This is the Bureau of Visual Compost, how may I help you?

An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because the association of ideas is distant. Distant and just. – JL Godard.

Why is there no humanity in the images Icelandic media publish from Iraq? Literally, like no humans. Armed coalition soldiers, mostly American, yes. Dead and injured people, yes, although destroyed cars are more common. Perhaps those hit a nerve in the country of general Landcruiser ownership. But on election day, or when news hit about growing cancer rates – when anything else is newsworthy than car bombs or air strikes, all we get is the below.

A landscape? No, it’s not even a landscape, it’s unconscious, it’s nothing. Perhaps a soldier took his pocket camera along on a bomb raid, got some snapshots. The accompanying text is about the general elections taking place and people killed in an explosion. There’ s a lot of visual material in there. Images that actually reveal these slices of reality, show something, do exist, and are used by news agencies all around the world. They certainly have their ideological biases and limits, tend towards clichés etc. – but compared with what’s used in Icelandic web media, they seem infinitely rich.

The example above is not unfair or atypical, even if arbitrarily captured from RÚV’s website today. I went through news from Iraq on the website (Icelandic state radio) back to November 2009 – and the closest to a person I found was this:

A facile image today, if there ever was one – like air, u don’t even have to stop and notice, so common have these become.

Then there was this:

‘Terrorist attacks on election day’ the headline reads. No actual living people survived, but there are still functional hands in the country …

This is not necessarily due to any racist bias or any focused prejudices. The recent Dutch elections fare no better, visually:

– revealing, that while the elections were so and so, there are still windmills in Holland.

As RÚV’s managers don’t seem to notice any substantial difference between actual cinema and Disney’s 1000th variation on the My-dog-can-talk-or-at-least-think-in-voice-over! theme, this lack of images should come as no surprise. Director Grímur Hákonarson pointed out in a recent interview that being politically chosen and motivated, the managers of RÚV are highly interested in the names of local chieftains, less interested in literature – and one might safely add: unaware of the visual universe extending further than a shaved chin, necktie and mirror.

‘Christians demonstrate in Iraq’.

Breaking News! This urgent image just came in:

Newsroom ontology

The following, then, are the main categories of visual existence, according to the RÚV newsroom – a short random sample survey suggests that other local newsrooms pretty much follow the same classification, in varying proportions:

The main categories are: Local nature, often headlined. Politicians (mostly faces). Newsroom staff (also faces). Celebrity (bodies included). Money. Corporate identity and logos.

Car-related objects would be the odd one in today. The world outside Iceland remains largely a map-thing, with three main exceptions: Politicans and celebrity, of course, and then the outside world as a place of human suffering. However, even that minimal vision of humanity, the suffering animal, so prominent in media in general, seems to have become somewhat neglected recently, giving way for the suffering car and the demolished house.

A common feature is that the visuality is in most of these cases ordered from elsewhere – all those images are created and intended as images by another authority than the newsroom: corporate logos, celebrity, politicians’ faces – pictures of lost children from the police. No independent editorial policy or decision making is involved. No photographer’s passion to frame a slice of reality otherwise unseen. They show only those who have an interest in being seen, and serve that interest diligently. In terms of images the medium merely obeys the will of those with the means to impose it – be that show business or state authority.

Also noteworthy is that these exist more or less in isolation – items portrayed hardly ever relate to any other object, people or visual phenomena in the world. Only particulars are shown, and no relations drawn. In that way, the pictures are not so much photographs as icons – in the desktop computer sense – a heap of pixels saying little more than ‘click here’, making it a little easier to place the mouse on the correct news item than a single line of text does.

This is not really a matter of subtle ideological critique, but merely pointing out the blatantly obvious. Because of the absolute lack of imagery any visitor to RÚV’s website senses something akin to death approaching: so much inert material, doing nothing. With no explicit intention behind it, perhaps out of mere thoughtlessness, this lack functions as a closure, supporting the image of a universe consisting of Icelandic politics and nothing else. Such an outlook easily becomes a feedback loop, endlessly reproducing itself, the world on end.

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Are you a terrorist photographer or just an anti-social one?

The Guardian(.co.uk) has been collecting stories about police applying some shady sort of license they have in the UK to stop and search, even arrest, street photographers, professionals and amateurs, sometimes for suspected terrorist activities, sometimes for ‘anti-social’ behavior. The cases are interesting in a wider context, as police and legal trends set in one European country tend to spread, and particularly for the photographers and filmmakers everywhere alike, as such a tendency would be set to seriously damage the potential of documentary work.

In the cases of the published stories, some of the photographers have videorecorded the process of their harrassment and/or subsequent arrest – making these cases doubly interesting for anyone concerned with cinema as a truth-producing tool to challenge authority.

