Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.10.2011, Blaðsíða 34

34
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 16 — 2011
Mountaineers of Iceland • Skútuvogur 12E • 104 Reykjavík • Iceland
Telephone: +354 580 9900 Ice@mountaineers.is • www.mountaineers.is • www. activity.is
SUPER JEEP & SNOWMOBILE TOURS
Films | Couch festOpinion | Markets
There's a short film pro-
gramme in town. It's a good
idea: Couch fest films is an
initiative that lines up with
film festivals around the world in order
to screen a selection of recent short
films in people's 'cosy residential ven-
ues.' That's your home. They—you—still
charge for the screening, just a little,
because 'if the festival were free it
would make hosts nervous that anyone
and everyone could just walk right into
their house—people who were maybe
just bored and had no real understand-
ing of the love of film, community or the
idea behind the festival.' So it's a niche
thing. A connoisseur thing. Sort of.
Now, Reykjavík saw nine pro-
grammes to choose from, in resi-
dencies reaching westward from Bíó
Paradís: Animation 1, 2, 3, Comedy, Ex-
perimental, the 'Inappropriately Awe-
some' and three mixed programmes. To
be fair, the screeners I received seem
not to have included the experimental
programme. And some of the material
included on the DVD-ROMs refused to
play on my n year old laptop due to the
.mov files' amazingly high resolution
(all hail the EOS 5D mark II). Among the
films I could watch was a surprising and
neatly executed Dutch comedy, called
‘Sugar.’ Then there is the wonderful po-
etry-animation called ‘Animal Beatbox,’
reminiscent of Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl's
‘Kreppusonnettan.’ ‘Tongueling,’ ‘Plato’
and others also seemed to suggest that
independent animators are using their
medium for exploration. Having noted
these I am sorry to say: yaaaawn …
Judging from Couch fest film's se-
lection this year, what brings people to
make short films would seem to be:
1. to tell a joke
2. to catch the attention of produc-
ers or moviegoers in the hope of ex-
tending the short into a feature.
There's a cute little joke about
American café-culture that could re-
ally do wonders as an advertising cam-
paign. There's animated combat scenes
looking just like something else you've
seen quite often. Any attempted explo-
rations of human existence tend to be
limited by an essentialism, where peo-
ple's inner lives seem defined by their
official, external roles in the mind of
youngsters: a person who holds adver-
tising signs on busy streets for a living
reflects on herself as a sign-holder; a
person who has become old acts, be-
haves and feels only within the limits of
what a young person finds sympathetic
about 'old people.' Such caricatures are
just as numbing as the stereotyping of
race or gender. It's not a question of
political correctness but, shall we say,
'emotional intelligence?’ I have been
moved more by commercials for car in-
surance and washing powder.
Rule 1: if the scene could sell wash-
ing powder, don't shoot.
There is an abundance of problems
involved in human existence, an abun-
dance of joys and an abundance of
potential sensory data—none of which
is explored in these films. It remains a
riddle, when the rest of human endeav-
ours, not least artistic ones, struggle
with ideas, situations, history and non-
sense, how cinema, with its unique ca-
pabilities of portraying what it means to
exist as a human life-form within this
world of ideas, situations, history and
nonsense, can so often be so thought-
less. So stupid. To take but one exam-
ple—I do believe this is one of the big
challenges of contemporary cinema,
and it is not a rhetorical question but
cause for some reflection: why is it that
in all the films I watched, the only fe-
male main characters were
1. the generic 'old woman'
2. a teenage vampire?
Really, why? You don't need to de-
clare yourself a feminist to find some-
thing very peculiar about cinema's
reluctance to subjectivise individual
female characters. This is but one strik-
ingly obvious example of the vast scope
of potential struggles evidently not be-
ing fought within the short film.
The level of technical know-how
and stylistic ambition is generally very
high in most of these films, but spirits
are low. Most of the material shows and
tells us less than a successful internet
meme. Cinema is not philosophy, it is
not painting, it is not theatre and it is
not writing—it is something else alto-
gether, and it's best when it takes itself
seriously as such. Godard said he made
films to create friction, so philosophers
like his contemporary Foucault would
speak a little slower, proclaim a little
less. Then again, he said a lot of things.
There are many things to do with a film,
all in all this programme does rather lit-
tle of it. Cinema—especially new, young,
'fresh' cinema—must start conversing
with the humanities and the arts again.
