Reykjavík Grapevine - 25.09.2009, Page 36

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the reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 15 — 2009 RIFF is still going on, and there are still many, many awesome movies to be seen
(ha! Jónas!). Check out the program at www.riff.is
Every film festival has one
semi-pornographic film
to generate debate. Last
year it was Short Bus, this
year it’s Lars von Trier’s Antichrist that
gets the job done. Trier seems, like his
compatriot Lukas Moodyson, to believe
that the filmmaker’s task is to make his
audience as uncomfortable as possible.
In this he succeeds, admirably. But what
is the point? For a while, it seems to be
posing an interesting question. Satanists
tend to believe that Satan is a metaphor
for nature and hence good. But what if
nature is, in fact, truly Satanic? Instead
of dealing with this question, we get an
orgy of genital mutilation which quickly
becomes tiresome. Skip the movie, go
look at the stills in the Reykjavík Art
Museum instead.
At the other end of the spectrum is
Patrik 1.5, as much of a feelgood movie
as they come. A gay couple adopts a
teenage problem child. It is enjoyable
to watch, compare and contrast with
similar scenes from TV show Six Feet
Under.
It used to be that documentaries
critiquing capitalism were only shown
at underground gatherings where you
would look both ways before entering.
It says a lot about the changing mood of
our times that they have now become a
staple at film festivals. Food Inc, which
includes Eric Schlosser, the man who
gave us Fast Food Nation, is a decent
stab at the meat industry. Really, why is
a hamburger, which costs a lot to make,
cheaper than a bag of carrots? Why do we
subsidise junk food but not vegetables?
Another documentary that does a
good job of enlightening the viewer
on some of the issues of the day is
Defamation, about how anti-Semitism
is being used in Israel. The scenes of
the students travelling to Auschwitz in a
closed bus say more than many a news
story about the problems in the Middle
East. “I want to learn to have that look in
my eye, which says ‘Never Forgive,’” says
one of the children.
Being a Finnish drunk seems to be
a pleasant prospect. Mika Kaurismäki
steps out of big brother Aki’s shadow for
Three Wise Men. The film takes place
among three drunk men at a karaoke
bar on Christmas Eve, all sharing their
hard luck stories. It doesn’t come to
much more than a mildly interesting
evening at the bar, but at least you skip
the hangover.
One of the festival’s more interesting
experiences was the Norwegian art
film Dead Snow, which poses the
question: “What would happen if a
group of teenagers ran into a group of
Nazi zombies while hiking?” The film
answers this question in considerable
detail. Being able to see it in a swimming
pool (one of the fest’s gimmicks) was
fun, even if the sound was a bit off.
Storm is one of this festival’s pleasant
surprises. One just doesn’t see enough
of films about European bureaucrats
who all speak English with various
strange accents. In fact, it is a gripping
story about a lawyer who tries to get a
Serbian War Criminal convicted in spite
of corruption and politics on her side.
Perhaps they’ll soon make a similar
movie about Eva Joly.
Francesca, however, is one of this
year’s disappointments, despite having
offended Alexandra Mussolini. A film
about Romanian immigrants in Italy is
promising. Sadly, they never get there
and it is hard to feel sympathetic for
people who seem to have no idea what
they are doing.
Deadgirl was this year’s Midnight
movie. It is an interesting take on the
vampire myth, and a juxtaposition of the
Twilight series. A group of teenagers find
a living dead girl and decide to use her as
a sex slave. The film probably says more
about the strict caste system in American
sexuality than it intends, and is in any
case more realistic than Revenge of the
Nerds.
Regardless of whether cinema
used to be truth 24 times per
second or lies at the same rate,
it is now becoming something
else entirely. It is tempting to make some
grand declaration—it is always tempting
to make grand declarations. But perhaps
the greatest novelty to be observed at the
Reykjavík International Film Festival
(RIFF) is the inversion of silent cinema,
the invention of imageless cinema.
In between short films, in the two
short film programs offered, the festival
‘screens’ radiophonic narrations, as they
are labelled in English—the Icelandic
term used in the catalogue is hljóðmyndir
which would translate simply as “audio-
images.” These are short pieces of edited
audio recordings—stories told in an
interview setup, that is monologues
from within dialogues, mixed with
environmental sounds, documentary
recordings and ambient music. While
they run in the sound system, they
are accompanied with subtitles in
English. Apart from the modest sans-
serif typeface which, in case you do not
understand the original language, can
be taken as a minimal but fundamental
piece of montage giving meaning to the
otherwise ambiguous soundscapes—the
screen is blank.
tWo BIllIoN tImes per secoND
Some of these pieces are captivating.
