming to Terms with Our Own Ends: Failed Reproduction and the End of the Hu/man in Claire Denis’ High Life and Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Aniara“ by Allison Mackey, a chapter from the book Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media: From Annihilation to High Life and Beyond (Bloomsbury Press, 2023).
In this chapter, we examine how the “end” of humanity is figured through a From the introductionreconceptualization of human reproduction in recent science fiction films fundamentally invested in contemplating the future of the human species, Claire Denis’ High Life (2018) and Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Aniara (2018).
While both of these films reflect what Eva Horn has identified as “one of mankind’s most ancient fantasies,” we argue that they each imagine the end of the world in very different registers.
Claire Denis’ affective technique, including her nonlinear and alienating editing, sensual camera, and claustrophobic interiors, cinematically creates what Karen Barad calls “intra-actions,” where the primacy of the human is constantly undermined. This decentering of the human sparks a suspension of anthropocentric concepts, as sex, reproduction, and parenthood are put into question in ways that move beyond a Cartesian logic.
By contrast, Aniara, with its continuity editing and narrative structure, still takes human experience as central, rehearsing the science fictional trope of a lifeboat spaceship only to undo it in favor of extinction and total destruction.
Hence, in these films we see two forms of posthumanist cinema: High Life provides a posthumanist experience through refusing to succumb to Humanist logic and anthropocentric technique, while Aniara plays with generic conventions only to disturb them by leaving no space for humans to survive their apocalypse.
https://benjamins.com/catalog/fillm.17.10ogd
“Harry Martinson’s Aniara as a Menippean satire for the Anthropocene” by Daniel Ogden of Mälardalen University, Sweden. Published online: 24 November 2022
DOI logo https://doi.org/10.1075/fillm.17.10ogd
A chapter from this book: Nordic Utopias and Dystopias from Aniara to Allatta!
https://benjamins.com/catalog/fillm.17
Utilitarianism: The Needs of the Many…
From the Ethics in Film site, written by A. J. Renzulli and published on November 14, 2022:
https://www.ethicsinfilm.net/ethical-theories/consequentialism/aniara-2018
To quote, in which Utilitarianism is used to defend, or at least explain, the actions of Captain Chefone:
I believe that this Sci-Fi movie can be related to many different ethical codes, such as Kantian Ethics or Care Ethics. However, I believe that the best related link will be through Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism has its basis on choosing the action that provides the most amount of people with the most amount of happiness. This ethical code was started by Jeremey Bentham and later added on by John Stuart Mill [1806-1873] and his wife Harriet Taylor Mill [1807-1858]. This idea of happiness is very hedonistic, but Utilitarianism’s shortcomings happen when deciding what kind of happiness is best, a small amount of happiness for a long time or a large amount of happiness in a very short time. However, Utilitarianism’s foundation relies upon treating everyone’s happiness as equal and not seeing a specific person’s or group of people as above anyone else’s.
Utilitarianism can be directly related to the movie Aniara through the Captain’s choice of lying and changing the narrative in order to soothe the passengers and not put them into a panic. There are a few examples of this. The first occurred at the beginning of the movie where the Captain lied about the likelihood of finding a celestial body only taking two years. The Captain also lies to all the passengers about Mimarobe being the one that killed Mima, saying that she wanted Mima all to herself. He rationalizes these instances by not wanting everyone to immediately lose hope, make it easier for everyone to carry on, and deflect the blame off of himself. There is also an overarching element of Utilitarianism through the use and abuse of Mima itself. The captain would rather appease everyone, and not listen to Mimarobe’s conversation about how desperate and grim Mima feels, than risk losing the happiness Mima brings for even a week. This is exemplary of how the Captain believes the happiness and moral of all the passengers is most important.
Is It Better to Never Have Been Born at All?
This video by a physician calling himself the Antinatalist MD looks at Aniara from the perspective of a philosophy that says since existence is mostly about suffering, then bringing newborn humans into the world without their knowledge or consent to let them suffer through their lives is both morally and ethically wrong.
For the sanctity of intelligent, conscious life, it is therefore considered better that the human species goes extinct, rather than continues to make its current and future offspring suffer for the sake of existing.