In the links below, the videos are included with the articles.

London, dec. 11, 2009.
Accrington February 21, 2010.

On January 23, 2000 photographers gathered for protest against these practices, in Trafalgar Square, London.

The UK terrorism law, also known as section 44, has been applied in peculiar ways, even more promiscuously than many of those imagined, who were concerned about the road ahead when Western countries responded to the attack on the twin towers, in 2001, with various legislation increasing state authorities’ powers to track and interfere in people’s daily lives. In 2008, 2300 children stopped by British officers in the name of terrorism law, thereof 58 under the age of ten.

As many photographers and filmmakers will know, photography tends to be forbidden and/or strictly controlled in those places defined as pseudo-public or post-public – i.e. shopping malls and private commercial areas, that often have the aura of being public space, but in which behavior can be restricted and controlled far more extensively than civil rights would allow in real public spaces, such as on the street or in a public square. The right to take pictures as seen as part of the ongoing struggle about public space.

Right until after Iceland joined the EEC in 1993, halfway into the EU, every municipality had a sheriff, with a rather extensive role, as law-enforcing police officer, prosecutor and judge in many matters. I remember an instance when my father, an avid amateur photographer, took up his camera in a small town where we had just moved to, to take pictures of sheep that had just been slaughtered and lay hung on some sort of wooden suspense, blood dripping – all quite picturesque – when a hand suddenly arrived in the frame, forbidding the photography altogether. It turned out to be the local sheriff, doing his own illegal home-slaughtering, and conveniently enforcing local restrictions on photography on site. Mostly though, as far as I know, photographers have probably been rather free to do their thing in Iceland, that is, except in the shopping malls, of course. There’s no freedom like free markets.

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Good Copy Bad Copy

Good Copy Bad Copy, a fantastic Danish 2007 documentary about the battle going on against the tyranny of copyright, can be found here. Highly informative, covering everything from the Swedish Pirate Party whose members have been elected for the European Parliament, to filmmaking and distribution in Nigeria.

When Nigerian films were featured in a special section at the Berlinale film festival in 2004, I wrote about the lessons that might be learned from their methods, in a small art economy such as Iceland’s. That short article is here, alas, in Icelandic.

The clip above focuses on innovative methods of music production and distribution in Brazil. Notice the nice juxtaposition of images from the technoclubs first, all glitz, and then the facilities of the music producer, very sans glitz. As the film is distributed non-commercially, under a creative commons license, I’m curious if the filmmakers actually travelled this much, or if they had contact with separate teams in separate continents – the film’s aesthetics seem too coherent throughout for that, though.

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Burkina Faso 8600km

Documentarist Thorsteinn J. will premiere a film relating Iceland, in the midst of its economic and political crisis, to the experience of humanitarian volunteers in Burkina Faso, on his own website, on February 25. Here is the trailer.

Thorsteinn J. has since … perhaps as early as 2000, been a pioneer in web-based film distribution in Iceland, and made one of the most convincing attempts at a manifesto, so far, about the freedom of filmmaking, already technically free from the authority of TV programmers, curators and big budget producers. I can’t seem to find the manifesto online right now … but such declarations are important stepping stones, and might turn out to be as crucial as they are consistently ignored by those they are directed against.

Thorsteinn’s work has a delicacy to it, which is tempting to call poetic (even at times when most poets aim for the anti-delicate), bringing to light a Reykjavík – and now a more extensive universe – from a humanist perspective, that Thorsteinn J., a household name in Iceland, has surely cultivated since the start of his carreer as TV presenter. The filmmaker-storyteller’s attitude is fundamentally perplexed, as he goes about asking questions, sometimes about the blatantly obvious, sometimes as irritating as a compassionate Socrates, rather than a journalist – making his work, otherwise focused on human suffering, subtly comic. Those in touch with their inner cynic might find Thorsteinn’s whole approach too focused on hope and compassion. The trailer’s interview with representative of Christianity would feed such irritations. Nevermind, the film definitely seems like something to look forward to.

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The Cinema of Violated Children – Berlinale 60

Now, for coverage of the whole Berlinale festival, there are certainly better sources around, whether Screen international, which issues a daily magazine distributed in the festival area, with info focused on market interests, the Berlinale festival’s press releases or, this guy on Indiewire – who seems to give a pretty thorough all-in-all review of the 60th anniversary festival.

