The Cinema of Iceland: Between Tradition and Liquid Modernity 3631778643, 9783631778647

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Preface: A Cinematic Terra Incognita
Introduction: The Imaginary Island: From a Literary Myth to On-screen Stereotype
Part One: Reconfiguring Utopias: Nation Building and Cinema
1 Nature, Countryside and the City: The Ideologies of Nation Building
2 In the Land of the Great Narrations: Chronotopias, Uchronias and Nostalgic Past
3 Tradition, History and Liquid Modernity in Icelandic Musical Documentaries
Part Two: Figures of Tradition, Crisis and Change
4 Of Fishermen and Their Ships: Marine Motifs, Cruel Nature and Zeitgeist
5 Restless Daughters of Freyja: Female Soul of Icelandic Cinema
6 The Curious Case of Anti-Vikings
Part Three: Reimaging Utopia: Genres and Transnational Dreams
7 Icelandic Crime Stories
8 At the Edge of World: Black Comedies and the Allegories of Crisis and Isolation
9 Cinematic Journeys Around Iceland
Appendix: Tradition and Liquid Modernity in Documentary Cinema
Afterword: Notes After the Year 2016
List of Figures
Bibliography
Filmography
Bibliography of the Previously Published Parts of the Book
Index

Citation preview

The Cinema of Iceland

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN PERFORMANCE HISTORICAL NARRATIVES. THEATER. PUBLIC LIFE Edited by Mirosław Kocur

VOL. 18

Zu Qualitätssicherung und Peer Review der vorliegenden Publikation

Notes on the quality assurance and peer review of this publication

Die Qualität der in dieser Reihe erscheinenden Arbeiten wird vor der Publikation durch einen externen, von der Herausgeberschaft benannten Gutachter geprüft.

Prior to publication, the quality of the work published in this series is reviewed by an external referee appointed by the editorship.

Sebastian Jakub Konefał

The Cinema of Iceland Between Tradition and Liquid Modernity

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. This publication was subsidised by The Vice-Rector for Research and Foreign Cooperation of the University of Gdańsk, the Dean of The Faculty of Languages and The Director of The Institute of Culture Studies. Cover Image: The photo on the front cover comes from the movie Virgin Mountain (Fúsi, 2015) and is used by the kind permission of Dagur Kári (the director of the film) and Agnes Johansen (Sögn & RVK Studios).

Printed by CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 2364-3919 ISBN 978-3-631-77864-7 (Print) · E-ISBN 978-3-631-77915-6 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-631-77916-3 (EPUB) · E-ISBN 978-3-631-77917-0 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b15131 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2019 All rights reserved. Peter Lang – Berlin ∙ Bern ∙ Bruxelles ∙ New York ∙ Oxford ∙ Warszawa ∙ Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed by prof. Gunnar Iversen from Carleton University in Ottawa and dr. hab. Rafał Syska from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. www.peterlang.com

Acknowledgments Many people supported me during six years of my academic researches on Icelandic cinema, published in this book. First of all, I  would not be able to start and continue my studies without four scholarships from Norway Grants and EEA Grants founded by the Polish operator (Fundacja Rozwoju System Edukacji). I  was professionally supported with the substantive guidance at the stage of applying for all these scholarships by such kind people as Joanna Pavlovych, Sylwia Iżyniec and Łukasz Sopyła, who worked for FRSE. I am also profoundly grateful to the wonderful, helpful people I  have met in Iceland. Professor Björn Norðfjörð was my academic tutor during my first and second stay at the University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands). His valuable articles, book and PhD thesis served as guiding lights of knowledge for my studies on Icelandic cinema and culture. During all my visits to Iceland, I  was also receiving films and other materials generously provided by Erlendur Sveinsson and Gunnþóra Halldórsdóttir from the National Film Archive of Iceland in Hafnarfjörður (Kvikmyndasafn Íslands) and Christof Wehmeier, Steven Meyers and Gunnar Egill Daníelsson from the Icelandic Film Centre. This monograph would not be published without the financial support of the Vice-Rector for Research and Foreign Cooperation, Professor Piotr Stępnowski and the Dean of the Faculty of Languages dr. hab. Maciej Michalski. Extraordinary appreciation goes to prof. Gunnar Iversen from Carleton University in Ottawa and dr. hab. Rafał Syska from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, who carefully reviewed the book. Moreover, The Cinema of Iceland would not be completed in such a shape without Professor Mirosław Przylipiak and all employees of the Faculty of Film at the University of Gdansk, who allowed me to go for a half year sabbatical, making it possible for me to peacefully develop and expand the final version of this monograph. I further wish to express sincere appreciation to Icelandic directors and producers who gave me their personal permission to use the pictures from their films:  Óskar Thór Axelsson, Ragnar Bragason, Benedikt Erlingsson, Ólafur de Fleur Jóhannesson, Dagur Kári, Baltasar Kormákur and Agnes Johansen (Sögn & RVK Studios), Rúnar Rúnarsson, Marteinn Thorsson and Snorri Þórisson (Pegasus Pictures). During my researches I also received some Icelandic language support from Jacek Godek and Ingólfur Guðmundsson. The translations of my book into English were supervised by

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Acknowledgments

Maciej Kur from the Department of Translation Studies at the University of Gdansk. I am deeply thankful for this help. Finally, special gratitude is extended to my loving parents, who supported me from the beginning of my academic career, and to my beloved Aleksandra, who was the first reader of the major parts of the book and always helped me with good advice and common sense.

Contents Preface: A Cinematic Terra Incognita? ...................................................

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Introduction: The Imaginary Island: From a Literary Myth to On-screen Stereotype ...................................................................  13 Part One: Reconfiguring Utopias: Nation Building and Cinema 1 Nature, Countryside and the City: The Ideologies of Nation Building ...........................................................................................  39 2 In the Land of the Great Narrations: Chronotopias, Uchronias and Nostalgic Past ................................................................  69 3 Tradition, History and Liquid Modernity in Icelandic Musical Documentaries ...........................................................................  97 Part Two: Figures of Tradition, Crisis and Change 4 Of Fishermen and Their Ships: Marine Motifs, Cruel Nature and Zeitgeist ...................................................................................  115 5 Restless Daughters of Freyja: Female Soul of Icelandic Cinema .............................................................................................................  139 6 The Curious Case of Anti-Vikings ......................................................  169

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Acknowledgments

Part Three: Reimaging Utopia: Genres and Transnational Dreams 7 Icelandic Crime Stories ............................................................................  193 8 At the Edge of World: Black Comedies and the Allegories of Crisis and Isolation ...............................................................................  221 9 Cinematic Journeys Around Iceland ..................................................  241 Appendix: Tradition and Liquid Modernity in Documentary Cinema ..................................................................................................................  269 Afterword: Notes After the Year 2016 .....................................................  291 List of Figures ....................................................................................................  299 Bibliography .......................................................................................................  303 Filmography .......................................................................................................  313 Bibliography of the Previously Published Parts of the Book ..........................................................................................................  319 Index ......................................................................................................................  321

Preface: A Cinematic Terra Incognita? Most people associate Iceland with a popular tourist destination – full of unusual attractions, such as glaciers, geysers and crippling air traffic volcanoes. Many others may think of Vikings, sagas and financial crisis of the year 2008. Flying to Reykjavík for my first scholarship in September 2010, I was aware that this northern land also gave the world some great writers, gifted musicians and not necessarily widely recognized cinema. This last field of culture is supposed to be the new subject of my academic interests that finally transformed into six years of researching project. At the beginning of my work, I had known only a few films – mostly those of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson and recognizable in Europe movies of Baltasar Kormákur. Gradually, during my scholarships at the University of Iceland (Háskóli Íslands) and in the course of my queries, both in the National Film Archive of Iceland and the Icelandic Film Centre, I discovered more and more data on the unknown authors and themes. At the very first glance, the Icelandic cinema may seem to a foreign viewer as the one obsessively repeating the same themes and topics which, by the way, are not always easy to comprehend without the proper historical and culture background. Closer encounters with the most interesting films from this Nordic island, however, compensate the aforementioned difficulties, giving the opportunities to observe the birth and development of small (but brave) energetic and ambitious cinema. Such an experience also allows to analyze the problems related to the system of film production in the country populated by mere 330,000 inhabitants and indicates the challenges of introducing local culture abroad. For all these reasons, I decided to discuss in this monograph over 100 films that are, predominatingly, created in Iceland by Icelanders during the years 1906– 2016. They are casted with local actors who speak in their native language. These criteria may seem too radical in times of international co-productions, European movie grants and globalization, but the complexity of cinematic production, promotion and distribution system in the homeland of Björk explains such limitations. In a sense, these restrictions also reflect some Icelandic legislations brought to life in Reykjavík in 1978 within the creation of The National Film Archive of Iceland and the Icelandic Film Fund. Taking into consideration all these elements, at the beginning of my cinematic researches I analyze some ideological contents of the different narrations

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Preface: A Cinematic Terra Incognita

referring to the idea of supporting the utopian and romantic view on Iceland. In this part of the book, I  introduce some inspiring academic terms, such (among others) as John Urry’s tourist gaze, Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, Kristen Hastrup’s uchronia and Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum, that will be used in next chapters. Also the key figures of Icelandic national identity are described here, altogether with the theories of imaginary communities and invented ­nationalism. Finally, the reader will find some references to the humanistic geography (and such concepts as Les Lieux de Mémoire and Les Lieux d’imagination). The first chapter of the book includes the films with nostalgic indications of the past and movies presenting antinomies of life in the rural and urban areas. These themes are often linked in Icelandic cinema from 1980s with the motif of symbolic struggle between the new and old, the youth and senility or the local and foreign, and used to strengthen the national identity. Chapter 2 analyzes the cinematic images that refer to the local sagas and legends with the heterotopian or uchronian perspective. In the third chapter, once again I  write about the films related to the popular motif of the generations’ conflict, connected with the powers of nature and the opposing forces of tradition and modernity. This time, however, my researches are concentrated on the popular genre of musical documents. Next three chapters from the second part of the book provide the interpretations of some characters selected from the pantheon of the Icelandic collective imagination. Their constructions indicate significant social changes and contain allusions to the figure of the Other. First, I  research the figures of fishermen. They were eradicated from the symbolic imaginarium of the Icelandic nation by the Danish colonial politics but have returned in 20th- and 21st-century local cinema in various contexts. The next two parts of the book focus on the movies about strong, independent woman and the immature male characters (that I called the anti-Vikings). Both cases are interpreted as meditations on so-called postmodern condition, which includes different forms of social, individual and cultural crises. The sections from the third part of the book focus on the ironic or dystopic look at the utopian idea of North and Icelandic national identity. Different attempts to deconstruct some popular motifs from previous chapters, such as the conflict of generations, the fear of foreign cultural influences and the feeling of geographical and mental isolation, are analyzed here, based on the genres of black comedy, road movies and crime cinema. In the plots of these films, I try to track strategies that reimage tourist simulacra of Iceland into the ironic figures and allegories, once again, indicating some different types of crises.

Preface: A Cinematic Terra Incognita

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The context of postmodern changes is also discussed in the selected studies on the Icelandic documentaries which are placed in the appendix of this monograph. These non-fictional films often refer to the problems and themes that were described on the basis of the feature movies in the previous parts of the book. Finally, the book ends with an afterword, presenting a panorama of Icelandic movies that were produced after the year 2016, when my official researches from the grants finished. It is an attempt to sum up the evolution of the Icelandic cinema and indication of its transnational successes, achieved in the second decade of the 21st century. In all chapters I  am also interested in different reinterpretations of the clichés connected with the stereotypical images of Iceland and its inhabitants, constructed by the local and foreign narrations. Such strategies often include some intertextual games with the viewers, attempting Icelandic directors use the transnational branding of the local contents. Last but not least, I hope that the reading of this book will outline the ­vision of the unknown film realm, which, thanks to the sincere commitment and hard work of many people, became a dynamically spreading image, eclectically weaving together selected myths, stereotypes and modern means of expression.

Introduction The Imaginary Island: From a Literary Myth to On-screen Stereotype Constructing a Myth The protagonists of Julius Verne’s A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, a novel written in 1864 and inspired by Icelandic sagas, decide to sail to the far North to reach one of the craters under the Snæfellsjökull glacier to get from there to the center of our planet. Obviously, the dreams of traveling to the 19th-century Verne’s fictional “land of fire and ice” are rooted in much earlier times. They were spun by the first sailors who set off from Europe to explore the unknown. The ancient marine wanderers initially identified a lone island at the end of the ocean with the farthest land – mythical Ultima Thule. As Pierre Lévêque fairly points out, the ancient history is “a period when brave pioneers explored new ocean trails. Euthymenes and Pytheas arrived at The Pillars of Heracles. The first one crossed the western coast of Africa, most likely reaching Senegal. The other one sailed north, visited the British Islands (named that way for the first time), Scandinavia and the foggy island of Thule (Iceland), only to come back to Marseilles, where he wrote diaries that raised general disbelief ”.1

In his description of the fantastic lands, Umberto Eco invokes not only this boundary imagination but also creates the first maps of imaginary space, which include, for instance, the volcanoes and fantastic creatures guarding them.2 According to Eco, “the myth of Thule merged in time with the one about Hyperboreans. The ancients perceived Hyperboreans (those who live farther than Boreas – the personification of the

1 This quotation is a translation of the P. Lévêque’s book, L’aventure grecque, 1964, translated into Polish in 1973. See: P. Lévêque, Świat grecki, transl. J. Olkiewicz, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa, 1973, p. 331. 2 Eco’s book includes a reproduction of “The Map of Iceland” created by Abraham Ortelius in the 16th century and a picture of Thule (here called Tile) from the work of Olaus Magnus Charta Marina, published in 1539. Cf. U.  Eco, U.  Eco, Historia krain i miejsc legendarnych [The Book of Legendary Lands], transl. T. Kwiecień, Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, Poznań, 2013, pp. 223, 228–229. It is also worth mentioning that mythical island of Thule was not only associated with Iceland but also, among other lands, with Greenland and some parts of Norway.

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Introduction northern wind) as people occupying the areas located far away from Greece. This perfect land was ceaselessly lit by the sunshine for six months a year. Hecataeus of Miletus (6th–5th centuries BC) placed Hyperboreans even farther north, between the ocean (which surrounded all of the known lands) and Riphean Mountains (a legendary mountain chain of uncertain location, sometimes placed far North, and sometimes nearby the Danube Delta)”.3

The descriptions of such mythical island combine ambiguous narrative strategies – marked by journey reports and phantasmal imagination. Words of disbelief can be found in the comments included in Polybius’ The Histories.4 This work included the descriptions of the heroic journeys of Pytheas, who presumably reached not only the British Islands, but also the gates of far North. Researchers of imagology and humanistic geography5 emphasize that the unrealistic status of the farthest land merged over the centuries with marine reports from Norway (or, more generally, today’s Nordic areas), areas often compared to the Fortunate Isles. In his work Southern Perspectives on the North, Peter Stadius differentiates four phases of development of perception of the northern region of Atlantic. The first one, already mentioned, is Greek antique,6 which recalls the Hyperborean phantasm. In the times of the Roman Empire, the pejorative perception of the North as a savage and wild land is enhanced further. Stadius quotes texts like Germania by Tacitus, in which – in his opinion – the first literary comparisons of the Northern people’s (in this case Germanic tribes) barbaric alterity and civilized South culture, perceived then as the center of the world, has been drawn. Genesis of those negative perceptions is related to the reinterpretation of theory of elements developed by Aristotle, in which the northern area has been identified with water, moist and phlegm. And that, according to Stadius, caused the “cold” perception of its inhabitants.7 He also remarks that the negative descriptions of 3 U. Eco, op. cit., p. 224. 4 Cf. Polybius, The Histories [Historíai]. Polibiusz, Dzieje, t.  2, transl. S.  Hammer, M.  Brożek, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, De Agostini Polska, Wrocław, Warszawa, 2005, p. 491. 5 One of the most important elements of the studies related to humanistic geography is the concept of the production of space, popularized by Henri Lefebvre, who proved in his works that social space should not be perceived as a homogeneous being, but instead should be treated as the result of processes occurring between the perception of material reality, its symbolic representations and other forms of social practices. 6 Cf. P. Stadius, Southern Perspectives on the North: Legends, Stereotypes, Images and Models, Wydawnictwo UG, Nordeuropa-Institut der Humboldt-Universität, Gdańsk, Berlin, 2001, pp. 9–10. 7 See: P. Stadius, op. cit., p. 10.

Introduction

15

Fig. 1:  The part of Olaus Magnus’ map Carta Marina (1539) presenting Iceland, photo: Wikimedia Commons.

those territories and barbaric behavior of its inhabitants (all communities whose territories and models of behavior did not fit in the boundaries of the Empire) were confronted in that time with earlier, hyperborean narrations, as those present in the texts of Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus.8 Medieval reports of Celtic sailors and Irish monks re-established the utopian perception of Iceland.9 In his The Idea of North, Peter Davidson proves that “the fire of Icelandic volcanoes strengthened its reputation as a place of miracles. Medieval cosmography known as The Carte of the Warld describes Iceland as a place of strange, marvellous things (mony ferlyis), where boiling water can burn rocks and iron (scaldand watter that birnis baith stanis and Irne)”.10

8 Both philosophers described Hyperboreans as people unaware of hardships of life, with whom Apollo himself had a pleasure to live for three months. 9 P. Davidson, The Idea of North, Reaktion Books, London, 2005, pp. 58–60. 10 Ibidem, p. 59.