Meanwhile, we'll be sharing more chal-
lenging things on YouTube.
Strangely enough the emphasis
on the importance of the market
has not been reduced in Icelandic
society after the crash. You would
think people would be interested
in something other than the mar-
ket after its failure, but this is not
the case. While Spain, the Arab
countries and now even Israel have
their own mass movements of "in-
dignados," spreading new hope,
Iceland’s indignation and political
awakening seem to be fading fast
while a new turn is being taken, a
turn where, once again, the market
is the message. What do I mean
by the market being the message?
I’m pinching this from philosopher
Marshall McLuhan, who coined the
phrase "The medium is the mes-
sage" to express the fact that all
medium is influenced by its form to
the extent where the message that
the medium brings us IS in fact one
with its form. The medium is thus
constantly talking about itself.

I should rather say that "the medium is
the market"—meaning what I’m trying
to say, that Icelandic media is overflow-
ing with news about the market. The
news is the same as before, only with
a negative twist: Before, the news told
us that everything was booming and
the rate of this or that was sky high,
now they say just the opposite, plus we
should be worried about a new world-
wide economic meltdown. Why? Why
should we worry about that? The spec-
ulative realm of our minds has limited
space, and there is absolutely nothing
we can do about some prophecy that a
new economist has just brewed up. In
terms of speculation, we have the pos-
sibility of filling our minds with some-
thing completely different: literature,
music, the new constitution.
The speculation about the new Ice-
landic constitution says that congress
will probably kill it. That it’s too demo-
cratic for this world, they will never
let us vote on a constitution made by
citizens voted directly by the people.
Constitutions have usually not been
made like this; the founding fathers of
the United States wrote theirs in secret,
and it was mostly penned by Thomas
Jefferson. Then it was presented to the
people. In Spain they wrote a constitu-
tion some thirty years ago. The fact is
that a large part of it leaked out be-
fore it was ready. As it happens, an
important Spanish intellectual read it
and found it full of mistakes and trite
material that had nothing to do with a
constitution. He wrote an article in the
paper, pointing out its mistakes. What
happened? Thirty years ago a worried
Spanish president phoned the writer
and asked him to visit him and elabo-
rate on the subject in person.
Would this happen today in Iceland,
a much smaller society? Probably not.
As far as I know, the government has
not even invited the authors of the con-
stitution to a meeting to expand on the
subject and discuss it. What will they
do? I don’t know. Nobody seems to be
willing to ask the government, the news
is filled with items about the market.
Nothing can be more important for a
society than a constitution. Yet the Ice-
landic public television has not seen fit
to stage a public debate about it.
In many ways, the new constitution
looks good. It is a reform, and even goes
beyond simply being an improvement
on the old one. But it still has flaws. Ac-
cording to the present constitution, my
vote has less value than a vote from the
countryside. These are remains of an
old policy, according to which a certain
balance should be kept between the
city of Reykjavík and the rural areas;
the population of rural Iceland should
be more or less equal to that of the city.
This policy flunked as early as 1950.
Today there is no real policy of bal-
ance between the two worlds of Ice-
land, happy as I would be to have one.
The thing is more or less out of control
with some remnants of the old policy
still lurking around, meaning it’s much
easier for someone from rural Iceland
to get voted into congress than it is for
someone from Reykjavík. No constitu-
tion in the world has different kinds of
vote, where some of them weigh more
than others. While this has been largely
corrected in the new constitution, Ice-
land is still not one constituency, mean-
ing that my vote in fact still weighs less
than my friends in Þórshöfn on Langa-
nes.
Why is this still so? We have no
way of knowing. For the government
is not opening up any discussion or
publicly seeking a solution or ponder-
ing openly whether there should be an
election about the constitution or not.
Why no public meeting with members
of the constitutional board? My hunch
says that the government is looking for
a great way of turning the thing into
something they can present to the me-
dia, a piece of marketing.
Lots Of PixelsThe Market Is The Message
HAUKUR MáR HELGASON
HERMANN STEFáNSSON
jENNY HOLzER
“You don't need to
declare yourself a feminist
to find something very
peculiar about cinema's
reluctance to subjectivise
individual female
characters”
“The news is the same as before, only with a negative twist:
Before, the news told us that everything was booming and
the rate of this or that was sky high, now they say just the
opposite, plus we should be worried about a new worldwide
economic meltdown. Why?”