Festival anxieties

Let’s start out with the obvious: this is a great festival. It’s huge, the program is outdone only by the number of participants – the city seems to be craving for cinema at this time of the year, every single time. They claim to sell 200 thousand tickets anually, and when you see the cue at the ticket booths or the crowds coming and going in the U-bahn, that seems believable. The pleasure of sinking into a cinema, day after day, one, two or three films per day, with the press pass privilege of feeling free to leave if the film is terrible and just go to that other screening next doors, is complete. The greatness of such a great festival comes with its cons, of course, one of which is the anxiety of never having real overview, never knowing if you are really optimizing your festival experience, if you are really seeing those films that you would most like to see, and not missing out on a whole ten day program in the next screening room, that would have blown your mind more than the ones you actually saw etc. – I don’t even dare thinking of the anxiety of those who are here for the parties and networking, but it is visible in some of the faces you meet.

To be sure, this festival is a Hollywood thing, not in the sense of the films themselves, but in the social sense: hundreds of young people volunteer at the festival, working in the wardrobe or ticket sales, taking care of visitors etc. without wages – such organization is possible only wherever there is prestige and social capital to be made. Glitz. Probably all of the major festivals are like this, probably the festival route is a travelling Hollywood attracting hopeful talent (oh, which reminds me:)

Revolution? What revolution?

This aspect of the festival, its purely capital side, is underlined in many ways. Of course, it is not merely a festival in the same sense as a literary festival, it is also a marketplace, the equivalent of Frankfurt’s annual bookfair. Every event that involves something more than just seeing a film is tinted by this, sometimes in quite intolerable ways. For example, I have not yet seen a presenter or a moderator capable of asking the filmmakers interesting questions – not once. By far the harshest example yet was during a panel held with ten Mexican directors who collaborated on the film Revolution, to commemorate the Mexican revolution’s 100th anniversary.

The film consists of ten short films, where each director investigates what the revolution means for him or her today. To the project’s merit, two of the ten directors are women, which is certainly not revolutionary, but a considerably higher proportion than the female 5% of Mexican working directors. To the panel’s ridicule, however, the moderator, Mike Goodridge, editor of Screen International, forgot to ask one of the women any question at all, until an hour and a half had already passed and the audience had already been given a microphone. This failure of even acknowledging a female director’s existence was only the top of the moderator’s iceberg of ignorance.

First of all, the discussion was held in English. This may seem pretty straight-forward under any circumstances where you want to serve an international audience – but in the case of discussing South America’s social struggles in the year 2010, it is a strange decision, to put it mildly, when the whole continent, not least Mexico, experiences the English-speaking USA as a violently oppressive force. Some of the directors spoke fluent English, such as the beloved Gael Garcia Bernal – others had to really struggle to find their words, or even gave up. Through the years, there has certainly been no lack of capable live translators at such events at the Berlinale or other events in the city – and they certainly are not an expensive extra feature – it just seems that no one thought of this. Actually there even was a translator on stage, but presented rather as an embarrassing backup plan, than part of the program – and so the directors rather stayed in their silence than ask for help.

Second, the moderator was not merely incapable of asking any questions relevant to the film’s theme, meaning or intentions, let alone the contemporary context of the revolution and its heritage – whenever a directed digressed into speaking about the issues involved in the films, he forcefully pushed the conversation back into its place by asking about the practicalities of filmmaking. This became most painful in a sequence of Oscar nominee Carlos Reygadas‘ attempts to actually speak about his contribution to the film in the context of the revolution. I don’t know much about the director, and I suspect that I might dislike most of what he had to say – but to his merit he did try to say something. ‘Many people, he started, in Mexico speak about the corrupt government and bad government etc. – but I want to speak about how things really are, the chemistry of things’ and then he spoke of Mexico’s diverse social and ethnic groups referring to chemistry of metaphors, adding the occasional ‘As I say this is very politically incorrect. I thinks the killings etc. are just a reflection of who we are …’ – and every country gets the government it deserves and so on and so forth – he really got going and captivated the audience by saying something, even if these were reactionary clichés, they were something, and surely called for a response. I think I even saw Gael Bernal sink in his seat under the rant, or perhaps it was just my wishful thinking that someone would address and answer the essentialist – discussion, even heated discussion, was in the air.

The moderator, however, skilfully supressed the looming discussion by swiftly asking: ‘Did you do shorts before you did feature films?’ – in no relevance at all to the topic Reygadas had just opened up, but surely within the scope of Screen International’s intelligence services. Reygadas, however, is not over and he bravely makes another attempt at opening up a discussion, runs down the field with a ‘I don’t belive cinema is a narrative art form, although narrative can be the consequence of cinema’, but the moderator gets even faster to the defense and goes: ‘Did you work a lot with the actors?’ Reygadas is not yet subdued and for the third time he attempts to say something interesting, and succeeds, with ‘I know the concept of freedom is a complex philosophical topic and all, but then freedom is also that if you want to kick the chair in front of you, you can kick the chair. You know, in Europe everyone is free with all these civil rights and everything, but if the body is free, if you are free inside – how free can you be when you go to school for so long?’ – a fantastic, valid question, fundamental to the revolution, to cinema, and to our contemporary predicament and the moderator follows it up by asking: ‘Did you hold the camera yourself?’