And you thought the topics in this essay couldn’t get any darker or more nihilistic.
Episode 13: “Aniara” Movie Reflection — Antinatalist MD:
Antinatalist MD has this accompanying description about himself:
Welcome to the Antinatalist MD video channel. In this video series, I express my opinions on antinatalism from the point of view of medicine, ethics, religion, and science. I am an antinatalist primary care physician, with mostly libertarian views, who strives to be as pragmatic as possible. My focus is ultimately harm prevention through promoting wider acceptance of antinatalism.
The Scary Void
As we have seen so well with Aniara, the stars look so pretty and inviting from the relatively safe vantage point of Earth’s surface… until you are up among them. Then they become a vast collection of mocking, distant lights embedded in a cold and indifferent Universe with no seeming end.
The following videos delve into why space feels so frightening to most humans. Of course, in one sense it is not too difficult to figure out: We evolved on and for a single planet which, until quite recently in our all-too-brief history, appeared to be all of existence.
The stars we viewed only during our night cycles (when the sky wasn’t overcast) were so far away that we could not imagine them being more than pretty lights, perhaps heavenly pinpoints shining through the dome of the sky.
Or maybe they were the souls of great kings and warriors who were honored with a place nearer the gods (socially ordinary people rarely ever get such rewards). But as massive, extremely hot, and unimaginably ancient spheres of luminous gas – that took science to reveal their true natures.
Even early astronomers had trouble imagining just how far incredibly distant were the stars or that they were even suns like the one that the planet they stood upon circled around (or perhaps instead orbited Earth, but that is another story). We weren’t even scientifically certain that there was more than just one galaxy full of suns, the Milky Way, until around the year 1920!
So yes, it has taken a long time for humanity to figure out just how vast and ancient is the Cosmos we live in – and even then, the concept is often more an academic grasping than one we can truly comprehend. Thus, the void can be a frightening place to a collection of comparatively small tool-making mammals who are just beginning to leave their dens.
Cosmophobia: The Beautiful Horror of Deep Space
“Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” – Arthur C. Clarke
Interesting quote from the video summary:
If the world was ending, and you could save only one hundred and sixteen images as the final record of planet Earth, what kind of moments would you preserve?
This is an actual question NASA faced in 1977, when they decided to attach to the Voyager spacecrafts golden records encoded with a selection of photos intended to immortalize life on our fragile planet. And when I look at these pictures, which have now left our solar system and are hurtling out into the cosmic dark, I can’t get out of my head how they will probably be all that’s left of us one day. In the vacuum of space, these images could last for billions of years, outliving the earth, outliving the sun.
And though that should maybe be comforting… I think it scares me.
Space is Terrifying – Astrophobia
2001: A Space Odyssey – Horror of the Void (film analysis / commentary)
Rob Ager, Collative Learning – May 7, 2020
Detailed study of existential horror themes in Kubrick’s classic space adventure. Supplying our own light – 2001: A Space Odyssey and the horror of the void. Written, edited, and narrated by Rob Ager.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY & the HORROR of LOSING YOURSELF: An Analysis. By Empire of the Mind – October 12, 2021
Stanley Kubrick’s films are horrifying. All of them. While Kubrick only made one film that is technically a horror film, there seems to be something about his style that, even in his war films, comedies, film noir, and science fiction, plays on the human sense of dread. This video is the first in a series, beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey, that will analyze all of Kubrick’s films, their themes, style, and philosophy.
Opening quote from the above video:
“Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: To know so much and to have control over nothing.” – Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BCE), Histories, Book 9, Chapter 16.
This next link is not to a video but rather a most relevant essay on H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), who is aptly described in the introductory sentence of this article as “the master of cosmic horror stories… a philosopher who believed in the total insignificance of humanity.”
As you will see, Lovecraft would agree with Aniara that true horror for humanity does not come so much from standard tropes such as scary monsters or haunted houses as it does from the sheer presence of the vast and ancient Universe beyond ordinary human experience and comprehension.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-terror-of-reality-was-the-true-horror-for-h-p-lovecraft
To quote:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” – from the opening to Lovecraft’s story The Call of Cthulhu (1926)