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Introduction

The mythology of fantastic descriptions of the island will be also supported by associating its status with Scandinavia. Stadius proves that another important phase of change in the perception of this area is related to the internal attempts made to reactivate the myth of Hyperboreans in Renaissance. In 1555 in Rome, a Swedish Roman Catholic priest Olaus Magnus published a description of a Northern people called Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus. A  year before, in the same city, a posthumous work of his brother Johannes was published, Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sueonumque regibus. Both texts were popularized in Sweden in the 16th and 17th century. Their authors try to place the islands of happiness in the territory of Northern Atlantic, and these attempts connote with the idea of Scandinavia as the “mother of nations”. The strategies based on putting Northern rulers into the mythical and historical order of old Europe can also be found. Those measures had, obviously, an ideological character, as they were related to the reformation. And because of that, they inspired other philosophers in various ways. One that deserves to be mentioned here is Professor Olaus Rudbeck (known as Olof Rudbeck Senior), who lived in Uppsala more than a hundred years later. In his Atland eller Manheim (1679–1702, Latin: Atlantica), he celebrates the extraordinary status of the Northern territories, which had been marginalized on the maps of Europe.11 Rudbeck’s activities have clearly an ideological character, as they are related to the 17th-century war between Protestant Sweden and Catholic Spain. That is why the references to Gothic legacy can be found in them (as well as in an earlier work of Johannes Magnus).12 The Goths have been drawn by the author of Atlantica from Getica (6th century), written most likely by a Roman chronicler Jordanes.13 Magnus’s descriptions of the North were seen as an ideological response to the Spaniards’ vision of the South as the cradle of the European culture. The search for Gothic roots of the Northern people will reappear in the Scandinavian history in the 19th and 20th centuries. But let us get back to the evolution of the perception of Iceland. Because of its atypical geological structure, this land did not always have its utopian character. Peter Davidson provides some 16th- and 17th-century descriptions of the island that present it not only as a land of miracles14 but also as a volcanic landscape, which resembles a place of suffering for the sinners. Such a dystopian 1 1 See: P. Stadius, op. cit., p. 10. 12 See: P. Stadius, op. cit., pp. 41–42. For pre-romantic activities of Olaus Magnus and Johannes Magnus see also: P. Stadius, op. cit., pp. 13–14. 13 A treaty Gettica, which is believed to be written by Jordanes, is a shortened version of The History of Goths, written by the historian and politician Kasjodor (d. 583). 14 P. Stadius, op. cit., pp. 58–60.

Introduction

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Fig. 2:  The hellish landscapes of Iceland from Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555), photo: Wikimedia Commons.

perspective can be found in the reports of the aforementioned Bishop Olaus Magnuson, who informs the readers of one of his texts that “it is believed to be a place where impure souls find punishment or atonement. Souls, drowned spirits or those who died violently, have been surely seen there, taking care of their human business”.15 Similar antinomies in the depiction of the North and Iceland itself can be found in European literature written throughout the following centuries. Kristinn Schram, who took part in a research project Iceland and Images of the North,16 correctly points out that “in many cases it is very difficult to differentiate the perception of Iceland from more general descriptions of the North. For the North concept is full of extremes and ambiguity. […] From dystopian visions of barbarity to enlightened utopia – pendulum [of perception] sways from civilized to wild”.17

It is natural then that even in the works created in Iceland many years later, the contrast between a “hellish character” and a utopian landscape of solitary land, located at the end of the world, is still much alive. 1 5 Ibidem, p. 59. 16 “Iceland and Images of the North” project accumulates over 20 scholars working on the evolution of the Northern Atlantic territories perception. Research results are presented in the book form with extended analysis of matters covered previously on-line (See: Iceland and Images of the North, ed. S. R. Ísleifsson, D. Chartier, Presses de l'Université du Québec, Reykjavík, Québec, 2011). 17 K. Schram, Performing North. Folk Culture, Exoticism and Irony among Expatriates, [in:] “Nordic Yearbook of Folklore”, 2009, no. 65, p. 51.

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Introduction

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the phantasmal status of the island got even stronger. Ideas of romantic journeys pushed more idealistic daredevils to seek unknown exaltation in the distant Northern lands. Even though the expedition to circumpolar territories did not match the concept of a Grand Tour,18 there have been some travelers who set out into these areas. They were mostly inspired by the idea of discovering the roots of European culture in, once again alive, Germanic mythology and aforementioned Gothic fiction.19 To this day, the observations made by those travelers remain a suggestive example of difficulties related to the lack of suitable means of expression that could be used to describe the dissimilarity of the landscape and Otherness of its inhabitants. The authors of 18th- and 19th-century journals describing travels to the North20 often use the expressions typical for Orient travels, whose specifications and ideological implications are studied in the classic work of Edward W.  Said.21 This narrative strategy is well illustrated in the texts of wanderers culturally related to Poland. One of them, Edmund Chojecki, in 1856 described Iceland with the following words: “Summits covered by everlasting snow, extinct volcanoes, breathing craters covered by lava glaze and basalt columns spread on the ground  – real Babylonian temple, overthrown by a prophet in fury”.22

18 Cf., for example, Ch. Hibbert, The Grand Tour, Methuen, London, 1987, as cited in: R. Chymkowski, Polskie podróże na Islandię. Od Edmunda Chojeckiego po Ferdynanda Goetla [Polish journeys to Iceland – from Edmund Chojecki to Ferdynand Goetl], [in:] Islandia. Wprowadzenie do wiedzy o społeczeństwie i kulturze [Iceland. Introduction to Social and Cultural Studies], eds. R. Chymkowski, W. K. Pessel, Wydawnictwo "Trio", Warszawa, 2009, p. 123. 19 P. Stadius, op. cit., pp. 12–13. 20 Anglo-Saxon reports from expeditions to Iceland, including poetry written in 1937 Letters from Iceland W. H. Auden, are discussed by Karen Oslund in The North Begins Inside. Imaging Iceland as Wilderness and Homeland (“GHI Bulletin”, 2005, no. 36, pp. 91–99). Auden’s poetry from Iceland is also mentioned by Kristen Hastrup in A Place Apart. An Anthropological Study of the Icelandic World (Oxford, New York, 2004, p. 12). In both cases Auden’s poetic experiences – governed by the external perspective of “stranger in a foreign land” – emphasise difficulties of impartial studies on other cultures. 21 Said, author of Orientalism, similarly to Foucault focuses on studies of relations of ­discourse, knowledge and power; he precisely follows different ways of imposing a symbolic hegemony to the Other. Cf. E. W. Said, Orientalism. Western Concepts of the Orient, Penguin Books, New York, London, New Delhi, 2006. 22 R. Chymkowski, Polskie podróże na Islandię – od Edmunda Chojeckiego do Ferdynanda Goetla, op. cit., p. 126.

Introduction

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It is worth mentioning that such exalted descriptions of Icelandic Otherness were a result of licentia poetica, as – according to Karen Oslund – most of the travelers coming up to the island in the 18th and 19th centuries were well aware of the existence of glaciers and volcanoes. Glaciers could be observed, for instance, in Switzerland, a very fashionable travel destination at that time, while volcanoes, on the other hand, could be admired in Italy.23 Most likely that is the reason why these reports from Iceland, apart from oriental imagery, contain rhetorical figures popular at the time and compare its inhabitants to the figures from ancient Greece or to the societies of Oceania, untainted by civilization. That is the effect of both internal and external reactions to the strategy of presenting Icelanders as poor peasants and fishermen, which are also present in numerous descriptions of the journeys to the island.24 John R. Gillis, who lived in Iceland for some time, dedicates one of the chapters in his book Islands of the Mind to this antinomy in the perception of Iceland. He proves that “the insular character of Icelandic identity was actually born on the continent. The feeling of uniqueness of its inhabitants was shaped to a large extent by the travelers who visited Iceland in the 18th and 19th century, who romanticized Icelanders in the same way they did in the case of the nations of Oceania, claimed to be especially virtuous and unspoiled by the civilization”.25

However, contrary to Gillis’ conceptions, the examples of internal idealization of the “homeland of the sagas” can be found in the reckoning of indigenous islanders, who were recovering their national pride in the 19th century and became more and more courageous about the thought of independence.

(Re)constructions of the National Liberation Myth The 19th century was a period of national awareness awakening. Patriotic voices were heard in Icelandic national liberation rhetoric, calling for emancipation from Danish reign. Romantic narrations, popular at that time, presented the island, cloistered in the Northern ocean, as a Nordic reservoir of virtues, which, 23 Cf. K. Oslund, Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic, University of Washington Press, Seattle, London, 2011. 24 Processes associated with internal attempts made to deconstruct the literary image of Icelanders, presenting them as poor and uncivilized, are also analysed by Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson in Icelandic National Images in the 19th and 20th Centuries, [in:] Images of the North. Histories – Identities – Ideas, eds. by S. Jakobsson, Rodopi, Amsterdam, New York, 2009. 25 J.R. Gillis, Islands of the Mind. How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004, p. 119.

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Introduction

due to its isolation, preserved its untainted culture (represented throughout ages by the unaltered Viking language and its relics like Poetic Edda26) and unharnessed nature. Foundations for the “nation construction” discourse can be found in the preserved scripts of Icelandic intellectuals who studied the past of their nation and texts of Johann Gottfried von Harder in Copenhagen. Patriotic character of the “national triad” was fully conveyed in writing almost a hundred years later, in the verses of Snorri Hjartson: “Land, nation and language, trinity pure and real”.27 In one of his articles, suggestively titled Icelandic National Identity: From Romanticism to Tourism, Gísli Sigurðsson proves that this figure was integrated with the strategy of utopian perception of a country life.28 Comparison to the nostalgic status and the vision of dangerous foreign influences (as well as contraposition of idyllic country life and stigmatized, corrupted urban culture) will return in the key moments of Icelandic history, when the attempts of definement or redefinement of its national identity will be made.29 26 Gísli Sigurðsson points out that it was German historian Konrad Maurer, who was mainly responsible for the popularization of Edda and other sagas from Iceland in Europe. He proved that their authors were mostly educated Icelanders living in the 13th century. The German scholar, inspired by the tales of Grimm brothers, went to Iceland in 1858. He collected local tales and legends, and published them on his own in 1860 in Lipsk. In his private life, Maurer was a friend of an Icelandic scholar Guðbrandur Vigfússon. That was the reason why he became such a supporter for Icelandic independence of the Kingdom of Denmark. G. Sigurðsson, Icelandic National Identity: From Romanticism to Tourism, [in:] Making Europe in Nordic Contexts, ed. Pertti Antonen, NIF Publications, Turku, 1996, pp. 42–43. 27 K. Schram, Borealism. Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances and the Exoticism of the North, PhD dissertation, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 2011, p. 104. 28 Gísli Sigurðsson, op. cit., pp. 50–52. Interestingly, Sigurðsson claims that the relation between nation and rural tradition can be found, particularly, in the language layer, because Icelandic noun þjóð means “nation” as well as “village” and “the people” (for: ibid, pp. 42–23). 29 It is important to point out that I am neither a sociologist trying to find “what was first: nation or nationality” nor an anthropologist, but a film scholar dealing with cultural constructs in cinema. In my opinion, the notion of a “nation” was best defined by Ernest Gellner, who proves that nations are a creation of man, a product of his beliefs, loyalty and solidarity. See: E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1983, pp. 17–18. On the other hand, using the term national identity I am leaning towards the definition made by Zbigniew Bokszański, who claims that “the national identity of national collective is a collective self-knowledge, its self-determination,

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Those actions are nothing new in the European culture and were successfully used in other countries to reintroduce or (to recall the famous concept of Erich Hobsbawm) “to invent national identities”.30 In this kind of imagery (fairly noticed by Colin William and Anthony D. Smith), the homeland category contains a “characteristic and unique territory” in which “the national identity is merged with the memory that has been rooted in the category of homeland. Its mountains are sacred, rivers full of memories and lakes recall ancient vows and battles, that has been preserved in the national epic poetry and ballads and has been catching the ­attention of the creators of multiple legends”.31

The imperative of cultivation of the language, unmodified for hundreds of years, and devotional respect for its distinguished products, such as Poetic Edda, will be passed along to the next generations. Those generations will finally witness the return of medieval manuscripts, partially retrieved from the Danes in the second half of the 20th century.32 Local patriots’ dreams of an independent country after more than 80 years of nostalgic recollection of the golden era (Icelandic gullöld)33 are finally coming true. On 18 June 1944, their descendants gather in the center of Reykjavík to celebrate gaining complete independence from Denmark. This gathering in the front of the prime minister’s office has been later described in the textbooks of Icelandic history as a continuation of the official celebrations which took place a day before in Þingvellir. Due to the specific formation of the land, this region34 (Icelandic þing  – “parliament”, vellir  – “flatland” as in “a plain of gatherings”) became a traditional meeting place of medieval clans’ representatives, who for hundreds of years have been debating in one of the first protoparliaments in the world – Althing (Icelandic Alþingi). creation of self-image and whole content, matter of self-knowledge, and not externally constructed image of a nation character” (Z. Bokszański, Tożsamości zbiorowe [Collective Identities], PWN, Warszawa, 2005, p. 108). 30 Cf. E. Hobsbawm, T. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 6–14. 31 C. Williams, A. D. Smith, The National Construction of Social Space, “Progress in Human Geography”, 1981, no. 7, p. 509. 32 G. Karlsson, The History of Iceland, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000, p. 160. 33 This is how the period of events described in Icelandic sagas, happening between 871 and 1262 is called (for: K. Oslund, Iceland Imagined…, p. 5). 34 Cf. See: P. Stadius, op. cit., p. 61.

22

Introduction

Fig. 3:  Þingvellir, photo by the author of the book.

It is worth mentioning that Þingvellir is one of only two places on Earth where tourists, to this day, can admire the impressive tectonic plate crack. Direct influence of tectonic movement on the history of Iceland is described in one of the sagas included in Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders), whose authorship is attributed to Ari Þorgilsson the Wise. Gísli Sigurðsson claims that around the year 1000, the representatives of the Viking clans met in Þingvellir to debate on the acceptance of Christianity on the island. Violent eruption of a nearby volcano Hengill was considered God’s voice that confirmed the decision of adopting a new religion. Traces of that event can be found in the local nomenclature – lava fields, left after the eruption near Þingvellir, were named Kristnitökuhraun, which can be translated as “Christianity lava”. Þingvellir seems to be a good example of the so-called memory space (French lieu de mémoire).35 That term, popular in historical, sociological and cultural studies, 35 See: P. Nora, Les Lieux de Mémoire. (Based on the Polish translation: P. Nora, Między pamięcią a historią:  Les Lieux de Mémoire, transl. P.  Mościcki, “Tytuł Roboczy:

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was promulgated by Pierre Nora. In his most famous work, Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, this French historian analyzes phenomena important for postmodern societies, such as the disappearance of rural cultures, selectivity of historical memory, end of ideology and “acceleration of history”. Even though I  consider most of those remarks intellectually relevant, the concepts of Colin Williams and Anthony D.  Smith and comments of Yi-Fu Tuan, mentioned later in this book in the chapter about uchronias and mythical space, are much closer to my research perspective. But what are those “memory spaces”? Pierre Nora divides cultures into the “cultures of memory” and “cultures of history”. The first category exists in the space of a living memory and historical continuity; therefore, it is closer to the traditional cultures. The second one replaces “awareness of severance of relations with the past” and “historical memory breakdown” with “personification of memory in places, where historical continuity still exists”. This new memory is somehow closer to the “dead archive memory”. In this perspective, lieux de mémoire resemble more the monuments of temporary memory erosion and widening historic inconsistency, which may seem as a debatable matter especially to those who study history and national identities. But let us get back to the events from 18 June 1944. Situation was significant, because during the extraordinary session of the parliament in Þingvellir, the constitution of the Republic of Iceland had been ratified and its first president had been elected.36 Four main parties’ leaders took the floor during the Reykjavík meeting and spoke about that momentous event. Ólafur Thors, the leader of the Independence Party (and the first parliamentary prime minister), compared the establishment of the republic to the end of a long journey and concluded his speech with the words: “Icelanders, we are home. We are a free nation”. Guðmundur Hálfdanarson (co-author of a book that analyzes the perspectives for Iceland and European Union integration) fairly points out that in such a perspective the “new republic became a promised land, a place that Icelandic nation has been looking for almost seven centuries”.37 It should not come as a surprise then that a society consisting mostly of farmers and fishermen has uncritically Archiwum” [Working Title: Archive], 2009, no. 2, p. 4). An example of Þingvellir as a “memory space” may be found [in:] G. Hálfdanarson, Þingvellir: An Icelandic „lieu de mémoire”, “History and Memory”, 2000, no. 21. 36 G. Karlsson, op. cit., pp. 322–323. 3 7 G. Hálfdanarson, Discussing Europe: Icelandic nationalism and European integration, [in:] Iceland and European Integration. On the Edge. The Reluctant Member of Europe (Europe and the Nation State), ed. B. Thorhallsson, Routledge, London, New York, 2004, p. 131.

24

Introduction

accepted a vision of a native island, presented fiercely in the speeches of patriots and politics as a reservoir of virtues. It felt familiar to the images provided in the literature, poetry and art. True Nordic character was still going to be sustained by the nature monuments and ideologically connected rural landscapes cultivated by the hardworking “sons of the soil”. In National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Tim Edensor analyzes the “rural rhetoric” and places it within a more general concept of genius loci of a nation.38 The British author discusses the process of creating “national ideology of a landscape”. He mentions a utopianism of rural landscape attributes, a strategy characteristic for the English Romantics. These attributes were selected and analyzed by David Loventhal,39 who considered these elements as fitting to the rhetoric figures of the 19th and 20th century Icelandic nationalist discourse in at least three aspects. First common denominator is the emphasis on the isolation of those two countries. According to Loventhal, being an insular country should guarantee protection from (in this case, continental) “foreign contamination”. As a small community (even today composed of a little more than 330,000 people), Icelanders often mentioned the so-called negative identity40 to define themselves as a nation different from the others, which was caused by the disparity of the Icelandic landscape. As Smith and Williams point out, “the characteristic lay of the land, islands, mountains […] helped them to emphasise the differences and secured the empathy of Otherness or even independence”.41 Another popular method used to reinforce patriotic feelings is to apply the narration concerning the eternal “nature enhancement”, which in the case of Iceland is more frequently focused on paying respects and fearing nature and its untainted power. The third element of this national discourse highlights the “stability of the village”. This process is vital as it implements historical memory in space. It also emphasises the connection between the rustic areas and “the need to order-making”, which, according to Loventhal, is a “mythical product of an era when stability was ensured by having your place on Earth”.42 38 T. Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Berg, Oxford, 2002, p. 59. 39 Ibidem, p. 60. 40 Yoonmi Lee sees the notion of “negative identity” as the simplest form of self-identifying collective, claiming that “national identity is just an ability to differentiate us from them” (Y. Lee, Modern Education, Textbooks, and the Image of the Nation: Politics and Modernization and Nationalism in Korean Education: 1880–1910, Routledge, London, New York, 2000, p. 29). 41 See: C. Williams, A. D. Smith, op. cit., p. 506. 42 T. Edensor, op. cit., p. 60.