At which point Reygadas cynically surrendered: ‘No, I just ate and drank while the film made itself.’ The editor of Screen International had successfully managed to steer off the danger of any interesting dialogue that evening.

When the moderator, Mr. Goodridge, finally remembered that the woman sitting next to him, Mariana Chenillo, existed, he asked her if being a female director in Mexico was hard. She said yes, certainly, only 5% of directors there are women. He then asked: And do you believe this? She: What, that it’s hard? He: Yes. She: Er … yes, it’s a fact. Goodridge then gave the word to the audience again.

Don’t know

Reygadas was certainly not the only person on stage who had more interesting things to say than the moderator could acknowledge – that was obviously the case for many of the directors, some of whom would have been capable of doing so in English, while others would have benefitted greatly from a translator. The whole episode, however, is noteworthy precisely because it is not unique, but completely ordinary. Discussions about cinema, even at prestiged events, with smart people, tend to be banal and stupid. Equivalent to asking a writer whether he or she uses Word 95 or Word 98, if they use the keyboard or the mouse to copy-paste paragraphs …

I’ve heard that this is the case at venues such as the Frankfurt book fair, as well, which is a pure market-event – an event for publishers and distributers and not a literary event at all. At the Frankfurt parties even Germany’s most distinguished philosophers speak about their books in terms of euro-palettes – that is how many palettes have been printed etc. As mentioned before, the Berlinale has a double nature, as a film festival and a marketplace. As we should all know very well, however, if you show the market too much leniancy it ends up taking over the whole thing – which inevitably leads to stupidity.

To some extent, however, stupidity is the order of the day. I have seen some pretty decent films at the festival, but none of them is as subtle, as profoundly intelligent and as artistically whole as Werner Herzog’s 1968 Lebenszeichen, screened in the Retrospective section. Herzog was 26 when the film was premiered, at a point in time in which the whole world seemed to be craving for something smarter, at the beginning of probably the most wonderful decade in the history of cinema yet, when cinema opened up for thought, or thought opened cinema up, invaded it and impregnated it. Then Jaws came along and ate us all.

Chronic infancy

This is not to be nostalgic, to glorify Herzog personally or declare cinema dead – far from it – but to name our predicament, in comparison to what went before us. (With all the necessary preliminaries, I didn’t see that many films, yes I’m oversimplifying, yes, this is unfair, judgemental and please correct me if I just missed all the films that would challenge this perspective on current cinema, I know I might be wrong. But I think I’m not.) We belong to a generation of constant infancy. Iceland’s foremost musicians (múm, Sigurrós etc.) have been dubbed ‘the cute generation’. Their cuteness however is not theirs alone, but a situation of a generation, who has faced no real common project or goal in which to show or practice a certain maturity that used to be taken for granted. Unlike our grandmothers and grandfathers who all around Europe were occupied by rebuilding a continent ruined by war, or in the case of Iceland, building a country from scratch, unlike those people who facing the physical desolation in all directions knew their efforts, building schools, hospitals, laying phone cables, laying roads etc. would be worth the while, our options have been between taking part in a competition of grabbing the biggest piece of the cake and munch on our own, or silently go and play with our legos. Whichever game you prefer, the greedy one or the cute one, they are certainly neither adult nor mature in any sense that earlier generations would acknowledge.

Now, again, this is not to induce a nostalgic trip. There are certainly large advantages to our Western situation – such as the simple one of already having decent houses and buildings for most of society’s fundamental needs. However, the difference involves serious drawbacks, as well, and one of the most apparent ones is this childish state when words and deeds remain ineffective – whatever you say or do, for a pretty long time already, it has not seemed to be capable of fundamentally altering anything.

In Germany, this generation wonders why it doesn’t protest against the war in Afghanistan – actually even the military wonders why young people who are actually against the war, are not protesting more, as discussed in the strange film Day of the Sparrow (I don’t know yet if I find it rather good or bad, but it’s certainly strange enough to be a bit of both). This is not to be pessimistic – but to note a difference between where we stand now, and where we, or those who came before us, stood in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

An American critic who sat next to me during one screening told me that in his opinion all the 14+ program short films he had seen, that is short films aimed at teenagers, had been better achieved than almost all of the short films aimed at adults. I cannot verify whether this is true, but it is noteworthy how many of the winning films in the short film competition itself actually dealt with children. Venus vs Me is an impressionistic piece about a girl at the beginning of puberty. Colivia is about a ten year old boy – in both films the adults are almost cartoon-like, though in very different ways, simplified creatures as witnessed by a child. The Golden Bear went to Händelse Vid Bank, a fantastically achieved film from Sweden about a bank robbery. Coherent to our chronic infancy, the beautiful one-shot CCTV-ish cinematography, however, keeps a far distance from all the characters involved, with both a storyline and characterization that could easily fit within a Donald Duck comic or the Olsen-gang. This is not meant to offend, as I genuinely liked the film.

