Review of “Så går en dag i Linneryd” (1962)
Seen in 2026.
Ingrid Samuelsson interviews locals in Linneryd, a village 37 km south-east of Växjö, Sweden.
This was seven years before Sweden got a second TV channel, three years before Miljonprogrammet accelerated urbanization in the country, and two years before tariff concessions at the Kennedy Round of GATT talks accelerated economic globalization by about 40 billion USD. Urbanization and global economic competition are barely a shadow over these interviews. Economic rationalization is more than a shadow, but is just sending milk to Växjö.
At least a couple of the local businesses referenced in this film are still alive as of my viewing in 2026, that is 64 years later: The saw mill J.G. Anderssons söner AB (now JGA), and Linneryds plåtslageri AB, which in 1962 was run by a very energetic man, apparently without machines or hearing protection. Although the Nationaltemplarorden (NTO, National Order of Templars) was merged with the international IOGT in 1970, there is still an active house of that order in the village. The local school, shown preparing young men to meet modern women by dancing with them, now only runs up to grade 6. I’m guessing that fewer locals enter full-time employment by age 16.
With obvious effort, but seemingly without intention, “Så går en dag i Linneryd” is a glorious time capsule of cinéma vérité. Samuelsson’s subjects have almost no media savvy. Instead of appearing as themselves, they are themselves in a way that was already much harder to achieve in a documentary just a decade later. That’s in spite of Samuelsson’s camera and lighting rig. They must have been bulky, but the same camera sweeps across the village as smoothly as if it had been a drone shot.