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Edensor also proves that the presence of attributes discussed by Loventhal is related to the overuse of a father and host figure, which were once used in the national discourse to create the vision of a seemingly harmonic world.43 Those elements are also related to the strategy of nostalgic resorting to the nature uncorrupted by the civilization or erasing any notions of innovative order from the portrayal of a rural landscape. According to both authors, such actions help to save conservative values with the use of ideological criticism of the “morality downfall”44

Cinematic Reinterpretations of Myths and Stereotypes: From the Cinema of Heritage to the Postmodern Irony The aforementioned strategies will be also used in the 20th-century film industry. Björn Norðfjörð recognized the heritage film as the most characteristic genre in the founding period of the Icelandic cinema. Popularized by Charles Barr, the term was also used by Andrew Higson in his research on British national cinema.45 Higson defines heritage films as “a genre that processes, reconstructs and, in some cases, creates national heritage on screen. […] A central representative strategy in national cinema imagery is an imitation of literacy texts, artefacts and landscapes related to the tradition, which have privileged status in the area of the accepted national heritage definitions. Other strategy is to reconstruct historical events perceived as particularly meaningful for a certain nation”.46

It is worth mentioning, that in the European film studies a nation is mostly treated as “an imagined community”. Benedict Anderson claims that political community 4 3 Ibidem, p. 61. 44 Ibidem, p. 62. The figures of honest peasants and fathers, loyal to the land and their farms, well known from the great novels by Gunnar Gunnarson and Halldór Laxness, are also used in the Icelandic cinema as the personification of the ideological antinomy between the city and the village, connected with the motif of struggle between tradition and modernity (or old and new). This theme is presented in greater detail in the next chapter about the movies from the 1980s and 1990s. 45 B. Norðfjörð, Icelandic Cinema A National Practice in a Global Context, op. cit., p. 62. 46 It is not my aim to prove or inquire to what point a national cinema is an original product of a specified society or how it uses and reinterprets conventions created and promulgated by the system of “global Hollywood”. Profound analysis of Andrew Higson’s and John Hill’s dispute on the definition and attributes of that sort of a cinema can be found in the aforementioned dissertation of Björn Norðfjörð. Cf. A. Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain, University of Oxford Press, Oxford, 1995, pp. 26–27) [after:] B. Norðfjörð, op. cit., pp. 76–96.

26

Introduction “imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign […]  – is imagined, because the members of even the smallest nation do not know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in minds of each lives the image of their communion”.47

This theory is perfect for analysis of cinematic constructions that depict a certain national community on screen. With its postmodern orientation, it does not precisely correspond to the cultural heritage of nations of such countries as Iceland. It is a nation which stores medieval cultural texts to this day, with well-preserved (and not entirely expelled by the Christianity) belief system and long-lasting sense of community, intensified by the references to the so-called negative identity. However, as Tim Edensor fairly points out, despite the fact that “national elites try to construct culturally an ancient national lineage” and its cultural goods, the traditions mentioned in the national discourse are not fossilized, but they “are continually reinvented in a range of different contexts”.48 Michael Billing’s book Banal Nationalism is a fine example that points out that the receivers and co-creators of those traditions are mostly people not connected with literary sphere, handling “everyday adoration of a homeland” (describe in the book as “flagging”)  – taking part in all sorts of mass events (including cinema) or co-authoring social media. After all, the continuance of a nation is an everyday performance.49 Due to those perspectives, cinema may be treated as a mass tool for “nation flagging” as well as for careful uncovering of ideological implications of national identity narration. But let us get back to Iceland itself. Its small cinema did not allocate the money which could enable the production of big-budget movies that could faithfully convey the historical reality.50 That is why such strategies as depicting the power of wild landscape, nostalgia for the golden age celebrated in sagas and recollection of idyllic country life stimulate patriotic feelings. This way of showing Icelandic life was used for the first time in the first half of the 20th century, when the 47 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revisited Edition, Verso, London, New York, 2006, p. 6. 48 T. Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, Berg, Oxford, 2002, p. 6. 49 M. Billing, Banal Nationalism, Sage Publications, London, 1995, p. 5. 50 Those phenomena are critically analyzed by Higson and Hill in the texts focused on British cinema. See: A. Higson, The Concept of National Cinema, [in:] Film and Nationalism, ed. A. Williams, New Rutgers University Press, Brunswick, 2002, p. 53; J. Hill, The Issue of National Cinema and British Film Production, [in:] New Questions of British Cinema, ed. D. Petrie, British Film Institute, London, 1993, p. 14; and [in:] S. Croft, Concepts of National Cinema, [in:] The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, eds. J. Hill, P. Ch. Gibson, University of Oxford Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 389.

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precursors of “moving pictures” began their activity. Such figures appeared again in the 1980s, when, for the second time, the government’s idea of national cinema marketing was implemented. Unfortunately, the thematic inaccessibility of those media of expression swiftly led to artistic impasse of a revived medium and effectively prevented Icelandic productions from achieving greater success abroad.51 In his article about film production system in Iceland, Björn Norðfjörð analyzes the array of issues and paradoxes, which are constantly present in Icelandic cinema. Author starts his analysis with the metaphor of “struggle for visibility”, related, in his opinion, to the specific geopolitical situation of the island and to the difficulties in funding and distributing films in a small (both in terms of land and population) country. Analyzing Andrew Higson’s postulates on national cinema (contained in Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain), the Icelandic film expert enlists some of the main problems of a “small cinema”. Firstly, in a country as sparsely populated as Iceland (and for that called “x-small” by the film expert), making a movie that could compete with Hollywood pictures is basically impossible, for the national budget would not hold it. On the other hand, private investors would not support a big cinematic project for such a small audience, due to a big chance that the funds invested in them would not repay. Thereby, when planning a production of a professional film in a small country, it is wiser to choose smaller productions with local purport that could interest the natives, and count on some sort of support from the government. According to Norðfjörð, that sort of pictures cannot be made in satisfactory way and only with public funds, so assistance from abroad is needed. This solution in most cases requires the adaptation of the European artistic film model (programs like grants from Media Programme or Eurimages, popular in the 1980s and 1990s) which however, as the attendance data from Icelandic cinemas show, is not willingly watched by the Icelanders. Attempts on engaging in cooperation with independent producers from the USA are, obviously, even more difficult. Moreover, the investments of that kind were not viewed positively on the island of the sagas.52 51 Cf.: B. Norðfjörð, Iceland, [in:] Cinema of Small Nations, eds. M. Hjort, D. Petrie, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007, pp. 44–54. 52 Simultaneous usage of the funds from the associations of Nordic countries (such as Nordisk Film & TV Fund) and internally restructured funds obtained from the Icelandic Film Fund compounds to the model which works efficiently in Iceland. Those institutions do not put emphasis on transnational form and content of the work they support. While writing about transnational turn in the means of film production, Norðfjörð notices the fact of the development of three Icelandic production companies strongly oriented towards acquiring foreign markets and developing various methods

28

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As far back as in 1990s, the local artists realized that constant duplication of stereotypical and ideologized images of their own country and the attachment to a single model of public film production support is not compatible with the dynamics of changes taking place in Iceland and in the entire world. And that is why the 1980s cinema strategy of cherishing historical memory by emphasizing places associated with it was gradually replaced by the idea of deconstruction of patriotic discourse figures. Stijn Reijnders, Dutch cultural researcher and the author of lieux d’imagination term,53 relates such a way of treating places of memory (connected with the concept of lieux de mémoire by Pierre Nora) to the consumerist and reinterpretational processing of fantasy and real areas relationships. According to Reijnders, more recent ways of media usage of lieux de mémoire are closer to the game of blurring boundaries between what is real and what is not. He proves that the places of imagination are physical reference points, such as objects or places, which enable certain groups in a society to create and then go beyond the symbolic border between the “imagined” and the “real” world.54 In this kind of practices, a land that is important for a certain society becomes an artefact that resembles the popular postmodern simulacrum of Jean Baudrillard. Elżbieta Rybicka, analyzing the texts of Reijnders in her book Geopoetyka (Geopoetics), stresses the feedback resulting from those actions, proving that “due to cultural creation (literary or film) and its receivers, the bilateral circulation turn real places into heterotopic lieux d’imagination, but also the cultural creation […] with the means of those practices, analogically turns into lieux d’imagination, obviously with different ontological status”.55

of film funding. Those companies are Icelandic Film Corporation (brought to life in 1990 by Friðrik Þór Friðriksson, existing on the market until 2004), Zik Zak Filmworks (established in 1995 by Skúli Malmquist Þórir S. Sigurjónsson) and Blueeyes Production (founded in 1999 by Baltasar Kormákur and his wife Lilja Pálmadóttir, existing under that name until 2012). Cf. B. Norðfjörð, Iceland, [in:] Cinema of Small Nations, ibid. 53 See: S. Reijnders, Places of the Imagination: An Ethnography of the TV Detective Tour, “Cultural Geographies”, 2010, no. 17/1. My description of the term lieux d’imagination is based on the Polish translation of the text: S. Reijnders, Miejsca wyobraźni: etnografia wycieczek śladami telewizyjnych detektywów, transl. J.  Radziszewska, “Tematy z Szewskiej”, 2011, no. 1 (5), pp. 67–68. 5 4 Ibidem, p. 68. 55 E. Rybicka, Geopoetyka. Przestrzeń i miejsce we współczesnych teoriach i praktykach literackich [Geopoetics. Space and Place in Contemporary Theories and Literary Practices], Universitas, Kraków, 2014, pp. 212–213.

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Fig. 4:  Fiction mixed with reality. Iceland Film Location App – digital application for the Icelandic film lovers and fans of Hollywood movie spots in Iceland. Source: http://www. filmlocations.is/the_app

According to Reijnders, there are more and more attempts to inscribe practices and meanings from fictional narration into real places in postmodernism. This “infecting reality with fiction” can be seen in Iceland – a country where tourists are encouraged to take trips in the footsteps of important film spots and visit areas related to national symbols56 with the use of specially designed maps and smartphone applications. Media images of the island, duplicated in modern audiovisual culture, contain many elements of the so-called tourist gaze.57 That manner of perception of history and space analysis was propagated by an American sociologist John Urry. In his book The Tourist Gaze, he interpreted the flâneur figure, borrowed 56 Gísli Sigurðsson describes brochures and schedules of tours organized for diplomats and leaders of the states visiting Iceland. They are usually constructed in a certain way: guests visit Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies, where most valuable language relics are kept, then they see the Althing building and go to Þingvellir. Sometimes, the representatives of foreign govenments visit artefacts associated with natural forces, such as geothermal plants or water reservoirs. The author notices that vital institutions such as National Gallery or National Museum are not taken into consideration as they do not have symbolical meaning for Icelanders. Most of the “special attractions” resemble ordinary tourists’ routes, which interestingly show how symbolic national identity of Iceland has been efficiently coupled with the tourism industry. Cf. G. Sigurðsson, op. cit., pp. 60–63. 57 Cf. J. Urry, J. Larsen, Tourist Gaze 3.0, SAGE Publications Ltd, Los Angeles, 2011.

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from Charles Baudelaire and popularized by Walter Benjamin, and paraphrased the term “medical gaze”, known from texts of Michel Foucault, thus creating a ­suggestive description of leisure culture and space consumption. In the third, significantly expanded edition of his book, Urry defines the specifics of the tourist gaze in the post-industrial society: “The ‘tourist gaze’ is not a matter of individual psychology but of socially patterned and learnt ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger, 1972). It is a vision constructed through mobile images and representational technologies. Like the medical gaze, the power of the visual gaze within modern tourism is tied into, and enabled by, various technologies, including camcorders, film, TV, cameras and digital images. There is no single tourist gaze as such. It varies by society, by social group and by historical period. Such gazes are constructed through difference. By this we mean not merely that there is no universal experience that is always true for all tourists. There are many ways of gazing within tourism, and tourists look at ‘difference’ differently. This is in part because tourist gazes are structured according to class, gender, ethnicity and age. Moreover, the gaze in any historical period is constructed in relationship to its opposite, to nontourist forms of social experience and consciousness”.58

Urry has distinguished nine features which characterize that perception.59 In the research on audiovisual culture, the aspects emphasized in the last four elements of his typology are most significant. In subpoint six, the integration of a tourist gaze with the sphere of pleasure and dreams is discussed. According to the author, it is constructed and preserved by the modern means of communication. The seventh criterion concerns the reinforcement of tourism artefacts with the use of techniques that allow them to be repeatedly recreated and reconstructed. 58 Apart from the discussion about Foucault’s conception, the authors of the extended version of the book analyze various methods of human perception, related also to the comments of John Berger and his classic monograph Ways of Seeing. Cf. J. Urry, J. Larsen, Tourist Gaze 3.0, op. cit., pp. 2–3. 59 In the first subpoint, Urry contrasts tourism with the everyday order and associates it with the order of modernity. In the second one, he emphasises its relation to mobility. In the following elements of his typology we find out that tourism is based on short, time-constrained travels outside of the spaces that can be identified as home and that the perception of tourism should in some way contrast with a workplace of people personating tourists. In the fifth subpoint, the author contraposes the massiveness of tourism against the individuality of traveling (See: J. Urry, J. Larsen, Tourist Gaze 3.0, pp. 4–5). It is worth mentioning that some of a determinants related with the tourist gaze (or post-tourism) can be easily revised and updated, as the cultural practises, such as long trips around the world, visiting places associated with work, “black tourism” in the places of tragedies and disasters, belong to the newest forms of space consumption, which mobility sociologists also perceive as the tourist experience.

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Fig. 5:  Icelandic landscapes seen through the tourist gaze perspective. Photo by the author of the book.

The last two elements relate to the collection of semiotic signs and relentless search for authenticity.60 In these subpoints, the author points out the multiplicity of creation forms related to artefacts associated with space consumption and singles out the role of people responsible for their production and distribution in media. In the perspective inspired by the mobile sociology, cinematic Iceland starts to resemble a huge amusement park, mentioned by Jean Baudrillard,61 where visiting old national memory spaces (such as Þingvellir) is just as attractive as 60 Dean MacCannell and Jonathan Culler dedicate much of their research to this ­perspective of tourism. Both thinkers notice that the tourists paradoxically miss the authenticity in their journeys, but this longing is mainly subjected to strict control of the travel agency, which often fabricates delusional sense of dealing with something extraordinary. Cf. D. MacCannell, The Tourist. A New Theory of the Leisure Class, University of California Press, Berkeley, London, New York, 1999. 61 J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, transl. S. F. Glaser, The University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1994. It is worth mentioning that in his description of America, the

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all-night drinking in bars, humorously referred to by the Icelanders as rúntur.62 In one of his most known texts, Baudrillard himself explains the process of media hyperreality creation, using the metaphor of a map detaching itself from the territory that it should copy. “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory, and […] today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map”.63

In this famous vision of the French philosopher, the situation is more radical than in Reijnders’ theories  – real spaces cease to exist, dominated by the media images used by the people to create their own perception of places and events. Baudrillard’s idea can be briefly described as an attempt to determine the interferences of symbolic relations between signs and their media mappings. In this perspective, the film island may be treated as an intriguing example of a tourist simulacrum. Portrayed this way, modern Iceland will become a being where media images are subjected primarily to the perception of people from the outside – a place composed of elements taken out of context and organized in a way that will simplify the consumption of its images. French philosopher evokes the Disneyland ­figure – simulated space of amusement – where many, not always matching elements are gathered in one place. That metaphor is meant to map the ontic disorder in medial images of the world. Interestingly, Baudrillard is not alone in similar perception of hyperreal status of modern amusement. Author of America uses the previous concepts of “pseudo-events” by Daniel Boorstin and “society of the spectacle”. Cf. D. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to PseudoEvents in America, Harper, New York, 1964; G. Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, New York, 1995. 62 K. Oslund, Iceland Imagined, op. cit., p. 5. Etymology of that term comes from a car ride arranged by young Icelanders bored by the life on a province. However, since the temporal prohibition on beer sales in the pubs has been lifted, rúntur also means drinking all night in numerous bars. Anglo-Saxon term for this activity is the noun clubbing and more ironic bar crawl. 6 3 See: J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, op. cit., p. 1. Well known and popular, Baudrillard recalls in his writings, among others, the ideas of Jorge Luis Borges (Cf. Dreamtigers, 1964), whereas key concepts that support many analyses of the map meaning in certain societies can be also found in the earlier researches of Alfred Korzybski. That Polish thinker, after emigrating to the USA in the mid-1930s, laid the foundations for semantic study of culture. His works are available on the Internet in English. Cf.: A. Korzybski, Science and Sanity. An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, The Institute of General Semantics, Lakeville, 1995. On-line version: http://esgs.free.fr/uk/art/sands.htm (access: 28 October 2018).

