Reykjavík Grapevine - 15.07.2011, Qupperneq 40

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40
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 10 — 2011
Art | Films
Can We Capture Iceland?
Reverend John, who will not leave
his land and becomes the prisoner of
his own loneliness and depression,
is he Iceland? Old men, reminiscing
about an old sports field, are they
Iceland? The Reykjavík 9, accused
of attacking the powers that be,
are they Iceland? Young men, run-
ning like madmen, are they Iceland?
Missed opportunities, the dreams
we never followed through with, are
they Iceland? The small town that
withers away around us, is that Ice-
land? The cancer we conquer, is that
Iceland?
Can we capture reality? This was the
headline of a panel held at the Skjald-
borg film festival. That is one of the
eternal questions of documentary film-
making (although one that often ends up
as: what is reality?) but Skjaldborg is a
festival for Icelandic documentaries, so
the question that is perhaps more rel-
evant for this festival is: can we capture
Iceland?
It's certainly a task beyond a single
film, but a body of diverse work may be
up to the task, even if the real Iceland
will probably always be just outside the
camera's reach.
A SHORT HISTORICAL
BACKGROUND
"We do not only have to show our coun-
try’s beauty, to attract tourists. We also
have to show the outside world that
here resides a cultured nation, that has
culture both old and new, a nation of as
high a standard as other Nordic coun-
tries". Thus wrote a film critic in Mor-
gunbla!i! in 1925, in an article about a
film by Loftur Gu!mundsson, a film the
unnamed critic never bothers to mention
by name. He goes on and calls for the
film to be shorn of the ugly bits before
it gets shown to foreigners, and it be-
comes quite clear he doesn't mean the
scenes that don't work cinematically, but
simply the scenes that he does not find
flattering towards the nation—and finally
the writer concludes: "... everyone must
do their part to give the outside world
the prettiest and best picture, when the
foreign public first gets to know our na-
tion in their cinemas".
But this notion, of filmmaking as
mere tourism propaganda, is not just
an ancient relic: "Film is one of the most
pertinent forms of promoting a country
and has huge influence on the stream of
tourists the world over". This quote does
not come from the aforementioned 1925
article, it's from one entitled "Filmmak-
ing and tourism" that was published in
Fréttabla!i! in 2010. It’s written by Björn
Brynjúlfur Björnsson, film director and
then-head of the Icelandic Academy of
Film and Television. It seems that the
article from 1925 had proved prophetic,
and Björn goes on to state how TV show
‘Nonni & Manni’ increased tourism from
German speaking countries and how
‘Children Of Nature’ increased Japa-
nese tourism to Iceland by 27,8 percent
and from this concludes: "According to
research, 18% of all travellers come to
Iceland directly because of films".
The article is written around the crux
of the ‘Inspired by Iceland’ campaign,
but mostly in response to the cuts in
film funding by the government. Fighting
those cuts, which were more severe than
in other art forms, is a worthy cause—but
it is strange that nowhere in the article
is artistic value mentioned, or the roles
that films can have in dissecting a soci-
ety whose ills the economic collapse had
made so painfully visible. Those kinds
of film might capture Iceland, but they'll
hardly capture too many tourists, right?
And that bond between filmmakers, ad-
vertisers and the tourism industry has of-
ten felt a bit too tight, not by way of Coca
Cola bottles placed in odd places in the
frame, rather because of long dramatic
shots of landscape that had very little
to do with story or character but much
more with presenting the image that has
been demanded since, at least, 1925.
A9AINST THE CLERGY
And looking at the list of films for Skjald-
borg beforehand I was a bit apprehensive
this could be the case all too often. The
selection seemed to be rather skewed
towards nature and villages, the old cli-
chés of Iceland we use to charm tourists
with, but are getting quite bored with
ourselves, considering about 60–70%
of us live in the capital area. Thankfully,
most of those films truly tried their best
to be critical, yet compassionate, of their
subject matters.
“Adequate Beings” (‘Land míns
fö!ur’) takes place in Dalirnir, an area
we passed on the way to the festival in
Patreksfjör!ur, and while it is perhaps
short on story, it's long on mood. And
that mood is a common one for Icelandic
villages, the mood of a once proud and
bustling town that has seen most of its
people flee a crumbling economy and
lack of jobs. In the case of this town it
Thoughts in the wake of the Skjaldborg documentary festival