Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson

The collapse of the financial system in Iceland in the fall of 2008 has raced economists, writers and historians to the computer to write books about it. Today, there are close to 10 books that have been published about the collapse, all with different take on the issue. My favorite is the White Book (2009, published in Icelandic) by Einar Már Guðmundsson but he is the only writer who critically examines the political economy of the collapse.

Now, Icelandic filmmakers and journalists have joined in the discourse. God Bless Iceland, a documentary film by Helgi Felixson was released October 6th. Same day, the Icelandic State Television aired its first episode of four called The Collapse (2009) by Þóra Ásgeirsdóttir.

Reviews of God Bless Iceland have been mixed, some like others don´t. However, none of the reviews I´ve come across actually address the visual approach being used, which I find quite interesting. Instead, the main question evolves around how political it is, if the film manages to analyze the meltdown. So much for the confidence in the medium in being able to convey alternative knowledge!

Anyway, I´ve watched the first two episodes of The Collapse and what a disappointment. The art of filmmaking has been diminished to the art of outdoor architectural paning and empty-boardroom tilting. I wonder where all the hours and hours of footage are of journalists chasing and interviewing politicians, where all the out takes are and where all the other media footage is i.e. from other competitors in the business like Channel 2, Mbl.is (web TV) and independent filmmakers? One way to interpret their approach is that they are veiling their inadequacy in addressing the unfolding of the collapse.

The filmmakers seem to be totally oblivious about their handling of visual media and what goes on in their voice over messages. For instance, while the heavy voice over talks about a national collapse the film footage rarely – if ever- glares from the city center of Reykjavík. It´s like the collapse didn´t happen anywhere else in the country!

The film by Felixson adds the human tragedy to the equation of the collapse but it has affected every living soul in the country, one way or another. The film follows the unfolding of the collapse and how it has affected the lives of three different individuals. I agree with other commentators that it is rather shallow from a (national) political point of view – which is rather surpricing from a filmmaker that has previously dealt with the pitfalls of Iceland´s political structure (cf. his documentary ´Bóndi er bústólpi´ from the early 1990´s) – but the film manages to introduce the personal turmoil: the politicians that wake up in a nightmare of their own construction (resembles the story by Shelley about Frankenstein!), the enterpreneurs that are faced with their own stupidity in doing business, and members of the population who decide to become political when they realize that they´ve been had! However, the film doesn´t manage to go beyond the personal or to interrogate these scenes but rather leave us with an impression that something profound has happened. Yes, but?

The rumour has it that more films about the collapse are being produced right now. Let´s hope they will be beyond the board-room stage and offer us some alternative, cinematic, depth.

Someone stated in the media that the first Icelandic horror film has been released this fall.  It´s called Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre and promotes it self with the catchy phrase: Hunting humans in the cold Icelandic waters.

A good friend of mine went to see it the other day but walked out during the break (yes, Icelandic cinemas screen all films with a 10 min break! It boosts their economy!).  He told me that it wasn´t because he was affraid or grossed out by the splatter scenes but rather because of the low production value. It terrified him to relive the filmic experience of the early 1980s which showed nothing but low budget solutions. Evidently, his remark put a twist on the meaning of ´horror.´ Has nothing changed, my friend asked me, since the first Icelandic feature films?

In order for me to answer that question I need to see it.

Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition. Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington, editors. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2005.

A review published in Visual Anthropology Review 21 (1/2) 2005.

In their Introduction to this volume, the editors, Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington, identify two main forces of globalization in Nordic countries which, they argue, are transforming Nordic cinema. These forces are neoliberal restructuring of national economies in the name of competitiveness and the mobility of people across geographical borders which increases social, cultural and religious differences in the region. As a result, they write, “national cinema” appears increasingly problematic as an analytical category. In light of this, the editors ask if it is appropriate to confine research questions within conventional national boundaries as has been the tendency in cinema studies.

The editors argue that because of blurred boundaries within Nordic film production scholars must rethink their methodologies for studying and reading Nordic films. These are fine sentiments but, unfortunately, the volume does not live up to the Introduction and does not deliver anything new in terms of theory or methodology in dealing with Nordic cinema.

The book is divided into three sections: “Trends in Transnational Nordic Cinema,” “The State and Film Markets in Transnational Times,” and “Auteurism and Genre in Transnational Context.” The first section includes three articles that try to set the scene in terms of “trends” in film production within the Nordic countries and how they have fared in the “international market.” The parameters of success in these and the other articles are box office numbers. Simplistically, the authors write about Nordic cinema as “globalized” as if Nordic films enter the United States market or challenge box office numbers compared with Hollywood films. Theoretically, the authors in the book utilize center/periphery models of globalization that are imperialistic and empirically outdated and which only serve to repeat jaded cultural policy arguments.

Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Faye Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin, University of California Press, 2002), reviewed in VAR 20(1):89-90, is a good example of a book that might have helped update the authors’ theoretical writing. Also, the authors in this volume seem to be totally unaware that there are sources of cinema in the world other than Hollywood.

In the second section we have four articles. Three of them describe Danish film culture, while the fourth discusses Finnish cinema. Here the authors are trying to understand the impact of different Nordic governmental film policies on film production and how these have affected cultural, economic and artistic arguments within the sphere. The articles are, however, not very convincing.

Although the authors in this section of the book write about cinema and cite cultural and societal changes as background, there are no actual explorations of how specific changes occur in any of the Nordic countries. Instead, we read about how cinema policy is played out within governmental institutions in Denmark (article by Pil Gundelach Brandstrup and Eva Novrup Redvall) and Finland (article by Mervi Pantti) and how this influences cinema production in these countries.

The third and last section of the book includes six articles that all fall within traditional cinema studies approaches dealing with “auteur” theory or genre studies. If there was ever a need or time to theoretically rethink both notions of “auteur” and “genre” it would be now in times of alleged transition. Globalization studies usually try to make sense of contemporary processes of globalization and transnational/cultural flows. They question not only the spatial assumption underlying the concept of community but fundamental concepts, such as culture, place, society, and nation, while they adopt concepts such as hybridity and hyperspace, disjunctive scapes, displacement, and deterritorialization for understanding contemporary social scenes (Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalizations. Arjun Appadurai, University of University of Minnesota Press, 1996; Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Duke University Press, 1997).

The great advancements in technology have increased awareness of divergent
interpretations of the implications of locality and definitions of community. Today’s world involves new order and intensity. The media and electronic technology play an important role in the world order. Following Arjun Appadurai, it can be stated that the media and technology have created communities with “no sense of place” (29). The articles in this section of the book, however, do not contribute to such rethinking.

The authors do not question fundamental cultural and social constructions of concepts like “state,” “markets,” “borders,” “origin,” and “author” that influence deeply conceptions of change, globality, local practices and audience reception. The concept of culture is not critically examined in this attempt to rethink Nordic national cinema, although the authors reduce national cinema and Nordic governmental policies to Nordic culture. Current reception theory within media studies, such as the work of David Morley in Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (Routledge, 2000), which emphasizes the agency of audiences and social processes do not seem to have washed upon these author’s shores. The articles by Linda Haverty Rugg and Trevor G. Nestingen are examples of essentialization of cinema audiences. This is rather unfortunate as the Nordic countries are an excellent research venue for contributing to rethinking the concept of national cinema, its producers and its audiences because of their size and close collaboration in commerce, culture and politics.