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Iceland as the Other (and Unknowable) Most recent discussions about changes in the perception of space and national symbols related to those changes will emerge in Icelandic cinema in the context of references to the strategy based on the marginalization of this small country’s political and cultural status and to the antinomian perception of its inhabitants related to the figure of heterotopia (Greek θτεροτοπος “heterotopos”, “other place”), which constitutes a mirror reverse of an utopia and the order of exclusion, existing between utopia and dystopia. According to local researchers, this long-lasting process of reducing or even excluding images of Iceland on the maps of the world contributes not only to the emphasis (or even symbolic reinforcement) of Europe and North America hegemony but also to the confirmation of inner perspective of Iceland’s perception as a being sentenced to cultural and political isolation. Björn Norðfjörð treats this phenomenon as one of the pillars of his analysis of the film Nói albinói by Dagur Kári.64 This movie expert recalls the words of Astradur Eysteinsson, who draws attention to the metaphor of “topographical encounter between Iceland and old Europe”.65 “On many European maps Iceland simply does not exist. It is not hard to understand why it is so. Its presence creates too much space left for an empty ocean, an ocean which has plenty of meanings for Icelanders. […] The ocean strongly decentralizes the old Europe […]. The continent is being pushed to the bottom right corner of the map. In some cases, the solution is to root Iceland and place it in a separate frame, which usually appears in the upper left corner of the map (hanging somewhere north from Scotland, in a no-place or rather no-position), and sometimes, to reduce its size”.66

Status of Iceland, analyzed in Norðfjörð monograph as a space of exclusion and a country that combines a collection of postmodern antinomies, gives it a 64 The author of the monograph on Dagur Kári’s works refers to, among others, Cartographic Cinema by Tom Conley. Conley examines a role of film maps and travels in French and Italian cinema. He also interprets cinematic images of the cities, reflects upon road movies and American superproductions connected with maps and traveling, such as Indiana Jones franchise or Gladiator (2000) by Ridley Scott. Other interesting examples of usage of “alternative geographies of modernity” can be found in Rob Shield’s Places on the Margin. Cf. T. Conley, Cartographic Cinema, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2007; R. Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity, Routledge, London, New York, 1992. 65 B. Norðfjörð, Dagur Kari’s Noi the Albino, University of Washington Press, Seattle, Copenhagen, 2010, p. 52. 66 A. Eysteinsson, Icelandic Resettlements, 1997, p. 155, as cited in: B. Norðfjörð, Dagur Kári’s Nói Albinoi, op. cit., p. 52.

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character of a heterotopic being. This way of perceiving space in the research on postmodernism is associated with a famous lecture by Michel Foucault, in which he takes a closer look at the places on the verge of acceptance and expulsion from the social order.67 According to the French philosopher, heterotopia is a border space connected with “places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality”.68

In simple terms, they can be accepted as places that cannot be easily defined in discursive practices, existing on the margins of the social and legal order, creating unobvious relations and networks of social connections with normalized spaces or sometimes even excluded from social norms. In the perspective inspired by Foucault’s thesis, in the result of its marginalization on the maps of the world and cultural suspension between tradition and modernity, the northern island can be perceived as a heterotopia of deviation. According to Foucault, heterotopic spaces combine structural antinomies, related to sacrum and profanum, order and chaos, purity and filth etc. Those are the other spaces, excluded, but still remaining in the relationships with normal areas and utopias. Heterotopias of deviation, distinguished by Foucault, focus in their essence on people sentenced to social marginalization and ostracism. Among other places, the French thinker classifies mental asylums and nursing homes into this category. Both figures are frequently mentioned in Icelandic culture as metaphoric attempts made to describe the Otherness of an island and its inhabitants. From a different perspective, also inspired by Foucault’s thought, modern Iceland can be interpreted as a heterotopia of accumulation. In its status, it combines the artefacts and mindsets from various historical periods. According to Foucault, 67 Foucault’s lecture became an inspiration for other researchers dealing with space anthropology. Famous analysis of “non-places” by Marc Augé and a concept of “thirdspace” by Edward Soja are among the most important theories related to heterotopias and hyperreality. Cf. M. Augé, Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, transl. John Howe, Verso, London, New  York, 1995; E.  Soja, Thirdspace:  Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Blackwell Publishers, Malden, Oxford, 1996. 68 See: M. Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, transl. J. Miskowiec,  “Diacritics”,  16:1 (Spring 1986), pp.  22–27. https://monoskop.org/File:Foucault_ Michel_1984_1986_Of_Other_Spaces.pdf (access: 2 October 2018).

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such category of places includes for instance libraries and museums, places that accumulate knowledge and objects from different ages. Those characteristics also fit into the methods of interpretation of the Icelanders’ past, described by the postmodern anthropologists. Kirsten Hastrup, the most famous foreign researcher of Icelandic folklore, refers in her studies to the term uchronia that suggestively conveys the specific relation to space and time displayed by the Icelanders. “Uchronia – she writes – is nowhere in time. If Utopia is a parallel universe, Uchronia is a separate history. It is a history out of time. Uchronic visions were part of the collective reproduced and invoked by the Icelanders, in search of meaning in the void between two histories”.69

The Danish researcher proves that Icelanders, who were isolated from the world for many years, existed in the “time suspension”, and did not see the linearity of history and treated sagas as its “living element”: “With no experience of a progressive history, the Icelanders knew that history could go wrong; the degree of misery that is entitled locally had no logic […] the Icelanders retreated to an imaginary time when history was ‘right’. This gave rise to Uchronic visions that were at odds with present experiences […]”.70

The study of paradoxes related to the perception of the past led Hastrup towards the thesis that resembles the aforementioned concepts of “the invention of a tradition”. “One could even argue, that while other peoples invented tradition to match new historical situations, the Icelanders reproduced the images of the past to invent themselves”.71

The examples of this unusual perception can be found in many Icelandic novels and films where the motive of coexistence of two parallel universes is used – timeless mythical order and lack of modern space miracles, described in this book. Moreover, in many modern narrations, the perspective inspired by the status of marginalized Iceland will result in its portrayal as an ironically perceived province of Europe. A  lone island in the North becomes a reservoir of exotic 69 K. Hastrup, A Passage to Anthropology: Between Experience and Theory, Routledge, London, New York, 1995, p. 112. It is worth mentioning that Danish anthropologists carried out a field study on Iceland in the early 1980s, which resulted in the publication of five books. Three of them constitute an academic trilogy: Culture and History in Medieval Iceland (Oxford, 1985), Nature and Policy in Iceland 1400–1800 (Oxford, 1990), A Place Apart (Oxford, 1998), which revived the Western interest in folklore and culture of the North. 70 Ibidem, p. 113. 71 Ibidem, p. 114.

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eccentrics living in the space where weathered myths and symptoms of postmodern changes are penetrating. Modern audiovisual images most often hyperbolize such imagery, using poetics of exaggeration, irony and black humor. Their creators also contest the 19th-century convention of utopian status of the “island of the sagas” with a similarly old figure of “hell on Earth,” lost at the end of the world. One might even say that after the transnational turn, Icelandic filmmakers paradoxically sometimes return to the primal image of the farthest land. However, the fiction strategies presented in their works are trying to convince foreign audiences that a visit to the 21st-century Iceland will not give them a chance to learn the truth about its authentic status and the Otherness of its inhabitants. In the gaze of liquid modernity, all that is left is the perspective of an audiovisual tourist led by antinomic hunger for amusement and authenticity, but ultimately unable to properly look behind the scenes of the images created for him.

Part One:  Reconfiguring Utopias: Nation Building and Cinema

1 Nature, Countryside and the City: The Ideologies of Nation Building Introduction  Monographers of Icelandic cinema symbolically consider the year 1901 as the beginning of the Icelanders’ adventure with movie art. That was when the first takes of Icelandic nature and customs of native inhabitants of the island were documented on film. The project of filming the landscapes, flora, fauna and people of the island was sponsored by a British company Gibbons & Co., which later presented the material in many other countries. However, these films were not made by an Icelander, but by Franz Anton Nöggerath born in Germany.72 The oldest short film that survived until today and can be found in the files of National Film Archive of Iceland (Kvikmyndasafn Íslands) in Hafnarfjördur is Firemen Practice in Reykjavík (Slökkviliðsæfing í Reykjavík) directed in 1906 by two Danish citizens –Peter Petersen and Alfred Lind – who also opened first cinema in the capital of the northern island. Even this short production presents the subject that will be highly important for all generations of Icelandic directors – “catching the glimpse of modern life”73 that will be often contrasted with the countryside and nature and may be presented for the local and foreign viewers: “The popularity of the film when shown in the Reykjavík Biograph-Theater suggests that it held a particular fascination for the locals as it caught on film their own town in the manner of foreign metropolises and exotic locations, which they were by now accustomed to seeing on the screen. For Icelanders today, this little film offers the  oldest ‘living pictures’  – as the locals referred to them in the early twentieth ­century – of the past”.74

The first pioneering project75 of recording the national heritage of Iceland was initiated a little bit later by an Icelandic photographer Loftur Guðmundsson, 72 B. Norðfjörð, Icelandic Cinema: A National Practice in a Global Context, PhD dissertation, University of Iowa, 2005, p. 27. 73 B. Norðfjörð, Iceland in Living Pictures: A Meeting-Place of Cinema and Nation, [in:] “Studia Humanistyczne AGH”, 2011, no. 10/1, p. 170. 74 Ibidem, p. 170. 75 The full feature movie The Outlaw and his Wife (Berg Ejvind och hans hustru) from 1918 was based on a stage drama by Jóhann Sigurjónsson’s but was directed by the Swedish artist Victor Sjöström, who shot it in northern Sweden. See: B. Norðfjörð, Icelandic Cinema A National Practice in a Global Context, p. 31.

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Fig. 1:  Iceland in Living Pictures (1925), dir. Loftur Guðmundsson. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

author of the documentary movie Iceland in Living Pictures (Ísland í lifandi myndum), produced in 1925. Watching some rolls of Loftur Guðmundsson’s movie project that were preserved to this very day, we may learn much about the reality of life on the island in the first two decades of the 20th century. The author of Iceland in Living Pictures takes us on a cinematic trip around the country, beginning his visual journey with an approval of the modern spirit of Reykjavík to pass on to show the beauty of Icelandic landscapes. The following segments of the movie present the toil of the work on the sea and the charm of life on the farm. We may also adore the beauty of Icelandic girls, who say farewell to us at the end of the screening.

Country and the City in the Works of the Pioneers of Icelandic Cinema Guðmundsson’s documentary may be treated as a pioneering, feature-length “moving postcard” from Iceland that gracefully invites us to visit the island. At the same time, however, it contains a powerful “ideological load”, identifying the life in the country with the beautiful, but ruthless nature. The movie integrates

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the “tourist gaze”,76 which creates the utopian vision of the island, with visual and textual77 portrayal of positive features of its inhabitants. It is telling that after the presentation of important state institutions and related symbols, a panorama of the developing Reykjavík is shown on the screen. On symmetrical streets of the city, we may notice a symbol of the progress – proud automobile, that due to an accidental editing error disappears suddenly for a while. However, most of the movie is focused on the advantages of everyday life in harmony with the nature. We are taken to a small fishing town of Ísafjörður, where panoramic take presents us the specific location of the settlement, stuck between two majestic fjords. Such a strategy of comparing the orders of the culture and the nature is used in the whole structure of the movie. The documentary often contrasts the elements of nature with the evidence of heroic work of Icelanders, such as fishing among great waves or huge ice floats. Other scenes show us the idyllic countryside landscapes, depicted in the time of haymaking, or the images of small cats warming themselves up in the sun, that does not often show itself on the island. The characteristic Icelandic motif of generational conflict and compelling the young to stay in the countryside appears vividly in the Danish adaptation of the classic Icelandic novel The Story of the Borg Family (Saga Borgarættarinnar), written by Gunnar Gunnarson. The movie was directed by the Danish filmmaker and actor Gunnar Sommerfelt in 1921 and depicted life on a countryside farm. This production is one of the first feature films set on the island of sagas that is focused, in accordance with Icelandic poetics, on stormy relations between the members of a family. Peter Cowie emphasizes the fact that the themes used in this movie will later return in numerous Icelandic movies: “Filming took place in a small town just 10 km outside the capital, and excellent use was made of a local wool market, as well as the craggy rock formations. Based on a popular novel by Icelander Gunnar Gunnarsson and starring an Icelandic actor, the story ­adumbrated one of the themes that has percolated Icelandic cinema itself in recent years: the conflict between a desire to travel abroad in search of fame and fortune, and the need to remain home to tend the ancestral estate”.78

Unfortunately, the economic situation caused by the great crisis of the 1930s made it extremely difficult to produce movies in the next 20 years. In the 1940s,

76 See: J. Urry, J. Larsen, Tourist Gaze 3.0, SAGE Publications Ltd, Los Angeles, 2011, pp. 2–3. 77 The textual layer is obviously represented by the cinematic intertitles. 78 P. Cowie, Icelandic Films 1980–2000, Kvikmyndasjóður Íslands, Reykjavík, 2000, p. 6.

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Fig. 2:  Between Mountain and Shore (1948), dir. Loftur Guðmundsson. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

however, as I have already mentioned in the introduction, the island obtained independence. Four years later, in 1948, Loftur Guðmundsson creates the first Icelandic sound feature film. The movie is focused on the protection of the countryside life against foreign influences. Between Mountain and Shore (Milli fjalls og fjöru) is a love story about an innocent “countryside boy”, who falls in love with a rich girl and is accused of sheep’s theft. Richard Peña, one of the curators of the Icelandic movies’ panorama in New York, describes this work of cinematic art with the following words: “The first Icelandic sound feature is this charming tale of star-crossed lovers shot against the stunning backgrounds of central Iceland. Gunnar Eyjólfsson, later one of the country’s most popular actors, plays the son of an impoverished farmer who falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Said to be based on an actual incident, the film was the culmination of the life-long efforts of its director, Loftur Guðmundsson—who had made some silent short films—to create a genuinely Icelandic cinema”.79

79 R. Peña, Images from the Edge. Classic and Contemporary Icelandic Cinema, 2012, p. 4, http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/between-mountain-and-shore1 (­access: 1 October 2018).

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Fig. 3:  Reykjavík Adventure of Bakka-Brothers (1951), dir. Óskar Gíslason. Photos from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

Such a description shows that even the contemporary movie scholars perceive Between Mountain and Shore only as a charming love story,80 neglecting an important fact that the movie displays the elements of xenophobic nature, present also in the later Icelandic productions. At the end of the story, it turns out that the sheep (as it was jokingly noticed by Peter Cowie that apart from fish and horses, these animals were closest to the Icelandic heart81) were stolen by the foreigners. Watching Guðmundsson’s movie today, it is hard to believe that it was made in 1948. Too much expression in acting and poor technical production resemble rather the productions made in the 1920s, only with sound and in color. Three years later, another feature movie appears, directed by Óskar Gíslason and titled The Reykjavík Adventure of Bakka-Brothers (Reykjavíkurævintýri Bakka-bræðra). This time, the film comically confronts the elements of countryside folklore with urban reality. Eponymous brothers arrive at the center of Reykjavík driving a tractor. Each of their actions initiates a series of slapstick gags. Contrasting comparison of the less-favored countryside mentality with urban elegance and modernity is present in most of the scenes of the movie. During their stay in the capital city, the boisterous “Icelandic Marx brothers” will not only enrage the local police and desecrate the National Theater, but also meet girls from the city and visit the most important places of the “metropolis”. It is significant that Reykjavík is again presented from the “tourist gaze” and shown to the audience mainly as a place of numerous attractions. The plot interestingly 8 0 Ibidem. 81 P. Cowie, op. cit., p. 6.

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clashes social contexts that can be perceived in terms of Marxist and Freudian ideology. In two scenes, the protagonists are presented with a ladder that they use first to climb up and peek on a rich man, who is drinking an expensive alcohol in his villa. Then they also watch the girls who live nearby and practice their roles for a theatrical performance full of erotic undertones. Unfortunately, the mischievous brothers may become the part of this better city life only in their imagination. The real confrontation with the urban reality always results in situations that ridicule their countryside origins. Even the conclusion of the movie, accumulating all misdemeanors of the protagonists, distinctly proves that they belong to a different world than the modernist inhabitants of Reykjavík. It comes as no surprise then that in the last scene, our affable heroes are forced to flee the city and to return with their tractor to a simpler countryside existence. The 1950s is also the beginning of Edda company, established in 1949.82 In accordance with the eponymous reference to the oldest Icelandic literary text, Edda was supposed to create and promote movies that cultivate national values. They are set on the island, tell stories closely related to the important moments in the history of the country and linked with its literary heritage. The first production made in accordance with the national cinema ideology was an adaptation of Halldór Laxness’ novel. Salka Valka from 1954 was paradoxically directed by Arne Mattson, born in Sweden. Interestingly enough, the movie was also a debut of Sven Nykvist, a camera operator that will later become famous for his work at Ingmar Bergman’s movies. Norðfjörð claims that the movie about “the love in the countryside” was watched by approximately 60,000 people.83 Another important production of Edda, which also managed to spectacularly succeed by gathering an audience of 70,000 people, was a film directed by a Dane, Erik Balling, titled The Girl GoGo (79 af stöðinni) from 1962.84 Contrary to Salka Valka, the actors who starred in this movie were Icelanders and used their native language in the dialogues. The film turned out to be an important, albeit controversial cultural work. It tells a story about an international erotic triangle, simultaneously reinterpreting the theme of clash between the countryside morality and urban values. The new morality is represented by the 82 Á. O. Ásgeirsson, Zjadanie sag. Krótka historia kinematografii nieznanej [Eating up Sagas. A Short History of an Unknown Cinema], [in:] Islandia. Wprowadzenie do wiedzy o społeczeństwie i kulturze [Iceland. Introduction to Social and Cultural Studies], eds. R. Chymkowski, W. K. Pessel, Wydawnictwo Trio, Collegium Civitas, Warszawa, 2009, p. 219. 83 B. Norðfjörð, op. cit., p. 40. 84 P. Cowie, op. cit., 8.

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eponymous GoGo, wife of a Dane, who has an affair with an American soldier and the movie’s protagonist at the same time. He is a boy from countryside, who arrives at Reykjavík in order to make a living as a taxi driver. Like in the case of The Story of the Borg Family or Salka Valka, even though it had much influence on the later productions that described the degenerating influence of the city, due to its complex production structures the film cannot be completely inscribed into the current of national cinema.85 What is worse, despite of the success of both Edda’s movies, the company was unable to obtain resources for the production of the following titles. Therefore, the 1960s and 1970s became a time when movies in Iceland were created directly for the television. It was not until 1980, the time when the National Film Fund started working and the Icelandic cinemas began to screen domestic productions directed towards Icelanders. But the movies made in the homeland of sagas will need another decade to become noticed in the European market and arouse interest of the investors from abroad. Icelanders assume that the beginning of their modern cinema should be traced back to the 1980s – the so-called Icelandic Film Spring.86 What is interesting, as many as ten most popular movies in the history of Icelandic cinema were produced during this period full of premieres and commercial successes.87 The most groundbreaking films from that time include the successful Land and Sons (Land og synir) by Ágúst Guðmundsson and Father’s Estate (Óðal feðranna), directed by Hrafn Gunlaugsson.88 Screenings of the movies created in the homeland of Halldór Laxness at the beginning of the 1980s became such an important cultural event that Icelanders, happy for the revival of their cinema, were willing to pay twice as much for the tickets to see their domestic productions than for the films from abroad. We may only highlight the fact that Land and Sons was watched by 100,000 people in the country with population of 229,187,89 which even today is an impressive result. Both productions were directly supported by the Icelandic Film Fund, established in 1978, and by two related institutions  – National Film Library and Reykjavík International Film 85 See:  A. Higson, The Concept of National Cinema, [in:] Film and Nationalism, ed. A. Williams, New Rutgers University Press, Brunswick, 2001. 86 The name was coined by Olafur M. Johanneson, a critic who in one of his reviews on Land and Sons wrote: “And now spring has arrived to Iceland, a new art-form is being born in Iceland no less”. cf. B. Norðfjörð, op. cit., p. 47. 87 B. Norðfjörð, op. cit., p. 49. 88 Á. O. Ásgeirsson, op. cit., p. 222. 89 P. Cowie, op. cit., p. 12.