Perhaps the most memorable one from
the first program is ‘Nunaqarfimmiut’ or
‘The Settlers’ by Else Olsvig, where a man
from Greenland relates the first time he
shot a whale. The power of this piece is not
least due to the tension created between
the subtitles and the mixed audio, for a
non-Greenlandic speaking audience.
The pieces in Icelandic, however, also
worked well, and the audience found
“I don’t want to talk today,” Þorgerður
E. Sigurðardóttir’s piece about Pre-
Menstrual Syndrome, at first perplexing,
then highly entertaining.
Now, an audio-channel without
images is not a new medium—it’s called
radio and it has been around for a while.
Bringing these pieces to the cinema,
however, reveals some fundamental
changes happening to cinema, deep
down under, or looming by the gates:
cinema is no longer anything at 24
frames per second, it is a lot of different
things happening at the rate of around
2 billion times per second—that is the
current ticking rate of the microprocessor
in a normal PC.
Whereas all other spheres of art,
media and representation have in a
relatively short period of time added
cinema to their bag of joys—from
edited video footage in internet-based
newspapers, to video-blogs and YouTube,
not to mention the prevalence of video-
art in all places intended for elevated
coolness, in bars as well as galleries—
this has not been a mutual appreciation.
The cinematic tradition, the group of
people professionally and/or passionately
involved in filmmaking, has been
reluctant to get mixed up with these
other fields of practice.
pop eXplosIoN
Visual art remains a prop or deco
within narrative films: sculptures used
as background for a Woody Allen date,
paintings used to show off the riches of the
owner of a house. Radio has a curiously
rare presence in films, but ‘radiophonic
narrations’ would perhaps fit in as
something listened to by characters
who remain as visual and dramatic as
ever. Whereas the democratization of
cinema has changed the way other media
function, other media have not altered
cinema to the same extent at all. The
one-way relationship between cinema
and other expressive media is not to be
lamented, nor is it an occasion for artistic
guilt. It is still a highly curious fact.
Something can be learned from the
history of music in the 20th century.
While Russian Schönberg decomposed
the classical tradition and revolutionized
music from within that tradition with the
invention of atonal music, thus setting
the scene for modern, academic music,
another revolution took place on the side.
Or rather, an invasion: namely, the radio.
Radio, and subsequently the recording
industry, gave grounds to the explosion
that we now know as pop. In terms of
scales and melodies, pop music is highly
traditional, and even, one could say, born
stagnant. Its creative evolution takes
place first and foremost in a different
dimension—what is vaguely referred to
by ‘sound’—the details of orchestration
and developments of attitudes. In many
places there is now, decades later, a great
f lux between academic musicians and
pop musicians, but the two worlds of
music have also managed well, each on
their own terms, while ignoring each
other completely. The world of music has
settled for something akin to a two-state
solution.
The premises for those fundamental
changes in music as art, and as a social
thing, were technological changes.
When a mic and an amp can pick up a
whisper and deliver it to thousands, the
sophisticated technique of opera singers
just seems silly.
amateur porNoGraphers,
your mother
There is a parallel to be drawn here.
A revolution is taking place, not from
within cinema, but from the outside, like
an invading army. For better or worse
the Americans are coming into cinema’s
Iraq. Youtubers, video-bloggers, amateur
pornographers, visual artists, and your
mother are making material that starts
running at the push of a play button. As
of yet, no Schönberg is in sight, though
perhaps David Lynch may be on the way
to somewhere along with his Inland
Empire.
Cinema is no longer 24 frames
per second of anything, but whatever
happens after you press a play button.
Among classical filmmakers whatever
happens after you press the play button
is very likely to sport a central character,
a beginning, a middle and an end. In
pop-film—the three minute jingles on
YouTube being exemplary—the variation
is wider and more chaotic.
This is not to hail the lack of tradition
or the death of tradition, but a new lineage
unfolding. At this embryonic state,
popfilm probably has its own Woody
Guthrie standing in a line somewhere,
but no Bob Dylan is there yet to point him
out to the rest of us.
The image-less cinema on the black
screen, which nonetheless kept an
audience watching and listening for
around three minutes per piece, revealed
the fact that what we were watching
had never come near celluloid. We were
watching a QuickTime file, composed
of any digital elements that can fit a
timeline, visual or not. The invasion of
the radiophonic narration is a symptom
of the changes taking place, a crack
in the ground, or the paramilitaries at
the gates. Those of us in the mood for
drama can already hear them rattling
their cameras.
Dead Girls In The Snow Oh no! It's The Radiophonic
Paramilitaries
movies | RIFF movies | Media
Valur GuNNarssoN
haukur mÁr helGasoN
antichrist
food Inc. Defamation
Dead snow
three Wise men storm
francesca Deadgirl
patrik 1.5