The Silver Bear, then, went to the Israeli film Hayerida – about a family of three, mourning their recently deceased son, which seems to have died ’serving the military’. The problem with this film is of a different kind. Here we surely stay close to the complexity of an adult world – adult feelings convincingly portrayed. Visually the film is very sophisticated. The whole narrative, however, is supported by the film’s blind spot, of not translating ’serving the military’ into ‘terrorizing Palestinians’ – of keeping the camera far away from the wall, from occupied roads, or any other evidence of the constant militarized harrassment at the center not merely of Israel’s politics, but at the heart of the film’s narrative.

This forced ignorance is perhaps precisely what defines the existence of a child, supposed to either believe or feign belief in Santa-claus, in daddy’s greatness, in an asexual and non-violent world of charm, flowers – and then at odd moments, which the child is not supposed to fully understand or know the reasons for: silence.

We live in an era defined by enforced silence, not so much about the world’s harms, but about its reasons. This silence lies at the heart of our childlike existence. Cinema is being fenced in and turns a blind eye.

Gunpoint Glitz

The Berlinale film festival now celebrates its 60th anniversary. From the beginning of film festivals, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, as humanity celebrated still being alive, the films and the festivals not only signalled an opening of the world, a forerunner of what we now know as globalization, they were themselves such an opening. Now, in only a few years, all that has changed. Whereas the cinema, the place with the seats and the curtains, had the function of a window to, if not the outside world, then to some other world, we are now surrounded and occupied by such windows all day long. With the advent of high speed internet connections the technical hindrances that were the raison d’etre of film festivals have, in only a few years, not only become evident, but obsolete at the same time. In that way the role of film festivals has been fundamentally reversed, simply by their not changing: they no longer signal the opening up of cinema, but the closure and limitations manufactured to sustain markets. That is, the only reason that the films are now screened in selected places, at chosen times, to a limited audience, is marketing, and the necessity of hype.

Of course then, there is habit – there are those, like David Lynch, who find the idea preposterous that you would watch a film from anything else than a projector in a crowded hall. (Which reminds me, there is a documentary at the Berlinale this year, about a young man’s journey through the TM meditation movement that Mr. Lynch has been advocating for the last years – according to the film’s synopsis the young man does become somewhat disillusioned along the way.)

To be fair, there is, at least ideally there should be, some intelligence in hype. By going through the screening process of industry, media, cinephiles or movie-buffs and die-hard fans, before films hit the general public, free-market theory would argue that a lot of work has already been done for the general audience, who can rely on that process for information about which films are worth seeing and which ones are not. Let’s leave that claim there, to be taken at face value by those who want, rejected by those who know better. Nói Albinói, a splendid Icelandic film, would hardly have hit Icelandic audiences at all, if not for the prestige it gained on the festival route.

So let’s say there are pros and cons, however you evaluate them – nonetheless the fact is that a profound change has taken place, turning the nature of cinemas and film festivals upside down. Not only the festivals but ordinary cinema houses no longer open up a channel for what you couldn’t get otherwise, but actually are sustained by an enormous effort of copyright laws, lawyers, policing and ideology – an whole edifice of nuts and bolts to keep those who don’t go through the rites of standing in line, paying, the whole abracadabra of capitalism, from enjoying the technological benefits of our times, that could allow just about anyone access to anything at any time. These restrictions are sustained through violence: in Germany you can expect a fine of 1200 euros if caught illegally downloading a film – and if you don’t pay, of course the debt goes through its ’standard procedure’, which in the end always lead to the arms of police officers. If film were a person, this involuntary change in its ‘meaning of life’ would certainly call for a serious existential crisis.