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Fig. 4:  Land and Sons (1980), dir. Ágúst Guðmundsson. Photos from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

Festival. However, an unfavorable economic situation of the country and reluctance of the government to support the filmmaking projects forced the founders of the national cinema to mortgage their own houses or to take risky bank loans in order to be able to implement their ideas.90 It is believed that the financial struggle is the main reason behind the poor technical quality of the movies produced in the 1980s. On the other hand, the cinematic language used to create movies in this period is of lower quality than the one used in movies from Hollywood or Europe… in the 1950s. This situation was caused mainly by the lack of professional education for the directors, screenwriters, camera operators and technical assistants. The best way to analyze the attempts at creating the foundation for the modern national cinema is to focus on two pioneering movies that had so much influence on the works of other Icelandic movie makers. First of them, Land and Sons by Ágúst Guðmundsson, is a movie that emphasizes the charm of the life in accordance with the nature (to even larger extent that the equally popular Father’s Estate by Hrafn Gunnlaugsson), connecting the apologies of countryside life with ideas related to national identity. Writing about the backgrounds of this movie, Peter Cowie states that “Almost half the attendance came from the provinces; old folks’ homes emptied as the pensioners turned out to see Ágúst’s work”.91 The interest of the older generation is not surprising. The plot of the film focuses on the aversion of young people to farming duties of their parents and touches the motif of migration from the countryside, in search for an easier life in the city. Numerous scenes depict the protagonists as careless and nature-loving 9 0 Á. O. Ásgeirsson, op. cit., p. 223. 91 P. Cowie, op. cit., p. 12.

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cowboys, who ride their horses and look after their sheep. However, the plot in general is full of metaphorical, albeit straightforward features, for example, the scene related to the migration to the city, when the protagonist pointlessly kills his white horse, or when he gives away his beloved dog to his neighbor. Land and Sons also clearly operates with the local, national perspective.92 The story is constructed in such a way to make the audience identify with the hard-working, ailing father and his opinion. The scene when the old man suffers from a heart attack may be rooted in the poetics of the realistic novels of the 19th century. The man falls on the ground during his work in the field. The film highlights the positive aspects related to the attachment to the land and nature, putting much emphasis on the beauty of the Icelandic landscapes. Probably this is why the young protagonists begin and consume their romantic relation outdoors. The thesis of conservative approach presented by the movie can be also supported by the fact, that the protagonist’s lover unsuccessfully tries to convince him to stay on the “land of his ancestors” and in the end refuses to go with him to the city. The film can be surprisingly up to date, when watched after the financial crash that occurred in Iceland in 2008. Its story takes place in the 1930s, in the time of the great crisis, when economy on the island was collapsing. Considering the problems of contemporary Icelanders, the grim utterances of the movie’s characters, such as, “economic crisis and sick sheep, that’s our legacy”, “we are the nation of debtors” or “everything collapses here, it’s an arid land” sound disturbingly topical.93 Just like Land and Sons, the second important movie of the period, Father’s Estate, directed by Hrafn Gunnlaugsson, uses the “young-old”, “countryside-city” and “nature-culture” juxtapositions. However, it also distances itself from the ideologized devices of national discourse. Gunnlaugsson’s movie begins at a wake, with a speech of a man who praises the civil virtues of the deceased – “he could fully understand the importance of life in the countryside”. Portentous oratorical performance is observed by two bored sons of the late man, whom we may later 92 More details about the features of national and transnational cinema and their relations with the moviemaking system can be found in: Transnational Cinema in a Global North: Nordic Cinema in Transition, eds. A. Nestingen, T. Elkington, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2005. 93 The crisis of 2008 will become another important motif presented in contemporary Icelandic documentaries and feature movies. See: J. Björnsdóttir, “A Stupid Man Built His Home on Sand”: A Film Response to the Icelandic Banking Crisis [in:] World Film Locations: Reykjavík, eds. J. Conolly, C. Whelan, Intellect Books, Bristol, Chicago, 2012, pp. 24–25.

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see outside, during an argument over the obliqueness of the authorities and the rich. The older son, Helgi, claims that the head of the family was a “romantic fool, that allowed others to exploit him”. He thinks that the head of the family would not like them to stay on the farm. The protagonists decide to convince their mother to sell the indebted farm and to move to Reykjavík with them. However, the woman does not want to lose “the land of the ancestors”. Due to an unfortunate accident, Helgi becomes paralyzed. His younger sibling, Stefán, does his will and takes a bus to Reykjavík. In the capital, the protagonist becomes a student and starts to enjoy the life of the city. Unfortunately, his careless life does not last long. A  contract worker employed at his family’s farm sexually abuses his impaired sister, while his mother signs an unfavorable agreement on the lease of the lands that belong to her. The youngest brother returns home, but instead of sorting out his family matters, he gets into trouble with the law and is forced to spend the winter on the farm. In the last minutes of the movie, we see him resigned to his fate, standing on the ladder and looking at the bus on its way to Reykjavík. It is telling, that in contrary to the Land and Sons, where there are no scenes that depict the advantages or disadvantages of urban life, Gunnlaugsson’s movie does not idealize the countryside nor does it favor the easier existence in the capital city. In this case, unlike in the Guðmundsson’s production, an ambiguous attitude towards the countryside life is proposed. Countryside order, closely related to nature, does not give any chance for the development of young generation. Farming is not a promising branch of economy, because of the farmers’ indebtedness caused by politicians and businessmen, who learned how to exploit the gullibility of the others. Countryside is also a place that is losing its character. At the end of the movie, we may see Stefán driving his tractor along a new, asphalt road. With sadness, he observes the adaptation of the countryside landscape for the needs of tourism. The land of the ancestors is no longer used for pastoralism and is divided and built-up by the rich, who purchased it using illegal methods. The flaws of the richer part of the society are represented by Gunnar  – the owner of a Mercedes car and the only shop in the area. Unpleasant man becomes rich through buying horses from poor farmers and selling them to Germany. His daughter, brought up abroad, is a devoted follower of the urban lifestyle. She thinks only about her own pleasure and cruelly flirts with Stefán, who is presented as innocent and uncorrupted by the foreign influence. In the scene when three characters meet with each other, we may notice some traces of left-wing perspective, very popular in the Icelandic cinema of the 1980s. When the shy boy enters Gunnar’s house, he is received like a peasant who wants to speak with his master. He not only has to wait for the audience with a man who exploited his mother’s naivety but is also taunted and impudently courted by the barely clothed

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Fig. 5:  Father’s Estate (1980), dir. Hrafn Gunnlaugsson. Photos from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

daughter of the businessman. Left-wing features are also highlighted at the end of the movie, in the speech about the folk that must pay for the cars of its representatives. The passionate utterance of the young man was contrasted with the scenes of hedonistic party organized by Gunnar’s daughter. Here, however, we need to emphasize the fact that Gunnlaugsson’s movie cannot be simply inscribed into straightforward perspective of depreciation of the city, known from Land and Sons and from the movies made by the pioneers of the Icelandic cinema. The reality of life in Reykjavík was also depicted in quite ambiguous manner. On the one hand, the capital city of Iceland flabbergasts the young provincial with its charm. It is a modern city, where young girls do not hesitate to pick up men for a single night and where you can study in one of the perspective fields. On the other hand, though, Stefán lives in a cellar rented from a lonely, single mother with alcohol problems and must pay off debts of his older brother, who developed a taste for the “sin city” glamor and was severely punished for his deeds by the cruel fate. Such an equivocal approach towards the urban culture will later become a popular rhetorical device, often used in Icelandic cinema of the 1990s and in the movies produced in the first decade of the 21st century. Let us now return to the analysis of ideological devices presented in the movies produced during the Icelandic Film Spring. Left-wing attitude towards telluric themes and zealous criticism of cultural and political colonization of the country can also be found in Inter Nos, another movie directed by Hrafn Gunnlaugsson from 1982.94 The plot presents a story of an engineer, who works as a designer of 94 Latin title of the movie was supposedly used to highlight the patriotic message of the film.

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thermal power plants and undergoes his midlife crisis. The screenplay connects the fate of the protagonist with unclear meditations on the influence of politics on a discourse that utilizes new telluric themes. In one of numerous phantasmatic scenes, the main hero of the story goes to see a theatrical play. During the performance, his daughter, playing the role of mother-Iceland, removes her clothes. This act is accompanied by the words of the narrator, who tells the audience to comprehend the true image of their country, unromanticized by the poets and summarized with the words: “We live in Iceland, naive mother-Iceland. We are the last generation on Earth. Let’s fuck her. Let’s have fun and fuck everything we can”.95 After these vulgar words, various references to the turbines and atomic energy appear on the screen. Such themes can be associated not only with the trade of the main character, but also with the discussion about foreign investors, willing to build natural power plants on the island. In the course of the plot, Benjamin, living in a half-real world, falls into a sexual and patriotic obsession with thermal energy. In his visions, the erotic fascination with corporeality of his daughter’s friend (with a telling name Edda96) is mixed with irresistible will to return to the nature. Female attributes are symbolized by hot springs and geysers visited by the scientist, who tries to tame the forces of nature in his visions. Of course, the movie’s script identifies the energy of the Earth with the natural resources of the country. The foreign powers, represented here by a Japanese corporation, try to capture and control these resources. References to the left-wing opinions are also visible in the

95 When he watches the theatrical striptease of his own daughter, Benjamin daydreams about seducing Edda, daughter of his late friend. 96 The motif of raping the uncorrupted nature of the homeland, personified as an innocent virgin, is a popular element of nationalistic narrations (See: G. Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, Blackwell Publishers LTD, Cambridge, Oxford, 1993, pp. 70–71, 108–109), and it is also used in Icelandic national discourse. It is related to the symbolic figure of Lady of the Mountain (or the Mountain Woman, Isl. fjallkonan), created by Erikurr Magnusson, professor of Nordic studies, who had a prophetical vision in 1864. The manuscript held by the creature he drew is symbolizing the intellectual individuality of Iceland, where linguistic traditions and original mythology, passed down from generation to generation, managed to survive under foreign jurisdiction. “Purity and uniqueness” of the female personification of Iceland will become a rhetorical device used first in poetry and painting, and later in literature and film (See also: I. D. Björnsdóttir, The Mountain Woman and Presidency, [in:] Images of Contemporary Iceland: Everyday Lives and Global Contexts, eds. G. Palsson, E. P. Durrenberger, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1996, pp. 106–111). More info on the fjallkonan and Icelandic cinema may be found in the second and fifth chapters of this book.

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scene of the punk concert. Lyrics of the songs maneuver between the urge to copulate with young girls and to criticize politicians, who sold themselves to a foreign capital that rapes mother-Iceland.97 Unfortunately, constant and unclear mixing of psychoanalytical connotations with political allusions did not make the film highly popular among the Icelanders, while the foreign audience may perceive the movie as unwatchable. Explicit communistic sympathies, less hermetic criticism of foreign influence and legible satire on the urban life can be found in the film adaptation of Halldór Laxness’ 1948 novel The Atom Station (Atómstöðin) produced in 1984. Just like its literary source, Þorsteinn Jónsson’s movie presents a satirical vision of the corrupted politicians “selling” the country to the Americans. The movie depicts two parties. The first one is represented by the American diplomats and their pro-American supporters, who do not oppose the construction of an atom base on the island. The second one is composed of communistic students, befriended by a gullible protagonist from the countryside. It is significant that the complexity of Iceland-USA relation was presented not only in the political macro-scale (US Army occupation of the military base in Keflavik), but also in the micro-scale of human drama. Explicit political references can also be found in the motif of the romance between the prime minister’s daughter and a married American, who uses the “village girl” only to neglect her and deny any relation with her when she becomes pregnant. Unfortunately, the adaptation is not a good one and much of the rapacious satire of the novel is lost. Still, it revives the postulate to fight against the foreign influence (present also in Inter Nos), putting much emphasis on the uniqueness of Icelandic nature, language and culture, the purity of which is in danger from the side of external powers. The more modern form of discourse presented in both movies does not differ much from the language used by the 19th-century nationalists, who in their romanticized writings wished to strengthen the national identity of Icelanders living under Danish jurisdiction.98

Country and the City in Selected Films of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s White Whales (Skytturnar) from 1987 is a movie that continues the discussion about the changes in Icelandic national identity, but in a much more ambiguous manner. Even though it was created in the times of the 97 One of the stanzas goes as follows: “I want to love my country, I want to make my country rich, I want to boost its sales, I want to keep its NATO base”. 98 I. D. Björnsdóttir, op. cit., p. 109.

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Icelandic Film Spring, it displays some transnational elements. The plot is less hermetic; the screenplay is less focused on local reality and historic contexts. Many literary tropes, legible only for the Icelanders, were made more universal. Moreover, the syntactic-semiotic layer of the film contains references to popular movie genres that can be easily identified by the audiences from other countries. Therefore, White Wales can be perceived as a movie of transnational character. Björn Norðfjörð notices that this is the first feature movie in which the director begins to play with American culture, Hollywood cinema in particular. Friðriksson will go along this path in his future films. In inter-specific references and in the use of Anglo-Saxon songs, Norðfjörð looks for the announcement of the transgression of Icelandic cinema from local dimension to transnational level, open for international standards.99 Antisocial message of the movie is related not only to the director’s fascination with the history of American cinema but also with local stories about the “trappers of the North”, which became popular in Iceland in the 1940s.100 It was a time of freshly obtained independence, social changes and rapid development of the industry. In his article titled Iceland and the Images of the North, Kristinn Schram notices that it was a time when Icelandic texts of culture began to connect the remote, wild landscapes of the country with stories of extravagant, independent and rebellious protagonists, whose nonconformist personalities contrasted with social organization displayed by the inhabitants of the city.101 Schram also proves that even though their actions are often blameworthy, such characters very rarely induce negative emotions, because they are perceived by the Icelanders as a symbol of struggle against foreign cultural influence.102 The question is: were the protagonists of White Whales presented in such a way? The main characters of the movie resemble rather the melancholic “Nordic version” of Laurel and Hardy. Irascible and a little bit more sensible Grímur and good-natured but extremely childish Bubbi are a pair of whalers who lose their job and begin their “taxi odyssey” along gloomy and dark streets of Reykjavík, concluded with a tragic fight with the police. It is easy to notice that the choice of whalers for the protagonists of the movie contains a clear social context. However, the statistics tell us that whaling is not (and has never been) an important field of Icelandic economy. Meat of whales 9 9 B. Norðfjörð, op. cit., pp. 40–41. 100 K. Schram, The Wild Wild North: The Narrative Cultures of Image Construction in Media and Everyday Life, [in:] Images of the North: Histories – Identities – Ideas, ed. S. Jakobsson, Rodopi, Amsterdam, New York, 2009, p. 253. 101 Ibidem. 102 Ibidem.

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Fig. 6:  White Whales (1987), dir. Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

killed on Icelandic waters is sold only in Japan. It constitutes 1.3 % of the whole fish export – an industry that generates 75 % income of the national economy. Moreover, in contrary to Norway, Iceland has never been a “whaling tycoon”.103 In the 19th century, these animals were rarely hunted. After the Second World War, ten hunt centers were created, and this number did not change until 1986, when the International Whaling Commission forbade to kill these animals for commercial purposes. After three years, Icelanders started to ignore these restrictions. That is when the question of whaling became a subject of national importance. The prohibition and radical protests organized by Greenpeace members, who agitated to boycott fish products made in Iceland, enraged the authorities and public opinion.104 International discussion (joined also by the USA and New Zealand) revived the old rhetorical devices used in the times of nationalistic propaganda against the presence of American soldiers in the country or used to highlight the differences between Iceland and Denmark in the 19th century.105 Media that supported the government emphasized contrasts between the romanticized, 103 A. Brydon, Whale-Siting:  Spatiality in Icelandic Nationalism, [in:] Images of Contemporary Iceland. Everyday Lives in Global Contexts, eds. G.  Palsson, P. Durrenberger, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1996, pp. 26–27. 104 Ibidem, p. 35. 105 Ibidem, p. 27.

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sentimental opinion of the defenders of the whales, who were perceived as representatives of foreign political forces, and the scientific approach of the Icelanders, supported by the tradition of living in harmony with the nature. In the opinion of local media, Icelandic society was unjustly and insultingly compared to butchers or even fascists guilty of the “holocaust of the whales”.106 The countrywide feeling of external pressure was also supported by the TV broadcast of a documentary movie, which presented the defenders of the whales as people looking after their own profit and willing to destroy the Icelandic economy. This way, the fight for the right to hunt whales became a media battle for national identity, which was represented by the fishermen.107 Cinema also had its share in this argument. Very quickly, a year after the ban was imposed, Friðriksson understood the deadweight of the subject and decided to precariously compare unemployed Icelanders with helpless animals. Fortunately, one of the main advantages of White Whales is the fact that it does not present the opinion of its creator in a straightforward manner. Friðriksson did not create a paean for the protectors of the whales, or a film that would glorify the figures of unemployed whalers. The movie is focused on the upsetting results of the hunting prohibition. Simultaneously, however, we may see that the protagonists are socially ill-adapted because their grotesque behavior and flaws are highlighted in numerous scenes. What is most important, however, Bubby and Grímur die because of their occupation, which is symbolically bonded with the order of the nature. Even though the urban environment seems to be attractive, it is not their “ecological niche”. That is why Reykjavík is presented from quite a dystopian perspective. Sinful dimension of urban life is most visible in the scene that presents the results of the brawl initiated by the protagonists in a sports shop. In a single long shot, the camera shows the chaotically scattered artifacts of the consumer’s world. The image of destruction is accompanied by a radio broadcast of the speech of a bishop of Reykjavík, who calls the believers to trust their hope for a better tomorrow. Absurdity of the unemployed whalers’ fate is also highlighted by the fact, that immediately after the words, “Jesus Christ promised us salvation”, the police officers shoot tear gas in the direction of the protagonists and blankly kill the unarmed Bubby, who tried to surrender. Metaphorical message of the title is clearly emphasized in the penultimate scene. Wounded Grímur hides from the police in an abandoned swimming pool. He smokes his last cigarette and let the officers kill him. In the final seconds of his life, the protagonist crawls at

1 06 Ibidem, pp. 29–30. 107 Ibidem, p. 30.

