Reviews & Ratings for
World of Glory More at IMDbPro »Härlig är jorden (original title)

22 out of 27 people found the following review useful:
Infuriatingly difficult to grab hold of but hard to get out of your mind, 30 July 2004
Author: bob the moo from Birmingham, UK

Without fuss, without emotions, a thin pale man shows us his life, introduces us to his sick mother, his dead father, his wife, his son and his brother. He shows us his home and we see him calmly go about his life until we see the impact that the secrets he holds start to wear on him.

I would love to write reams about this film and claim that it had moved and touched me, or that I was able to understand so much about what the film was trying to say but, if I did that, I would be lying. I found this film very hard to get into and was left thinking about it after it had finished. I continued to think about it and the bleak impression it had of a ordinary life that was scarred by one terrible action – in this case, I think, the fact that the man had allowed genocide to occur in front of him without saying a word, and only going back to his ordinary rather dreary life afterwards. What exactly he had seen/been involved in is hard to read into in much detail and it caused me the problem, but I accepted that this was his secret, that it was awful and that he tried to live with it but, in the end, could not.

The film is delivered in a series of static shots that are as grey and washed out as anything I have ever seen – you will not leave this film smiling that's for sure. The sheer drudgery of day to day life is laid out here and it is an unpleasant thing to see. The point of the whole short takes some thought and I'm sure that it will be different for each viewer that sees it but I took it as a sort of judgment on those (countries and people) who try to just live with horrid things in their lives as if nothing had happened – they will not move on and it will eat at them as it does here.

Like I said, I wish I had the answers and I wish I could pontificate at length about the film but I find it hard to do. But one thing is sure – the film is in my head now and it is hard to shake the images left there and the sense of doom that came with the man's ordinary life and his inability to ever get passed the deeds that he had either participated in or allowed to occur without so much as a tear shed.

10 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Ballad of a Thin Man, 19 March 2008
Author: Graham Greene from United Kingdom

Capitalism, consumerism, genocide and guilt; just some of the themes covered by filmmaker Roy Andersson in this 14-minute experimental piece. As with his most recent films, Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, The Living (2007), World of Glory (1991) sees Andersson create a series of interconnected visual tableaux about a seemingly everyday man and the crumbling world that he inhabits.

Andersson uses the same principal as in his TV commercials, keeping the scenes concise and to the point; presenting us with a world filled with fragile, sickly looking people - the stench antiseptic and detergent pungently conjured in our minds. This mere description hints at the film's bleakness, a bleakness that is too hard to describe. With Songs from the Second Floor, Andersson used his series of vignettes to present to us the theme of cultural alienation using surrealism and black comedy. With World of Glory however, almost all elements of comedy have been discarded, leaving us with images of cheerless, unwelcoming reality.

That isn't to say that the film doesn't reward. The final scene complements that shocking opening image, making Andersson's message of repressed guilt as obvious as a punch to the stomach. It is only natural for the central character's carefully constructed world to fall down around him with the secrets he has been hiding, or indeed, the secrets that any one of us may be hiding; finally spilling out, until we here screaming in our sleep. There is no single way of interpreting or understating this film. The images wash over us, sometimes infuriating us with that sense of bleak, unbroken silences.

World of Glory acts as an astonishing companion to Andersson's more accomplished Songs from the Second Floor, and acts as a wonderful antidote to all those mindless summer blockbusters that permeate the cinematic sphere. As the cliché goes, you may not enjoy it, but you'll most certainly be left thinking about it for many weeks to come.

4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Starts off so slowly that you're tempted to turn it off....don't!, 23 February 2008

Author: planktonrules from Bradenton, Florida

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This short Swedish film starts off both confusingly and also is very dull through the first half. I honestly felt compelled to just speed ahead to the next short on the DVD but stuck it out--and I am very glad I did, as it improved tremendously towards the finish.

The film starts with a scene reminiscent of the German "Final Solution", as you see hoards of naked people herded into a truck and the exhaust was piped back into the passenger cabin. During this, the leading character of this film does nothing and everyone is emotionless. Then in the following very brief separate vignettes, this man introduces himself, then his brother, his job, his apartment, etc. All this is incredibly dull. The sets are all gray, the characters almost zombie-like and this man's narration is listless. Only later when you see that this man is in fact going insane does any of this make sense.

Complex, Bergman-like and slow. This is a film many will find tedious but try seeing it all and then decide. It's far deeper and more interesting if you wait it out and see the entire tale unfold.