My legal stomach likes exotic

Copyright lawyer Mareile Büscher and Milena Fessmann, founder of Cinesong, spoke about the reality of creativity’s legal restrictions in a panel for filmmakers, on the rights to music. First of all, if you’ve heard the rumor that the song ‘Happy birthday’ is copyrighted and cannot be sung or even hummed in a film without bought permission, this is true – record company EMI holds the rights and protects them fiercefully. The same goes for any other copyrighteds songs – if a character hums it, even in a documentary, technically speaking you must clear the rights – and practically you better should, because according to Ms. Büscher the staff of right holders scout film festivals to check if any violations take place. ‘Traditional’ songs are mainly those whose composer has been dead for 70 years (‘You can use Mozart of course, because he’s dead enough’ said Fessmann), and these can be recorded without anyone’s permission – except in the case of complex pieces such as symphonies, the score sheets of which are usually rented by the publisher for a certain occasion – so even if a philharmonic orchestra has given you permission to use their performance of a piece for your film, and the composer is long dead, the publisher of the notes might send his lawyers in case the orchestra rented the notes only for one performance, and not for inclusion in a film.

‘In my case children are performing Bach. I don’t know where they got their sheets,’ said one filmmaker.
‘Yeah, but you have to find out,’ urged Fessmann.
However, if you shoot documentary footage from a samba band in Brasil ’somehow, I would tend to just use it – something my legal stomach says it would somehow be alright. Intuitively.’ Said the lawyer. So remember kids, if you’re going to violate anyone’s rights, it better be in the third world.

That is the edifice that cinema is now part and parcel of, the global injustice sustained by an army of lawyers, an army of armies, and a a whole array of everyday ideological self-evident truths such as ‘you should not steal (from those who afford lawyers)’.

Grow up!

Long ago, sociologists wrote about how the cinemas took on the role of the churches – but if cinema adhered to a theology at the time it was a liberation theology. Theology enforced at gunpoint is something else entirely. So we stand in line, waiting for tickets, for the sake of collective absolution.

Fittingly, the Berlinale festival has for ten years been centered in Potsdamer Platz, a pseudo-public space built and run by Sony and Daimler-Benz. There’s a lot of glitz and the hotels in the area have drive-ins for limousines and everything else needed to serve super-stardom.

For your average independent filmmaker, however, or journalist, or the general public, Berlin certainly offers cozier places to spend your time in between screenings. Even the starting point of entering a film festival now involves turning a blind eye to your surroundings, acting as if you are not following orders at gunpoint, but practicing freedom. Of course partly you are, but a half truth tends to be a whole lie.

I did turn a blind eye and enjoyed those films that I found enjoyable. But we really need to talk.

We are not children. Regression or retreat into infancy is a common post-traumatic symptom. It’s understandable, even a necessary survival strategy at times. A virtue can be made of that necessity, and some artists have mastered this state of infancy supremely – reached astonishing heights even. Even so, it remains a state to be dealt with. It is time to grow up again. I look forward to a Berlinale where the moderators are not representatives of enforced stupidity, where the best short films are not restricted by children’s perceptions, where German documentarists no longer spend 90 minutes wondering why they are not protesting, where cinema shows itself capable of thought, subtle, dignified and ruthlessly compassionate.

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Worth the tree, definitely

Repticon – ‘Music video for Reykjavik! song Repticon by Inga Maria Brynjarsdottir and Hrund Atladottir, shot entirely on a Xerox machine.’

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Haïti, mon amour

Blogging is a fine way to remember … or replace memory, with something else, almost as useful.

Bande à part , Godard, 1964. Love triangle, two men make the girl an accomplice to their robbery of a fortune which belongs to the girl’s aunt’s friend. Linear storytelling with a narrator’s voice, which probably is reciting lines from the pulp novel the film is based on. At least the lines are quite novelistic – ’as they watched the lake they were hit by light that shimmered like’ something that light shimmers like. And so on.

The film is not shot in the same narrow spaces as Alphaville, but in a way it might as well have been. That is, the city and its visual surroundings do not get mixed up with events in any way – it serves as an idle backdrop most of the time, breaking into a playfield every now and then: running through the whole Louvre museum in a record-breaking 9 minutes 43 seconds, or Franz practicing equilibrium on an empty wire roll … the only elements of the city that belong to the story or the plot are the villa where the money is kept, and the English school where the guys got to know the girl, Odile, in the first place. Plus the road or the streets – a large portion of the film happens through dialogue in a moving car.

With such limited visual dynamics, the film is, again just like Alphaville, largely dependent on language, breaking cinematic etiquette with endless talking heads.

How come, then, that this film is not boring? That it is actually good? Why does this work?

One thing, of course, that really matters, is what outsiders would easily label as snobbery, but from the inside, that is from the snobs’ point of view, seems like something more noble: trusting the author. The film critic Serge Daney wrote that the gesture of showing was in his view fundamental to cinema, showing in the most simple sense of: Look! See what I found! And see, here is this – oh and let me show you something else! The effectivity of such a gesture depends completely on an established trust – not trust in the sense of an unshakable belief that what will be shown must be exraordinary, but a more elementary trust: that indeed there is someone behind the words, a person who makes the gesture, makes the offer, and intends something with it.