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the bottom of the pool, covered in his own blood like the hunted whale, whose dead body was shown in one of the first scenes of the movie. The concluding part of the compositional frame shows dying Grímur’s childish fascination with aquarium fish. It seems to be redundant, unnecessarily suggesting senses that could be deciphered in numerous elements of the plot and presented world. Also Friðrik Þór Friðriksson’s Children of Nature (Börn náttúrunnar, 1991), Academy Award-nominated opus magnum of Icelandic cinema, bravely re­in­ terprets key motifs of the local culture – clashes between tradition and modernity, nature and culture (or country and the city) – connecting these themes with the struggle between the old generation and the youth. Probably for the first time in Icelandic cinema, Friðriksson put all the topics in a wide transnational context, touching the matters that even today are not very popular, such as the place, role and social status of the elder in the consumer society. The entire creative output of the author of White Whales once again interestingly merges the 19th-century romantic perception of the nature and countryside with successful attempts to inscribe this context into the postmodern perspective. Already the first shots, deprived of any dialogues, reveal the suggestive poetics of the movie, which directly refers to the style of the European cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, initiating a creative dialogue with literary and cinematic output of Scandinavia. The first scene of the movie begins with an image of mossy stones, which is gradually broadened to capture the entire scenery and to present a group of men singing an old Icelandic song. Among them, on the left side of the frame, we can see the protagonist. Þorgeir (Gísli Halldórsson) leaves the group in order to drive the sheep into a truck that will take them to a slaughterhouse. Used as an introduction to the main story, the scene curiously accents the Icelandic attitude towards life and death and emphasizes the dependence of the inhabitants of this small volcanic island on the nature that surrounds them. Apart from fishing, sheep farming has always constituted a basis for the survival of Icelanders, living in the harsh conditions offered by the “land at the end of the world”. The necessity of killing other beings in order to survive is presented here as a collectively celebrated tradition. Even though the motif of sheep being driven to the truck has a purely utilitarian character, the group singing and cooperation between the neighbors consolidate the symbolic meaning of simple work.108 Interestingly enough, in the metaphorical sense, the scene of the

108 The traditions of everyday farming life are interestingly described in: S. G. Magnússon, Wasteland with Words: A Social History of Iceland, Reaktion Books, London, 2010, pp. 40–42.

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Fig. 7:  Children of Nature (1991), dir. Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

group work can be treated as a symbolic anticipation of the protagonists’ destiny. After all, Friðriksson’s movie is a moving story about an uneasy fate of two main characters, who are forced to leave the zone of the nature and move to a place (a pensionary house) where they can humbly await their death, just like the sheep transported to the slaughterhouse, presented in the prologue. The subsequent scene also presents the image that is iconic for the Icelandic culture – a lonesome farmhouse, usually depicted in the paintings and photos on the background of an ascetic, post-volcanic landscape and clouded, pale blue evening sky. Þorgeir is seen inside, unnaturally distant from the center of the frame. This time, the camera slowly proceeds from a long shot to a close-up, allowing the audience to contemplate the sad face of an old man, who celebrates the last evening spent in his house. The next scene emphasizes the finality of the farewell ceremony gesture even more. It shows photos from the past, depicting fragments of the protagonist’s family life, burning in the fireplace. Due to the film-editing technique of blending, one photo begins to appear as the dominant image. It presents a woman, presumably the late wife of the old man. What is especially interesting, the scene with burning photos acts also as an elliptical interval applied to depict the flow of time and indicating the process of fading memories.

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Next, the images blend and the plot moves on in time. It is morning. Þorgeir reaches for the drawer and takes out a pistol. He wraps it up in a newspaper and leaves the house. The tilted frame presents us the view of the farmhouse; this time, however, it is shown during the day, in the sunshine. The protagonist slowly walks towards the camera lens. The subsequent sequence of shots depicts a tired dog and a man on the background of the sky. In a surprising counter scene, the man shoots the old animal that humbly accepts its fate.109 Depressed with his deed and with noticeable effort, the protagonist takes the dead dog on his hands to a previously prepared grave.110 His walk is depicted with the use of wide-angle lens, which makes an impression of composing the figure of the old man into a “panoramic frame”. Ari Kristinsson’s camerawork refers to the method of picturing the nature known from Icelandic paintings (and inspired movies), which is based on several characteristic elements: hills grown with green grass, background of a vast ocean and majestic cliffs growing out of the water. Other ingredients of this “farewell with the farm” ritual include the gestures of drinking water from an animal drinker, washing hair in a metal bowl and playing the last concerto on the organ. All of them have an explicitly purificative character. Moreover, these actions emphasize the relation between the protagonist and the nature, which is perceived in accordance with the romanticizing paradigm of spiritual purity, very popular in Icelandic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.111 The right to decide on the life and death of an animal, escorting it to the place of its eternal rest, all related purificative rituals and paying the last respects to the concluded life through art (including the act of playing an instrument often used in Christian liturgy) are model examples of a simple, yet suggestive application of religious toposes, that will be present in other scenes of Friðriksson’s movie as well. However, let us now return to the analysis of the initial scenes of the movie. Before leaving, the main character needs to pack the most necessary and valued things (such as the 109 The killing of the animal is a motif that appears both in classical Land and Sons and Friðriksson’s White Whales. 110 The funeral sequence with a very similar composition will also appear in more complicated form in the movie finale. 111 More info about the links between the idea of the pure landscapes and Icelandic nationalism can be found in: G. Karlsson, Icelandic Nationalism and the Inspiration of History, [in:] The Roots of Nationalism: Studies in Northern Europe, eds. R. Mitchison, John Donald, Edinburgh, 1980, pp. 77–89; K. Kjartansdóttir, Remote, Raugh and Romantic: Contemporary Images of Iceland in Visual, Oral and Textual Narrations, [in:] Images of the North: Histories – Identities – Ideas, ed. S. Jakobsson, Rodopi, Amsterdam, New York, 2009, pp. 271–280.

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portrait of his wife) and makes an irrational, but highly symbolic decision about taking a large, old clock with him. The subsequent shot again inscribes a small figure of the old man into the vastness of Icelandic landscape, this time depicting him waiting for the bus and confronting his fragile body with the greatness of the blue sky and ocean. In the following scene, related to the space of the farm, the character looks at his house for the last time and boards the bus to Reykjavík. During his journey, he will look at the beautifully presented landscapes of the contemporary Ultima Thule, suggestively poeticized by the sublime tones of music composed by Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson. A bridge that the bus with the old man needs to pass on its way to the city, constitutes a significant artifact used to highlight the moment of the departure to an alien space. Crossing this border between two various worlds, the protagonist leaves the order of the nature and his former life behind. Þorgeir begins a new chapter of his existence, which seems to be a great unknown to him at the time. Enigmatic past and fears of the old man are represented by the fading neon lights of the dark streets of the city, observed by the unexpectedly awaken protagonist through the window of the bus that carries him into the unknown. City of Reykjavík is presented in the movie as a dark and unpleasant place. Þorgeir visits the capital of the country for the first time since 1937, when he was hospitalized there. From the very beginning, the alien character of the urban space is contrasted with memorable landscapes presented in the previous part of the movie, which depicted spectacular images of the countryside. After leaving the bus, the camera shows an affable old man in a dirty public toilet spoiled with painted scribbles. His figure is presented from the back, in the form of a crooked reflection in a broken mirror hanged in the toilet. After the images of the city reflected in the bus window, we are again confronted with a presentation of heterotopian space, dissimilarity of which will be often contrasted with the order of the nature, saturated with references to the religious toposes. In accordance with Michel Foucault, heterotopias constitute “transitional places”, connecting the mythical space of utopias with the order of reality in a specific way.112 This order includes the places that exist only apparently, such as those that can be seen in a mirror reflection of reality, and places linked with other cultural spaces with a specific network of connections, such as

112 See: M. Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, transl. J. Miskowie, “Diacritics”,  16:1 (Spring 1986), pp.  22–27. https://monoskop.org/File:Foucault_ Michel_1984_1986_Of_Other_Spaces.pdf (access: 2 October 2018).

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graveyards, retirement homes, gardens and festival squares.113 All these spaces will be used in the syuzhet and variously contrasted with utopian perception of the natural order. Let us now return to the analysis of Þorgeir’s feelings. The protagonist slowly enters the urban space that is alien to him. Awaiting his family, the protagonist consumes an Icelandic version of a hot-dog – his first “city” meal. He keeps waiting for his family in a desolate waiting room at the bus station.114 When the evening comes, he decides to take a taxi to the home of his closest relatives. Again, he watches the anti-landscapes of the city. Observed through the taxi window, the streets of the capital city are again presented as covered in darkness, abandoned and unattractive spaces, where a person brought up in the countryside will surely get lost. It is significant that it is the taxi driver, silent for most of the time, will speak the first words in the movie. Exactly in the 11th minute, with his voice deprived of any emotions, he utters the words: “this is the place where you wanted to get off ”. Unfortunately, the suburbs seem to be as much repelling as the city center. Contrast between the figure of an ailing farmer and the space of the city is highlighted by a desolate entrance to a gray, concrete block of flats, lighted with cold, unpleasant neon light. The following scene enunciates the dehumanizing character of interpersonal relations. It shows the protagonist talking with his granddaughter via door phone. The girl does not recognize him. The electronic device creates the first of many communication barriers related to the life away from the nature. Its presentation does not herald anything good. Shown beyond the reach of the artificial light, Þorgeir (who did not have a radio or telephone at his house) is forced to explain himself talking to a suspiciously looking box. Then he needs to wait until the doors are open and he will be able to make his way through the doorstep, carrying his heavy suitcase and the wall clock, the figure pointing out Þorgeir’s connection to the cycles of nature and the shortage of old man’s life. Prolonged with the use of visual means, his way upstairs emphasizes the spatial and emotional distance between him and his closest relatives. Wide-angle lens is used again here, in order to highlight the alienation through elongation and negative change of the corridor perspective. 1 13 Ibidem. 114 The bus station is presented in this scene as transitive place with highly profane ­character. Marc Augé perceives such strictly utilitarian places, connected with the men transportation, as “non-spaces”. See: M. Augé, Non-spaces. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, transl. J. Howe, Verso, London, New York, 1995.

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Finally, when the old man finally reaches his destination, we can see that the relations with his surprised family will not be easy. Especially his granddaughter, whose room will be taken by the visitor from the countryside, will not be able to see eye to eye with her granddad. In order to accentuate the feeling of strangeness between the family members and growing tension related to the restriction of the living space, the filmmakers again refer to a visual metaphor. The subsequent scene presents a “family interrogation” of the senior. The “judgment” can be interpreted from the perspective of the proxemics. The family members discuss the reasons behind Þorgeir’s arrival, sitting together on a sofa. Countershots present the old man, who sits in an armchair, relatively distant from the others. Wide-angle lens intensifies the feeling of distance even more. The protagonist himself feels clearly uneasy. He adapts a defensive attitude during this confrontation, sitting with folded arms and often looking down, abundantly avoiding eye contact with his interlocutors. Interestingly enough, the clash of generations and worldviews is presented not only on the basis of the seizure of the living space, but also with the use of differences in time economy. Already during his first morning spent with his family, Friðriksson’s protagonist painfully experiences this distinct impression of time. His son-in-law leaves for his work without a word, his daughter will find time only to utter a short “goodbye dad”, while his granddaughter quickly grabs a piece of bread, leaves his granddad alone and viciously turns on loud rock music,115 to express her protest against the unexpected guest annexing her room. The motif of urban space desolation and faster pace of time is presented again in the following scene. Clearly bored Þorgeir leaves the apartment. An ascetic children playground with two swings seems to be the only friendly place that is suitable for the celebration of the first moments of his retirement. The protagonist sits on one of the swings. The act of carefree swinging is a metaphorical attempt at presenting the cultural similarities between the figures of a child and an old man, anticipating the further fate of the ailing farmer, who will soon become a resident of a retirement home. Þorgeir’s retirement home is another unattractive and hostile space presented in the movie that represents the secularization of the urban life. The stairs that lead to the building are in a dilapidated condition and do not herald anything good. The first encounter with the personnel, focused on the rules of the home, also brings negative connotations. When the manager praises the atmosphere 115 The noisy urban way of life is pointed out by the noises of the city (such as a sledgehammer and the city traffic) and the loud music of the young generation represented here by the Icelandic band The Sugarcubes and famous voice of its female singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir.

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and talks about “one great family”, his utterance is contrasted with an unpleasant facial expression of the nurse who brings tea for the guests. What is worse, also the scene of the first meeting with Þorgeir’s love from the old times does not make the best impression. Stella (Sigríður Hagalín) is escorted by two nurses like a dangerous prisoner. Her first words heard by the new boarder are: “You cannot make decisions for me”. The sad fact of taking the possibility of deciding on their fate away from the residents, make the protagonists similar to the children from the title, deprived of most of their rights and obligations. In his essay titled Baśń zimowa [Winter Tale], Polish essayist and translator Ryszard Przybylski notices the change of the old man’s ontic status, even on the linguistic level: “Ho geron is a Greek word for an old man. It is a masculine noun, very dignified, used to describe a member of a council or senate. Beyond all doubt, it describes a man that deserves the honors and authority. Respected. To gerontion in turn, is used to describe a  different kind of an old man. It is a neuter noun, as affectionate as indulgent. Due to frequent physical helplessness or even mental weakness, the old man is sometimes treated like a child, being called a gaffer”.116

It seems that Friðriksson’s movie leaves no place for any kind of sensitivity towards the older people. It is replaced with a “professional approach towards the patient”, not really convincing in concealing such feelings as reifying indulgence or even contempt. Time spent in the retirement home is a period of numbness. Þorgeir is able to break its spell only during his meetings with the love from his youth. Unfinished conversations during meals, group singing in the church, unexpectedly interrupted dancing parties and more often visits on the graveyard are merely the substitutes of a real family life.117 The unreal impression of time flowing unproductively in the retirement home is enhanced by the fact of an unexpected death of Þorgeir’s roommate, who had accepted the conditions of his stay in the institution. Reification of death is highlighted with a significant reaction of the nurse, who is not trying to rescue the man, but only notes the hour of death and informs Þorgeir that the stories about the good son of his late roommate were only the products of the imagination of a man afraid of his loneliness. The death of his friend who had accepted his fate, feeling of the waste of the precious time and willingness to make Stella’s dream about being buried in the land of her ancestors true eventually convince the protagonist to escape and

116 R. Przybylski, Baśń zimowa:  Esej o starości [Winter Tale. An Essay on Old Age], Wydawnictwo Sic!, Warszawa, 1998, p. 25. 117 Foucault perceives a retirement home also as a heterotopia. See: M. Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, op. cit., p. 25.

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start their final journey across Icelandic interior that I describe in the chapter analyzing road movies. In these scenes of the movie, once again, the utopian and heterotopian motifs will appear, this time connected with pantheist view on nature (see also Chapters 2 and 9 of this monograph). Sacred powers of the nature contrasted with the urban life also return in next Friðriksson’s movie. Movie Days (Bíódagar, 1994) is, above all, a homage paid to the magic of the cinema that presents the author’s nostalgic reflection on the magnetic force of American pop culture. This movie also shows the leftwing perspective and telluric themes. The story takes place in the first half of the 1960s. It is not only the time of Friðriksson’s childhood, but also the moment when Iceland was still “learning” how to be politically independent from Denmark. In this decade citizens of Reykjavík were slowly getting accustomed to the presence of the US Army in their country. However, the presence of the US forces is nowadays also perceived as a strategy of cultural colonialism that gave Icelanders access to various cultural goods, such as whiskey or TV and cinematic genres. The film tells a story of a daydreaming boy fascinated with cinema. Already the first scene highlights the central role of cinephilia in the plot. This motif is not only closely related to Friðriksson’s biography, but also refers to the change of the cultural paradigm. The following scenes of Movie Days present a utopian series of memories that raises various everyday events to the rank of small, profane epiphanies. Just like in the movie recollection of the cinema, where children watch one of the Westerns with Roy Rogers. Their level of excitement is so high that the teenagers start screaming various comments to the cowboy and sing a song together with the hero. It ironically proves the “multiple reading” of the film and its “cult” reception. Relation between childlike sensitivity and the figure of the cowboy is an important symbol related to the cultural colonization of Iceland by the USA. We must remember that Roy Rogers signed an agreement that guaranteed him remuneration for duplication of his image in various mass cultural products, such as action figures, posters, photos and comic books. This fact turns our attention to the impurity of marketing strategies adapted by big concerns, such as Walt Disney’s company, which since their very beginnings tried to turn children’s fantasies into profit. Obviously, it is not the only proof of Friðriksson’s ambiguous attitude towards America. Another ironic comment on the strategy of merging democratic ideas with marketing is hidden in the “small rebellion” of one of the students, who brings to the classroom a bottle of Pepsi instead of milk. When confronted by a teacher, who declares that sweet food is forbidden at the school lunch, the big-headed boy replies that “he is a free person and he is able to choose his food himself ”.

