Reykjavík Grapevine - 20.05.2016, Side 56

There are “oceans” of albums out
there, says the crane operator—
more music than he could ever lis-
ten to in his lifetime, so he doesn’t
try to keep up with everything any-
more. Download as much as you
like, but you’ve still got the same
two ears and twenty-four-hour
days. So just do what you can. The
crane’s pulley creaks, and another
pallet of frozen fish comes up from
the hull of a freezer trawler.
‘Keep Frozen’, the first feature-
length film from artist and film-
maker Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir,
considers the necessary anachro-
nism of manual labour in the mod-
ern world. Shot in Reykjavík’s old
harbour, just west of of downtown,
the film documents the grueling
workday of the dockworkers who
unload tonnes upon cardboard-
boxed tonnes of fish frozen at sea,
from the dark of a winter morning
into the dark of a winter night.
Hulda Rós, who has worked in
sculpture, mixed-media, installa-
tion and performance art, attends
to the rhythm of work, isolating
the repetitive, inexorable choreog-
raphy of men and machines: boxes
are heaved, stacked, ferried by
forklift and wrapped in plastic on
a sort of Lazy Susan contraption,
whirring sluggishly. Other visual
artists and filmmakers have lately
been attracted to the late-industri-
al majesty of the fishing and ship-
ping sectors; with its focus on the
stevedores servicing the floating
fish factories that consolidated and
transformed the Icelandic econo-
my, you could consider ‘Keep Fro-
zen’ the humbler dry-land compan-
ion piece to Peter Hutton’s ‘At Sea’,
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna
Paravel’s ‘Leviathan’, or Mauro Her-
ce’s ‘Dead Slow Ahead’.
Blue Collar Nostalgia
But despite the rigor of its visu-
als, this film is not strictly ab-
stract. Voiceovers complement the
drudgery, like daydreams, as the
men—they’re all men—reflect, in
Icelandic and Polish, on their work.
Their concerns are very contem-
porary: in their acknowledgement
of the linguistic and cultural hi-
erarchies which persist in long-
running blue-collar concerns in
the Schengen era; and especially
in their flashes of nostalgia, which
recall ‘We Are Still Here’, the recent
documentary about shuttered fish
factories and dying Westfjords vil-
lages, or more than one recent fic-
tion film about phlegmatic farmers
clinging to a way of life, way off the
Ring Road. The subjects of ‘Keep
Frozen’, trudging in workboots and
safety gloves through the rapidly
gentrifying Grandi area, with its
boutique hotels and ice-cream par-
lours, express bemusement at Ice-
land’s brave new world of tourism
and entrepreneurship (the tourists
who came to take their picture,
the suits who ask them to keep it
down), while recalling where their
scars came from. They’re proud
of the work they do—they’re the
guys with the hard-muscled fore-
arms, who do the shitty work of
shoveling food into your and my
soft bellies—though any hint of
machismo is short-circuited by the
film’s overall tone of breakroom
deadpan, with an impassive fixed
camera capturing sparse, goofy
banter and bone-dry small talk.
Still, the film remains, in its way,
quite patriotic. The title ‘Keep Fro-
zen’ comes from the instructions
on each box of frozen fish, but it
may also suggest an imperative for
Iceland to retain some close, frosty
national spirit: Stay cold, ponyboy.
SHARE: gpv.is/frozn
Word s by MARK ASCH
Tote That Barge! Lift That Bale!
'Keep Frozen'
at Bíó Paradís
Movies Review56
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 6 — 2016
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