By the way, this film is part of the CINEMA 16: European Shorts DVD. On this DVD are 16 shorts. Most aren't great, though because it contains THE MAN WITHOUT A HEAD, COPY SHOP, RABBIT and WASP, it's an amazing DVD for lovers of short films and well worth buying.

An ironic title if ever there was one, 3 March 2012

Author: runamokprods from US

This deeply effective and chilling short piece, shows the emotional toll of complacency in a world where genocide and inhumanity exists all around us.

From the opening scene;, the gassing of a bunch of naked people in the back of a van by bland bureaucrats in what is obviously not Nazi Germany, but somewhere in modern Europe, Andersson is unafraid to challenge our idea that it couldn't happen again. And we don't all carry the seeds of inhumanity within us. And that, by living in that kind of a world, we are eventually torn up inside.

We follow a cadaverous man, who has witnessed this horror at the opening of the film as he slowly breaks apart.

And yet, this is not really a drama, it's more a super-black comedy. Indeed, this short embodies the best description I have read about Andersson – "Monty Python meets Ingmar Bergman".

But that doesn't do justice to the fact that the man has created a new and unique film language, and (as the behind the scenes pieces on his new "5 X Anderson:" set DVD shows) Andersson works with a perfectionism that is almost hard to believe to get exactly the right feel, lighting, acting and tone for each of his 1 take long static scenes in 1 shot.

BTW - I highly recommend the set for any admirers of Anderson's work. Seeing his student shorts as well as his two 'professional' shorts, this and "Something Has Happened", along with an entire disc of his working methods, and thinking behind his images, is really quite a treasure.

An ironic title if ever there was one, 3 March 2012

Author: runamokprods from US

This deeply effective and chilling short piece, shows the emotional toll of complacency in a world where genocide and inhumanity exists all around us.

From the opening scene;, the gassing of a bunch of naked people in the back of a van by bland bureaucrats in what is obviously not Nazi Germany, but somewhere in modern Europe, Andersson is unafraid to challenge our idea that it couldn't happen again. And we don't all carry the seeds of inhumanity within us. And that, by living in that kind of a world, we are eventually torn up inside.

We follow a cadaverous man, who has witnessed this horror at the opening of the film as he slowly breaks apart.

And yet, this is not really a drama, it's more a super-black comedy. Indeed, this short embodies the best description I have read about Andersson – "Monty Python meets Ingmar Bergman".

But that doesn't do justice to the fact that the man has created a new and unique film language, and (as the behind the scenes pieces on his new "5 X Anderson:" set DVD shows) Andersson works with a perfectionism that is almost hard to believe to get exactly the right feel, lighting, acting and tone for each of his 1 take long static scenes in 1 shot.

BTW - I highly recommend the set for any admirers of Anderson's work. Seeing his student shorts as well as his two 'professional' shorts, this and "Something Has Happened", along with an entire disc of his working methods, and thinking behind his images, is really quite a treasure.

0 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Impossible to forget, 17 September 2011

Author: mdek2112 from United Kingdom

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Roy Andersson's World of Glory is rooted in the moral dilemma of suppressing a tragedy, the horror of letting a terrifying event happen out of ignorance and fear. At the beginning, we are struck by the image of naked women and children being packed into the back of a truck and being poisoned with the exhaust - a vision of the earliest methods of extermination used by the Nazis - the gas vans - and the emergence of the Holocaust. The camera records the systematic mass murder in a single still take while placed within a crowd of unnaturally pale onlookers, people who shouldn't be seeing this.

One man in the crowd turns his head toward the camera. This man becomes the main subject of the film. In several subsequent vignettes, he stands facing the camera and describes to the audience his life, his family, his job, his car, his apartment, and so on. Every scene is lit with a cold, pale glow and more pale, stoic people are dispersed across each rigorously framed take, who barely acknowledge the man's monologue.

Andersson pushes the viewer from one vignette to the next, pulling us farther and farther away from the shock of the opening scene. Over time, the man's misplaced pride becomes humorous. I felt encouraged to laugh when he loudly praises his father's grave, chastises his son for getting a tattoo, or a very funny scene during Mass. But then comes the final shot, in which the man suddenly remembers "those screams" until his wife urges him to sleep before he is too upset by the memory.

Andersson's concern is the "blindness" of complacent and materialistic people, the citizens who submit to the demands of their leader, believing they are taking a neutral path by refusing to push beyond their ordinary surroundings. The Third Reich managed to kill millions in secrecy and deceive just as many wilfully naive citizens while doing so. The deep scars of the Holocaust are irreparable and now the only choice is to realise what we have done.

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