Sometimes you just have to say it straight out:
This is the TV movie version of a Science Fiction Opera.
An Opera about a gigantic spaceship on a trip to the stars.
It gets better.
Aniara started life as an epic, book-length poem published in 1956.
And, I will note, written by a Swedish Nobel Laureate.
Harry Martinson’s book then attracted the attention of composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl, who turned into an opera in 1959, with a libretto by Erik Lindegren. Blomdahl described his work with the ambiguous phrase “en revy om människan i tid och rum“: “a revue about Man in Time and Space.”
He used a variety of musical approaches, including atonal twelve-tone music, jazz and even an electronic tape.
And then, finally, Sveriges Television, Sweden’s government run television channel, adapted the opera for TV, under the direction of Arne Arnbom.
What is more remarkable is that, from the publication of the first portion of the book in 1953 until the release of a TV movie took a mere seven years.
With an adaptation into an opera in between.
The story is simple, at least on the surface: as a terrible war rages on Earth, the gigantic spaceship Aniara departs for one of our settlements on other planets in the solar system.
Only it is hit by a rogue asteroid and sent off course, out of the solar system, to the stars in the constellation of Lyra many lightyears away.
A trip which will take thousands of years.
But the ship is well equipped and can support it passengers in comfort as it makes its endless trip. And it has a computer called the Mima, which shows the passengers beautiful images from Earth.
The passengers indulge in endless parties and debauchery, while crowds of people huddle around the Mima, watching its soothing images and expecting someone to rescue them.
But then Earth sends its final, terrible images of the end of our world, and the Mima is so horrified, it dies.
Everything breaks down.
Religious cults form, an authoritarian government takes over the ship, people start dying.
And things just get worse from there…
The presentation here is the most minimal imaginable: in black and white rather than color, and on a nearly empty stage, with carefully planned lighting and some rather strange pieces of abstract art.
Most of the story is told through the eye of the Mimarobe, the official in charge of running the Mima, although he vanishes for quite a while and only returns again towards the end.
I recognized many of the lyrics from the original poem. However, they have been rearranged and often appear at very different points in the story. At several points, the subtitles seem to have left large chunks untranslated, but that is because even in the original those were nonsense lyrics, supposedly in some minor language few people spoke back on Earth before it was destroyed.
One of these scenes also features a set of young women who at first glance appear naked, but are actually wearing flesh tone costumes. I’m not sure if that’s how it was done on stage or a change made because this film was on television.
But then, the pictures of the original performances of the opera look very different, both in their costumes and in the complex and rather psychedelic sets.
Martinson’s poem influenced works by a number of other science fiction writers (including Poul Anderson’s equally bleak Tau Zero). Few works have portrayed the unimaginable vastness of space or the frailties of the human race so well.
But that definitely doesn’t make it a laugh-a-minute piece of escapist fun.
Ultimately, even in the form of an opera, the story is a deeply emotional one, filled with one tragedy after another, as their society breaks down and despair slowly takes over.
It is a bleak and dark tale, told in an eccentric sort of way, but with a lot of impact. Because it is an opera, it seems a bit slow at the beginning, with a long set of credits over a huge empty set with two still figures in it as the overture plays. At times it seems a bit repetitive, but the pace picks up as things move along. But it isn’t going to make anyone expecting a more routine science fiction story happy. While I never quite warmed up to the film, I found myself thinking about Aniara long after it was over.
It’s that sort of story…
rivets on the poster 
Sounds like a must see. Thank you very much!
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