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Fig. 8:  Movie Days (1994), dir. Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

The motif of TV is also worth noticing. TV constitutes a medium that was brought to Iceland by the Americans.118 Children from Friðriksson’s movie do not only observe their neighbor’s existence through the window (cause he is the only person with the TV set in the neighborhood), but also, encouraged with voyeuristic shiver of technological novelty, they follow the erotic life of another neighbor, who flirts with an American soldier. The scopophilic character of these entertainments is contrasted with radio broadcasts. Until the TV was introduced, radio constituted the primary source of intellectual entertainment for Icelanders. It should come as no surprise then that the following scene depicts Tómas’ family listening to one of the popular radio theater broadcasts. In the postmodern flirt with Neil Postman’s theses,119 Friðriksson’s radio is perceived as a local medium – integrating the family and developing the imagination. On the other hand, TV does not only tell about foreign matters but is also considered boring by the 118 First TV auditions were broadcasted by the US Army for the soldiers deployed to Keflavik. These broadcasts acknowledged Icelanders with classic American movies and… Elvis Presley’s songs. cf. G.  Karlsson, The History of Iceland, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, 2000, pp. 339–341. 119 In his text, Postman compares the differences between the reception of TV broadcasts and written text. Cf. N. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Penguin Books, London, New York, 2016.

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older audience, who in one of the scenes doze off during a wearisome broadcast of The Last Days of Adolf Hitler. The younger generation, however, seems to be addicted to the novelties of the “great world”, such as Tómas’ brother’s beloved rock’n’roll or Danish comic books about the adventures of Donald Duck’s nephews. Another theme that needs to be discussed separately is the “ghastly eclectic” status of Tómas’ cinephilia. The boy seems to be equally fascinated by the biblical figure of Jesus, noble cowboys, Adolf Hitler and the murderous hand from the space, featured in B-class movie made by Herbert L. Strock. All these scenes prove that the staffage of homogenizing culture, that makes all texts equal, has a bitter-sweet taste. On the one hand, this phenomenon is related to the idyll of childhood memories and dreams, on the other, it constitutes a tool for colonization and corruption of Icelandic culture, destroying the tradition and making the younger generation lazy. Such an ambiguous approach towards pop cultural invasion will be revised in the second part of the movie. If the first part of Friðriksson’s film finds its way between subtle discussion with mass culture and equivocal apology and does not contain any serious criticism of urban life, the second part presents values that contrast with urban fascinations of Tómas and is located much closer to the perspective known, for example, from Land and Sons. This time the protagonist is sent to the countryside for holidays. Deprived of the access to cinema and television, he learns how to spend his free time more productively. Apart from the work on the farm and lessons of fishing, little Tómas listens to evening stories full of folklore legends with scary accents, appropriately endowed by the narrator. In the universe of Friðriksson’s memories, the countryside world is a space of tradition and life in harmony with the nature, full of oral narratives that are much closer to the “spiritual perception of the world”.120 While the boy perceives the city as an area of unreal, pop cultural games, the countryside is not only a place of utilitarian work but also an oasis of marvel. Here we may meet a scary demon, herald of death, that is adjourned by the elder. The countryside order will also become helpful in facing two initiational events:  embarrassing discovery of protagonist’s own sexuality and even more difficult need to manage his father’s premature death. Countryside is also a place resistant to foreign influences. Mormons from remote Utah are treated here as a harmless curiosity,

120 J. Gogacz-Sowińska, Film islandzki dzisiaj. Sylwetka Friðrika Þóra Friðrikssona [Contemporary Icelandic Cinema. Profile of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson], [in:] “Kwartalnik Filmowy” [Film Quarterly], 2002, no. 39–40, p. 215.

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while foreign products such as whiskey and cigarettes are perceived as attractive, yet disposable diversification of countryside existence. Juxtaposition of countryside nature and lay city (where Tómas returns in the end) is another trope of meditation on the changes in political identity of the country where two superpowers fight for the souls of its inhabitants. It is telling, that both military and cultural invasion of America and attempts of Soviet infiltration are presented as concealed actions. Even though the movie shows the romantic affair between one of the neighbors and an American soldier, a fight of communist Úlfar with a fan of scouting, nicknamed “Mr. Dollar”, or a story about three Soviet spies, the real effects of Cold War influence may be seen on the cinema screens, where scenes of Eisenstein’s movies compete with capitalistic flood of Hollywood films. It is a battle that was eventually concluded in the 21st century, in the period when Icelandic cinema began to draw the biggest inspiration from external sources and transnational storytelling structures. The next movie directed by Friðriksson is much more homogenous in its political message and deprived of utopian perspective. Produced in 1996, Devil’s Island (Djöflaeyjan) seems to be much closer to the left-wing perspective, characteristic to some films of the Icelandic Film Spring. Friðriksson’s work tries to faithfully present the historical reality of the 1950s and 1960s Iceland, struggling against poverty and alcoholism. This costly approach made the production last for over four years and granted Friðriksson’s movie the title of the most expensive Icelandic film of all times. The film is based on a popular book written by Einar Kárason. It is a story of a family that lives in a settlement for the poor, created in the place of the former military base, in brass barracks left behind by the US Army, deployed to Iceland during the Second World War. The place is a metaphorical representation of the suspended identity of the country. The first frame of the film, consisting of an ironical chart, informs us about an uneasy relation between Icelanders and their guests: “Icelandic Vikings discovered America, but, like Oscar Wilde said, they had enough sophisticated taste to leave it be. A thousand years later, during the Second World War, the Americans occupied Iceland. And had no intention of leaving”.

It is significant that the beginning of the movie discredits the migration of Icelanders to the city areas. The first take seems to present a sea shore. Unfortunately, it quickly turns out that the frame does not show us an endless ocean, but a pond of rainwater full of empty bottles. After a while, a quick motion of the camera introduces us to the place of the action: muddy, gloomy barracks that are approached by a newlywed couple, driven there in a car. They are followed by a tractor that carries the rest of the bride’s family. “Something is

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Fig. 9:  Devil’s Island (1996), dir. Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

wrong, I can feel it in the air”, we hear the first words of a grandmother, endowed with the sixth sense. Soon it will turn out that this was a prophecy. In the course of time, the dingy settlement full of alcoholic men wasting their time becomes a metaphor of hell, juxtaposed against America, adored by the protagonist. Baltasar Kormákur plays here the role of Baddi, a young man who is in love with the USA. When he returns to his homeland, he becomes an introverted outsider, suspended between the lazy vegetation in the slums and nostalgia for his former life in the States. Lost protagonist cannot find a place for himself in the Icelandic society, so he drowns in its pathologies. The fatalism of his fate, presented as the inability to leave the slums representing the post-war Iceland, was suggestively used in the story of life and death of Baddi’s younger brother, who apparently managed to make his dream of escaping the prison of the “devil’s island” true. Insouciant as a child, Danni becomes a pilot, therefore each day he can leave the muddy barracks and observe his homeland from the “divine perspective”. Unfortunately,

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his happiness will not last long. One day, like Icarus fleeing the ancient islandprison, Danni dies. At the end of the movie, there is a scene that presents broken Baddi lying down on his brother’s grave and cursing the country and his own life. Wounds reopening, Devil’s Island obtained the status of a cult classic in Iceland. A  good screenplay and great camera takes made it a movie that was seen by 80,000 people. Therefore, Friðriksson’s movie repeated the success of movies made in the 1980s proving that the local perspective still could effectively win the love of the Icelandic audience.

Conclusions: On the Crossroads of the Liquid Modernity Devil’s Island can be also perceived as a production that symbolically concludes the period of modernist approach to the elements of national identity, characteristic for the Icelandic Film Spring. The film is a virtuosic display of acting, with splendid role of Baltasar Kormákur, an actor and director, who five years later will make one of the most famous Icelandic movies – adaptation of Hallgrímur Helgason’s novel titled 101 Reykjavík, an exaggerated apology of urban life and a “manifest of the worldview” of the new generation of Icelanders. The movie presents the rich citizens that belong to the consumption-oriented society and feel cultural bond not only with their homeland but also with their peers living in Europe and America. The works of the representatives of the new generation of filmmakers, inspired by the subcultures and American cinema, are democratically critical of the countryside and urban lifestyle alike. It is telling that the pessimistic perspective of the Icelandic images of modernity, presented in movies created after the year 2000, would scare the pioneers of Icelandic cinema and the coryphaeuses of the Icelandic Film Spring. Critical deconstruction of national identity is a significant proof of sociological change that took place in the homeland of Halldór Laxness. It is also a recognizable cultural sign of attachment of contemporary Icelandic cinema to the postmodern current of questioning all discourses and narrations.

2 In the Land of the Great Narrations: Chronotopias, Uchronias and Nostalgic Past Introduction  Icelandic cinema often compares folk imagination, saturated with fantastic ­perspective, with secularization of the society to speak about sociological changes faced by the inhabitants of this volcanic island. Popularity of this motif may be related to the cultural heritage of Iceland, a country promoted as a place that allows the foreign tourist to touch the treasures of Nordic traditions and admire the majestic landscapes, which for many centuries have remained unchanged.121 Strategy based on highlighting the timelessness of the “island’s spirit” by the use of quotations from canonical works of culture, such as Edda or Íslendingabók (The Book of Icelanders) used to consolidate the national identity of a nation held under Norwegian and Danish jurisdiction. Björn Norðfjörð notices that: “Extensive in scope of both time and space, the sagas are a prose fiction focusing on character interactions. Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg have argued that no other medieval literature went as far in combining romance and history, which they consider to lead ‘the way from epic to the novel’. … Icelandic folk tales also began to be celebrated and collected in the nineteenth century. And although not registering the nation formally in the manner of novel and arguably saga, they are literally referred to as þjóðsögur [nation-tales], as no distinction is made between nation and folk in Icelandic”.122

Unfortunately, mainly due to humble financial means devoted to production, Icelandic cinema since its very beginnings has not been able to make movies based on local sagas and oral tales in a satisfactory manner. Paradoxically, the interest of the Western world with the past and pillars of Icelandic identity was first effectively fuelled by romantic reports of travelers that visited

121 Landscapes endowed with temporal meanings by the cultures deprived of great architectural monuments are discussed by Yi-Fu Tuan in his book Space and Place, where, among other, he analyzes Aboriginal and Maori narrations. Cf. Y-F. Tuan, Przestrzeń i miejsce [Space and Place], transl. A. Morawińska, PIW, Warszawa, 1987, pp. 169, 196. 122 B. Norðfjörð, Adapting a Literary Nation to Film: National Identity, Neoromanticism and the Anxiety of Influence, [in:] “Scandinavian-Canadian Studies”, 2010, no. 19, p. 15.

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Iceland,123 which were later used by Anglo-Saxon writers, who dreamed of the “wild north”.124 Nowadays, plot structures of old Nordic texts are interpreted by American entertainment industry in various ways. Some examples of modern productions that include traces of Icelandic culture, which may be found by more perspicacious viewers, include adaptations of Tolkien’s prose (inspired by Edda), blockbusters about the adventures of comic Thor or the popular series Vikings, produced by History Channel. Obviously, such “unbridled stories and scenographies” can be found in the cinema of “postmodern Ultima Thule” as well. It does not mean, however, that Icelanders did not try to make films of national or transnational status, films that would constitute the return to their roots and that could be proudly presented to foreign audiences. Couple of movies about the Vikings were produced in Iceland  – including the beloved trilogy of Hrafn Gunnlaugsson, composed of When the Raven Flies (Hrafninn flýgur, 1984), Shadow of the Raven (Í skugga hrafnsins, 1988) and White Viking (Hvíti víkingurinn, 1991). Unfortunately, apart from a group of faithful lovers of Gunnlaugsson’s works, these productions (along with Ágúst Guðmundsson’s Útlaginn [1981], a movie based on the saga of Gísli) are suitable only for the most zealous fans of the genre so people who know the high-budget productions about the Vikings, such as Richard Fleisher’s classic from 1958, may be disappointed. Luckily, there is a film that can probably satisfy the admirers of Viking stories and sagas mixed with the fantasy genre. Beowulf & Grendel (Bjólfskviða, 2005) is an international co-production, directed by the Canadian Sturla Gunnarsson (but with the Icelandic roots), with both the Anglo-Saxon cast (Gerard Butler and Sarah Polley) and some Nordic actors (Stellan Skarsgård, Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) using mainly spoken English. Unfortunately, the movie became a box-office failure and such a situation may be partly blamed on a series of weather disasters and on-set accidents during the shooting process

123 Cf., for example, R.  Chymkowski, Polskie podróże na Islandię  – od Edmunda Chojeckiego do Ferdynanda Goetla [Polish Journeys to Iceland – from Edmund Chojecki to Ferdynand Goetl], [in:] Islandia. Wprowadzenie do wiedzy o społeczeństwie i kulturze [Iceland. Introduction to Social and Cultural Studies], eds. R. Chymkowski, W. K. Pessel, Wydawnictwo Trio, Collegium Civitas, Warszawa, 2009, pp. 124–125. 124 J. R.  R. Tolkien’s and other Inklings’ (C. S.  Lewis included) fascination with Scandinavian sagas was based on the works of E.  V. Gordon, who was one of the first Anglo-Saxon scholars to translate and propagate Icelandic texts of culture. Cf. T. Shippey, Tolkien and the Appeal of the Pagan: Edda and Kalevala, [in:] Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader, ed. J. Chance, University Press of Kentucky, Kentucky, 2004, p. 150.

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in the Icelandic locations. All these happenings may be watched in the documentary, suggestively called Wrath of Gods (2006), containing audiovisual materials recorded during the shots to Beowulf & Grendel and directed by Jón Einarsson Gústafsson. Also, another international co-production, CGI-animated story called Legends of Valhalla: Thor (Hetjur Valhallar – Þór, 2011), despite the presence on the cinematic screens of many countries, did not win the hearts of international audiences.

Nostalgic Returns to the Past Taking all these examples into consideration, no wonder that Icelandic directors rather decided to choose a different strategy than the expensive reconstruction of historical reality or presentation of the vast world of Nordic mythology and legends. A few interesting examples from the Icelandic cinema history use the motif of the coexistence of two spacetime orders – the sphere of founding myths, cultivated in national memory, and the competing order of modernity, presented in various ways. Such a heterotopic (or even uchronic) inspirations appeared for the first time in The Last Farm in the Valley (Siðasti bærinn í dalnum) made in 1950 by Óskar Gíslason. Its script is full of traces of Scandinavian myths and folk stories about fantastic creatures. Gíslason’s work is also considered to be the first Icelandic movie for children made in color. As Peter Cowie rightfully notices, this production, shot on 16mm tape, is more similar to the poetics of the 1920s American movies than to the cinematic works of the 1950s.125 Technical layer of the movie, far from international standards, proves the difficult financial conditions faced by Icelandic directors in the first half of the 20th century. Sloppy editing, numerous mistakes of the cameramen, bad synchronization of sound126 and primitive characterization (the sinister trolls look like long-nosed clowns wearing furs) did not repel Icelanders from contemplating the incredible story with their whole families. The plot is focused on the story of the siblings living in a desolate area, who are saved from the ruthless trolls by the queen of elves. Inspiration with elves and trolls can be traced back to Snorri’s Edda.127 In the late postmodernism, such characters became (apart from the Vikings) the most popular element of folk imagination, eagerly exploited by the Scandinavian souvenir industry. On the 1 25 P. Cowie, Icelandic Films 1980–2000, Kvikmyndasjóður Íslands, Reykjavík, 2000, p. 7. 126 Ibidem. 127 L. P. Słupecki, Mitologia skandynawska w epoce Wikingów [Scandinavian Mythology of the Vikings’ Era], Nomos, Kraków, 2003, p. 308.

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other hand, strong belief of Icelanders in the “hidden folk” (huldufólk),128 especially elves, became famous in the whole world due to the travel agencies, tourist brochures and “popular science” (unfortunately often pseudo-anthropological) reports from Iceland. Commercial value of the stereotypes related to the belief in “the unwashed children of Eve”129 is analyzed in the last part of the present article. For the sake of Gíslason’s movie analysis, we need to say that in accordance with medieval cultural texts created in Iceland, these creatures inhabit the land beyond time, called Alfheim (Ālfheimr).130 Alfheim becomes the destination of the little protagonist of The Last Farm in the Valley. It is significant that the events presented in the plot intriguingly merge the mythical time131 with quasi-historical reality. First of all, the ascetic countryside

128 In sources on anthropology of Icelandic culture, the name is usually used as a synonym of “elves”. The same approach is adapted in the present paper. The nuances related to the names of creatures depicted in sagas and folk tales are elaborated on by Olga Hołownia and many others. Cf. O. Hołownia, Alfar i huldufólk. O islandzkich elfach w mitologii, sagach i podaniach ludowych [Alfar and huldufólk. On Icelandic Elves in Mythology, Sagas and Folk Tales], [in:] Islandia Wprowadzenie do wiedzy o społeczeństwie i kulturze [Iceland. Introduction to social and cultural studies], eds. R. Chymkowski, W. K. Pessel, Wydawnictwo Trio, Warszawa, 2009, pp. 61–62. 129 The term “unwashed children of Eve” is related to one version of Icelandic tale, in which Adam and Eve managed to hide couple of their unwashed children from God. Unnoticed by the Creator, they gave birth to the hidden folk. Cf. O. Hołownia, Alfar i huldufólk. O islandzkich elfach w mitologii, sagach i podaniach ludowych [Alfar and huldufólk. On Icelandic Elves in Mythology, Sagas and Folk Tales], [in:] Islandia Wprowadzenie do wiedzy o społeczeństwie i kulturze, op. cit. [Iceland. Introduction to social and cultural studies], pp. 76–77, K. Sontag, Parallel Worlds: Fieldwork with Elves, Icelanders and Academics, University of Iceland, Reykjavík, 2007, pp. 13–14. 130 We will use the English spelling of the word, since it is fairly popular in the literature. Alfheim can be found in Scandinavian myths such as “Grímnismál” poem. The land is not only considered to be “the land of the elves”, but also to be the residence of Frey, the god of fertility. Cf., for example, Słupecki, op. cit., p. 308; W. Górczyk, Elfy – Istoty fantastyczne w mitologii nordyckiej [Elves – Fantastic Creatures of Nordic Mythology], [in:] “Kultura i Historia” [Culture and History], 2009, no. 16, pp. 13–14. 131 I use this notion in accordance with its definition provided by Mircea Eliade. In Icelandic cultural texts of the 20th and 21st century, the nostalgic “time beyond time” is closely related to mythical space depicted in Scandinavian tales, similar to many other cosmogenic and anthropogenic narrations from the past. In such a space time becomes circular and can be reversed and reclaimed, even though it possesses some features of “the eternal present”. Cf., for example, M. Eliade, Czas święty i mity, [Sacred time and myths], [in:] Idem, Sacrum, mit, historia. Wybór esejów [Idem,

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Fig. 1:  The Last Farm in the Valley (1950), dir. Óskar Gíslason. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

life and simple “timeless” clothes of the protagonists depicted in the movie may be as easily associated with medieval times as with the 17th, 18th and 19th century Iceland, or even with harsh living conditions in the first half of the 20th century. Secondly, the movie does not show any technical contraptions or any pieces of historical information that may help us to locate the presented events in time. These measures are justified at the very beginning of the movie by the “orality” of the message. The first scene depicts an old woman – narrator of the plot – who begins to tell her granddaughter a story: “Far away, at the end of the valley, there was a terrifying place, surrounded by clouds and large, high wall of cliffs - the Trolls’ Rock. It was a home to a sinister couple, Kolur and Kella. The trolls wanted to scare off all inhabitants of the nearby valley. And the

Sacrum, Myth, History. Selection of Essays], translated into Polish by A. Tatarkiewicz, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa, 1974, pp. 86–113.

