Presence

Presence is a full-length documentary about Georg Oddner, Troell's friend, who collaborated with the director for many years. Oddner played short roles in Who Saw Him Die? and As White as in Snow as a photographer, co-authored The Flight of the Eagle, worked as an editing consultant on The Emigrants and prepared the score for the sequence of gold search in The New Land.

When making the film about Georg Oddner, an outstanding Swedish photographer, a student of Richard Avedon, a former jazz drummer, Troell wanted above all to present a fulfilled artist - a man, whose life is rich, full of experience and emotions. Presence shows many of Oddner's empathic photograph portraits of people from different parts of the world and the artist's reflections on the essence of his art - meaning of rhythm, composition, relation between photography and time. At the same time, in Oddner's story about his attitude towards the world, people and art, Troell seems to present himself as a creator of images in which he managed to explore the human soul as well and to show the tragedy of life between dreams and fate.

Tadeusz Szczepański