Here, look at this.

Trust is a funny word in this context, because then there is another layer of trust which is somehow trusting the prankster – a trusting audience obeys like a child tricked into a game of illusion, and trusts that the author will deceive them well, or trick them well, trust that their trust will be exploited, perhaps just for fun.

There is this minimal level of trust that you need, in the author as well as in the equipment used to screen the film, when a film plays with its own formal categories, such as in the dancing scene in the café, when the music goes on and off – you must be able to fully assume that this is intentional, in order to enjoy it. That someone is saying ‘now see this’.

But what then, would the film not be fun or interesting or good if it wasn’t made by Godard? I just don’t know … the authorship is so fundamental to the reception of such films, that it is really hard to tell. Then again, the authorship is signalled by eccentricities from the very beginning of the film, its first message, delivered through the fast rhythmical cuts between the trio’s faces accompanied by a honkytonk piano, that even if you know of nothing of Godard you might sort of suspect, at least, that you are in the hands of a godard, that behind this film there is a man who ‘knows what he is doing’. You might and you might not. And you might or might not give into the offer, you may or may not like being in the hands of a man.

The relief of a Hollywood film, in the sense of a film where the film language itself is not threatened, but all novelties pacified by being subdued under Aristotelian coherence + a subplot, is the relief of alienation. Alienation has its good sides, definitely, even McDonalds shares that positive side – you can always go there without feeling threatened. It is not home to anybody, but open to everyone – it is anti-communal in that precise way, and all communities are as threatening to outsiders as they are cozy for those inside. The positive side of alienation is that everyone is equally alienated – that’s the egalitarianism of capitalism. If they happen to serve a nutritious and tasty burger as well, add a salad and mozarella, the McWorld definitely has its plus side. When you enter, you know that even if you are addressed, even if someone asks what you want, no one is really speaking to you.

In that precise way, also, Godard is as anti-modern as any celebrated, small niche restaurant where a whimsical cook intends to challenge you with his specialties. Anyone with anarchic self-esteem, a sense of autonomy and reluctance to give in to a foreign will, has a good reason not to enter.

Modernity is anti-meaning. Modernity, whether capitalist or communist, is about efficient systems and functionality. Meaning is premodern. As the supreme case of an author within the largely functionally-oriented field of film production, Godard’s motto could be deciphered as ‘il faut etre absolument premoderne’ – you must be completely premodern.

Obviously, this is not the message of his filmed content. It is not the message of the fact that he makes films, either. The fact however that he stubbornly insists on being a man, in the sense of a ghost within the machine, an author, can be interpreted in these terms. His films are haunted by humanity, a humanity that never fully finds its place within the narrative, in a modern world of modern cityscapes, but appears in the cracks in the filmic language itself. In its stubborn refusal to obey.

Note: A minor common element of Alphaville (1965) and BaP is North/South as a choice of direction the characters face, in both instances equally trivial, non-sensical, yet fundamental. Repeated often throughout Alphaville, the decision only occurs once in BaP. Decisions, as such, are ridiculous.

The title of this post is not related to its contents at all. I just realized that more people have now died in Haïti, after the earthquake, than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The earthquake would not have had the catastrophic consequences it had in a wealthier society, where buildings are made to stand such tests. The 200 thousand dead are victims of poverty and debt. What images will we receive, what images will we create, from there? In 2010 Godard will premiere a film titled Socialisme. More about that later.

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Alphaville

Just watched Godard’s Alphaville for the second time. The first time was in a German cinema with German subtitles, at a time when I probably didn’t really speak that much German. The film makes absolutely no sense without the linguistic component – wholly dependent on dialogue. Probably unnecessary to add that it’s a great film, but I really hated it the first time round.

Is it perhaps Godard’s most classical piece of storytelling? I haven’t seen nearly all of his films, 49 is the total number I saw somewhere – and a new one coming up later this year, Socialisme – starring philosopher Alain Badiou among others. No jump cuts, no weird time maneuvers, except for the fundamental one of the whole thing happening in the future. And time being an element of the story, in as much as it seems to be the city’s or society’s ambition to become timeless – in a world where everything happens by predictable, logical order, no time goes by in our normal, catastrophic sense. That’s part of the story, however. The structure of the storytelling is absolutely traditional. Which makes it an abnormal piece in Godard’s series.

The dependency on language, even if coherent with classical storytelling, is not filmic in a classical way, however. Had Godard taken the screenplay through script doctors, without the authority of already being ‘Godard’, this would surely have been corrected. ‘Show, don’t say,’ they say.

Now, apart from all that, apart from Godard and his filmmaking, it’s kinda cute to see the worries expressed in any sci-fi or futuristic dystopia from that old century. Since the stock markets took over, computers are not used for a total organization of society, but to serve conflicting private interests and whims. But who could have thought that computers, the machinery of reason, would first and foremost be the servant of unreason, accelerating and magnifying irrationality to the brink of collapse.

As one man said, virtual intelligence must be juxtaposed to virtual stupidity, which abounds. Gigahertz upon gigahertz.

Given two options, the tyranny of rationality or the tyranny of irrationality – kind of like asking if you would rather drink a cup of blood or have seven holes in your head?

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Iceland’s failure, ‘Dallas’, and the power of cinema

Iceland is currently in the midst of a process that will surely last years, and decades within the academia, of finding root-causes for the country’s total economic failure. Meanwhile, those who did find the whole boom-thing funny-smelling try to make it known that they knew and warned already in 2007, 2006, even 2005. Here, then, is a lone voice in the desert, back in 1982: a letter to the editor of an Icelandic tabloid newspaper, where an expatriot in Canada warns his old fellow-countrymen about the looming dangers for the country’s mindset, being put under the spell of the TV-series ‘Dallas’. The wonderful letter below was written to and published by DV, November 19, 1982. English translation below.

Dallas

The Dallas TV-series:
MAGNIFICENT PACKAGING
—content: moral rot

Jón Jónsson writes from Victora B.C., Kanada:

Every now and then I get newspapers scraps sent from Iceland. They allow me to follow events back home.
Sometimes it catches my attention that undesirable things, that should be warned against, are praised as divine. Which especially applies to the Dallas TV-series. Their popularity, for example, get relentless mention. I am quite familiar with the series, I have seen most of the episodes and I know a lot of people who cannot imagine being without the series, that glorious decay.

That is why I would like to mention that we are a sum of our influences through life. Dallas has its influence, so much I know from my own experience. The series is unusually destructvie, loaded with money and anything that may be bought with them. ‘Now, that’s living!’, many people think.

I am frightened by the morals practiced in the show: How exciting it is to have an affair with your secretary; how normal it is to betray and deceive, even within your own family; how far you can get through power and coercion; how sweet the power of money—of what little value life and love.

In Dallas the packaging is magnificent—but the content is moral rot. Icelanders, beware.

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As if Páll Magnússon were serious …

I guess the silence on the blogroll means most people are still in a dumbfound state of shock: after the Icelandic Film Fund declared a 35% reduction in funding, as part of state budget cuts in response to the economic crisis, the other biggest funder of Icelandic filmmaking, state TV RÚV, has declared it will severely cut purchases of all local production and stop buying Icelandic films altogether.

As anyone mildly interested, not necessarily in film as such, but in a society capable of internal dialogue, waits for CEO Páll Magnússon to say it’s a joke, that RÚV will of course fulfill its cultural role, as defined by law and its service contract with the state, that it will cut off its Friday night Disney specials, then let private companies take care of Guiding light, Desperate housewives, Army wives, even ER, before touching a hair on the local film industry’s head … while we wait for such a declaration, here is a list of what Mr. Magnússon could broadcast to fill RÚV’s long broadcast hours – as if he were serious:

1. Live webcam updates from the Páll Magnússon’s office.
2. Reality TV: Icelandic film professionals try their hands at the fishing industry.
3. Live weather webcams from around the country.
4. Friday and Saturday nights: Live camera-phone updates from Reykjavík’s once celebrated nightlife scene.
5. Reality TV: Icelandic film professionals try their hands in the ‘adult industry’.
6. Products from the upcoming adult industry.
7. Commercials from the boom years, 2002-2007, rerun with canned laughter.
8. TV-news rerun with canned laughter.
9. Adult material, yep, rerun with canned laughter.
10. Derrick should really be a bargain today.
11. And Matlock.
12. East-Germany’s DEFA films can’t be that expensive either.
13. Live webcam from RÚV’s cafeteria.
14. Live hidden webcams from psychiatrists’ and social workers’ sessions.
15. Mezzoforte videos.
16. Adult material with a Mezzoforte soundtrack … and canned laughter.
17. Webcams from soup kitchens.
18. Webcams from soup kitchens with canned moaning.
19. Parliament sessions, live, with canned moaning.
20. Stock material of Icelandic mountains with the national hymn, repeated over and over, with canned moaning.
21. Live visualization of ISK currency fluctuations.
22. Collective moaning through mobile phones, live.
23. Someone playing Grand Theft Auto 4.
24. Páll Magnússon playing GTA 4.
25. Páll Magnússon loosing friends on Facebook, live.

The possibilities are seamingly endless. Really, the film industry is sooo 20th century.

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