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In the Land of the Great Narrations valley was beautiful and fertile, albeit almost empty because of the horrifying trolls. All farmers were gone. All, except of one … Björn’s household was well-kept. He lived there with his old Gerdur, who was content with their fertile land. She was not afraid of the trolls, because she had a magical item, passed on for many generations, that protected its owner against any evil. It was the Ring of the Elves”.132

As we may see, the screenwriters present the whole narration in a bracket made of the tale being told. Soon, in accordance with the rules, we learn that this simple “non-historical” spacetime exists in parallel with the mythical spacetime, inhabited by supernatural creatures (elves, trolls and dwarfs) that represent the fantastic and terrifying powers related to pantheistic beliefs. Trolls presented in the tale of old woman symbolize the fear of the nature.133 They are fantastic creatures depicted in Icelandic tales, living in an invisible cave beyond time and space, and they love to harass people. “The machine of the plot” starts when the foul monsters come out of their mountain hideout in order to rob the dwellers of the eponymous farm134 and to take over the whole area. To do so, they plan to initially gain the trust of the people, by helping them in their back-breaking labor. The male troll turns into a man and is employed by the farmer to repair his stone wall. Later on, he starts the magical production of horseshoes, while his wife, disguised as a woman, goes down to the valley to help with the haymaking. What is important, the cunning creatures can not only change their appearance, but they are also able to control the flow of time. Therefore, they work in an extremely efficient and quick manner. Their deceit is noticed only by small Bergi and his sister Sólrún. Children constitute yet another element of Icelandic cinematic narrations that has been strongly influenced by romanticism. Small protagonists can “see more”, due to their imagination and sensibility, they are able to live in

132 I would like to thank Ingólfur Guðmundsson for his help in translation of the dialogues. 133 The word tröll is generally considered to express unpleasant emotions. It is derived from the verb trylla, which means “to enrage”, or “to madden”. Quotation after: A. Pietrzkiewicz, Główne motywy w islandzkich opowieściach ludowych [Main motifs of Icelandic folk tales], [in:] Islandia Wprowadzenie do wiedzy o społeczeństwie i kulturze, [Iceland. Introduction to Social and Cultural studies], op. cit., p. 102. 134 We may also find some traces of xenophobia in the movie. All in all, it is a popular element of numerous Icelandic tales that use the motif of farms visited by mysterious guests. Cf. T. Gunnell, The Coming of the Christmas Visitors… Folk legends concerning the attacks on Icelandic farmhouses made by spirits at Christmas, [in:] “Northern Studies”, 2004, no. 38, p. 54.

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“the double spacetime”.135 And only they will be able to prevent the disaster. In order to do so, small Bergi needs to reach the world of immortal creatures living beyond time. He will be assisted on his way by an affable dwarf, who will turn out to be an emissary of the queen of the elves.136 It is significant that in the moment when the protagonist reaches Alfheim, hidden inside a magical mountain,137 the authors of the movie, willing to highlight the supernatural character of the hidden folk’s land, decide to suspend the classic cinematic narration to introduce the elements of ballet and classical music. The scene was developed by Jórunn Vidar, a talented composer who used to exploit folk and avant-garde elements in her works. The most poetic of all scenes used in the movie – elven ballet138 – has so powerful impact mainly due to the beautifully arranged soundtrack and incredible choreography. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the protagonist of the story, charmed by the spectacle, seems to be pulled out from the stream of time. His return to reality will prove that only a moment has passed everywhere beyond the land of the elves. Eventually, thanks to the help of the hidden folk’s representatives, the children manage to claim another magical artefact, drive the iniquitous trolls away from the valley and save their family. Here, we should take a closer look on the character of the elven queen, who addresses the following words to the main protagonist at the very end of the movie: “Welcome, young Bergur. Don’t be afraid. You should already know that we have been living side by side with your ancestors for a very long time. We pay much attention to the things that happen in the land of men and we know you and your family very well.

135 Interestingly enough, Icelandic literature puts much emphasis on the lifelike presentation of childhood. Fantastic elements first began to appear in the novels in the 1990s. Cf., for example, S. Aðalsteinsdóttir, Icelandic Children’s Literature, 1780–2000, [in:] A History of Icelandic Literature, ed. D. L. Neijmann, Lincoln, 2006, pp. 448, 602. 136 We may find a figure of the elven queen called Una, Ùlfhildur, Hildur or Snotra in the tales and legends collected and written down by Jón Árnason in the 19th century. Cf. T. Gunnell, The Coming of the Christmas Visitors…, op. cit., p. 54, 60; T. Gunnell, Introduction, [in:] J. M. Bedell, Hildur, Queen of the Elves, Northampton, MA, 2007, p. 11. The legend of Hildur is available on the Internet: http://www.snerpa.is/net/thjod/ hildur.htm (access: 7 September 2018). 137 Mythical spacetime depicted in Icelandic movies is often related to the axis mundi topos. Therefore, it is often located inside or beneath the mountains or volcanoes. 138 Gíslason’s work is the first Icelandic sound movie in color with dedicated music and choreography. The dance of the elves itself is another important lead related to Icelandic folk tales. Cf. T. Gunnell, The Coming of the Christmas Visitors…, op. cit., pp. 54, 60.

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In the Land of the Great Narrations I appreciate your loyalty towards the elves. Be sure, if you ever find yourself in danger, I will look after you”.

This utterance will become much clearer when we take into consideration the  fact that the appearance of the ruler of the land beyond time and space is based on the 19th-century images of the Mountain Woman (fjallkonan), an allegorical personification of Iceland. In her article The Mountain Woman and the  Presidency, Inga Dóra Björnsdóttir139 interestingly presents how some nationalist ideas of Johan Gottfried Herder were used to create an allegorical figure of the nation’s mother, so popular in Icelandic paintings and poetry. The author analyzes several phases of the process that merged the nature’s symbolism with femininity. Emphasis put on the matriarchal implications is used to demonstrate the features that distinguish the Icelandic culture from the culture of its Danish rulers, presented in romantic poetry as a male figure associated with the Danish king. Motherly attributes, together with courageous (considering the times) accents put on female aspects, were used by the 19th-century poet Eggert Ólafsson in his poem titled “Iceland” (1832). In the poem, the Mother Earth’s sons represent various generations of Icelanders, who gradually start to treat their mother in less and less decent manner. Moreover, Björnsdóttir analyzes the subsequent changes in perception of the female role model and its romantization, giving another example from the history of literature and art. In 1864, Erikurr Magnusson, a Cambridge professor of Nordic studies, uses one of his visions to create the Mountain Woman, a motif that gained much popularity in art and poetry as an element of nationalist discourse. A manuscript held by the woman on Magnusson’s sketch is supposed to highlight the intellectual individualism of the country that managed to maintain its linguistic tradition and original mythology throughout the years spent under foreign jurisdiction. Björnsdóttir proves that both personified variants of this eclectic melange of the nature’s forces and nation were often used by the 20th-century politicians. A hundred years later, they are used by emancipation supporters as well.140

139 I. D.  Björnsdóttir, The Mountain Woman and the Presidency, [in:] Images of  Contemporary Iceland:  Everyday Lives and Global Contexts, eds. G.  Pálsson, E. P. Durrenberger, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1996, pp. 106–111. 140 However, when in the beginning of the 1970s the matriarchal connotations of this figure were attacked by a feminist faction Raudsokkur (Icelandic equivalent of American Red Stockings), most of Icelandic women did not support their postulates. Therefore, for their subsequent campaign, the feminist activists decided to celebrate the “feminine distinctness”. They eventually managed to succeed and gained

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Referring to the nationalist key of interpretation of Óskar Gíslason’s painting, we may risk a statement that the courageous children, brought up only by their grandmother and their father, managed to expose a dangerous foreigner and were miraculously saved by the protective, invisible force of the personified motherland. Analyzing the ideological clues, it is impossible not to mention the fact, that The Last Farm in the Valley, shown in Icelandic cinemas in 1950 had its first screening eight years after American army appeared on the island, six years after Iceland became an independent country and one year after it was incorporated into NATO structures. However, the events that consolidated the national identity of Icelanders were accompanied by facts that painfully harmed their pride. Aversion towards political relations with foreign forces was clearly visible in two other important moments in the history of Iceland – the acceptance of financial aid defined in Marshall Plan and Keflavik Agreement that specified the conditions for the US Army to leave the island and was ignored for over half a century, causing much indignation of Icelanders. It should come as no surprise then that in such a restless time, most of the movies produced in the 1950s did make some references to the past and nostalgically presented the nationalist triad “landscapenation-language”, that was first awoken by Icelandic romanticists.141 Perhaps The Last Farm in the Valley managed to succeed commercially due to these ideological marks. In any case, the movie is still remembered by the adults and often showed to the children.142 It is significant that celluloid adventures in the world beyond time and space are considered to be so important that the frame depicting the children flying in a chest became an official logotype of National Film Archive of Iceland and is still used on official documents and letters.                  *** Unfortunately, soon after The Last Farm in the Valley was produced, the Icelandic cinema collapsed for almost 30  “unproductive years”. During that time, the authorities could not find any means to support the production of films,143 so

some political significance. More information about this subject can be found in: I. D. Björnsdóttir, op. cit. 141 Cf. B. Norðfjörð, Iceland in Living Pictures: A Meeting-Place of Cinema and Nation, [in:] „Studia Humanistyczne AGH“ [“AGH Humanistic Studies”], 2011, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 175–178. 142 What is interesting, we may easily find similar visual representations of trolls not only in most of Scandinavian souvenir shops, but also in Norwegian movie Trollhunter (Trolljegeren), made by André Øvredal in 2010. 143 B. Norðfjörð, Iceland in Living Pictures…, op. cit., p. 180.

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the entire cinematic production was adjusted to the needs of television. After the establishment of firm foundations for professional production and distribution system, in 1982, two years after the first works of Icelandic Spring of Filmmaking were screened in the cinemas, there came a movie that again referred to the motif of correlation between mythical and real spacetime: Sóley. The movie, made by Icelandic artist and feminist director Róska Óskarsdóttir and Italian screenwriter Manrico Povolettino, tells a story that seems to be quite similar to the one told in The Last Farm in the Valley. Again, we are confronted with the representatives of the hidden folk who look after simple people. This time, however, the authors departed from a simplified narration for children. The audience does not only follow the adventures of the protagonist but also witnesses the “spiritual struggle” between Christianity and paganism. Set in the 18th-century Iceland, the plot is focused on a humble shepherd, Þór (Rúnar Guðbrandsson) and his journey into the interior. During his travel, Þór is robbed and loses his beloved ponies. People he meets accuse the elves, but the hero consequently looks for the culprits among common people. Traveling into the unknown, the protagonist saves a mysterious girl dressed in red. It is the eponymous Sóley (Tina Hagedorn Olsen) – enigmatic being, referring to the symbolic figure of the Mountain Woman and memorable elven queen of Gíslason. Despite the fact that they come from completely different worlds, the protagonists fall for each other and make love in mythical spacetime. What is important, the hidden folk’s land is again located underground. This time, however, its mythical character is related to geothermal energy that seems to keep the underground universe beyond the reach of the seasons. Considering the times, the erotic scene is brave. Sóley has sex with her human lover in a warm, underground lake. Of course, time flows differently in the kingdom of the elves. It is natural then that in the following scenes we learn that Sóley is pregnant and will soon give birth to Þór’s child. Unfortunately, the elven queen will not be able to stay with her beloved one in the real world. Her presence in the universe of flowing time is strictly related with particular seasons. Nevertheless, the matriarchal goddess, clearly connected with the rhythm of the nature, does not break her promise. Brave Sóley, together with a group of elves, finds the lost ponies of her lover and exposes the misdemeanors of a preacher, who used to rob his followers and blame huldufólk for his own evil deeds. Left-wing perspective, so popular in Icelandic cinema of the 1980s, is especially visible in the conclusion. At the end of the movie, we may witness a suggestive scene of fight taking place in the church of the “converted” pagan countrymen with their false shepherd. Eventually, the folk wins and takes the power. A modern viewer may perceive some elements of the movie as comical, especially the overly theatrical sequences depicting the “elven squad” appearing in

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Fig. 2:  Sóley (1982), dir. Róska Óskarsdóttir and Manrico Povolettino. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

the world of mortals. Carrying torches and clothed in “butterfly cloaks”, elven characters with their “choreographic parades” incongruously imitate the unique poetics of the ballet presented in The Last Farm in the Valley. Scenes of Christian prayer in the church, shown at the end of the movie, are not much better. Presented through a primitive parallel editing and evidently contrasted with the vision of careless feast of the immortal beings, surprisingly depicted as a hippie carnival taking place in the world beyond time and space. Softened by the use of a bright lens and warm lighting, the camera shows us long-haired men playing cheerful folk songs on guitars and accompanied by singing women wearing airy clothes. The scene depicting the life of a happy “elven commune” becomes even more telling when compared to the beginning of the movie, showing poor Icelandic shepherds living their lives in gloomy and damp dugouts. Alfheim is presented as a spacetime full of utopian joy, satiety, carelessness and harmony. However, the historical image of Icelandic community from the 18th century, depicted in the syuzhet, is its clear contradiction. The Vikings’ descendants try to make their existence more pleasant by playing sad songs on primitive instruments and by

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eating humble meals – they are far away from the careless life of the immortals. The theme of feasts and singing itself constitutes an important element of the narration. Folk songs lyrics complement the story that lacks many dialogues. Moreover, merging the cinematic and lyrical-musical narration is a strategy that highlights the importance of collective reconstruction of the past. Let us now return to the interpretation of the eponymous character’s status. The use of matriarchal figure, strongly related with the forces of the nature and art, allows to present the miraculous status of Icelanders as a nation that has based its identity on mythologized and historical past and that is not afraid to walk straight into modernity. Analyzing allegorical relations between Icelandic landscapes and old stories and unchanged language, David Martin-Jones notices that in the movies classified as Gaelic Renaissance model, the strategy of reinterpretation of the past tales and putting into the context of unique character of Scottish landscape144 was used to cinematically reconstruct the Gaelic culture. According to the author, the elements of the landscape become visual equivalents of national memory monuments – with their timeless existence that connects their identity with the past, with the present and with the future.145 Similar methods can also be found in Icelandic cinema that often refers to old narrations, full of folk concepts, and that frequently highlights the connection between “the country’s spirit” with the purity of the language and landscape in order to redefine national identity of Icelanders in important moments of their history. Concluding the analysis of Óskarsdóttir’s and Povolettino’s work, we need to note that also the “time outside the cinema” became an important factor related to the contemporary reception of the movie. Quality of the version available at the National Film Archive of Iceland is abysmal. It was copied directly from VHS  – it is a “copy of a copy”  – ironically comparing the status of Icelandic film to Baudrillard’s simulacrum.146 Moreover, just like in the case of The Last Farm in the Valley, while watching Sóley, the modern viewer from abroad can experience “the temporal shift”. Outrageous technical condition of “the digital copy”, together with over-theatrical performance of actors, primitive editing and

144 D. Martin-Jones, Islands at the Edge of History. Landscape and the Past in Recent Scottish-Gaelic Films, [in:] Cinema at the Periphery, eds. D. Iordanova, D. MartinJones, B. Vida, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan, 2010, p. 157. 145 Ibidem, pp. 162–165. 146 See: J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, transl. S. F. Glaser, The University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1994.

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unattractive screenplay invokes a feeling of watching a movie produced at the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, and not a mature European work of cinematic art produced in the 1980s. Paradoxically, however, after over 30 years since the day of its first screening, Sóley appears to be a peculiar experience, due to its weirdness, “temporal incoherence” and curious transformation of concepts present in sagas and folk tales.

In the Kingdom of Distance and Irony Under the Glacier (Kristnihald undir Jökli), written by Halldór Kiljan Laxness, is a text of culture that in the most intriguing way deconstructs the strategies of making references to the old narrations and makes fun of ideological foundation of the “time beyond time” motif. The novel was adapted for the cinema in 1989 by the author’s daughter, Guðný Halldórsdóttir. Under the Glacier tells about the mission of the National Church of Iceland emissary, who arrives at the parish located under Snæfellsjökull glacier to prepare a report on some alarming practices that supposedly take place there. In the course of the “church investigation”, the protagonist witnesses events that negate the empirical rules of experiencing time and space. Due to its original form, Laxness’ novel may be compared to other important novels of the 1960s, written by authors such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel García Márquez. Again, the plot of Guðný Halldórsdóttir’s adaptation, taking place mostly in the countryside, blurs the historical context. Attributes that accent the time of the events, such as cars or electronic equipment, may belong to the time when the novel was written (1960s) or to the end of the 1980s, when the movie was produced. Some elements were added to the script as well. For instance, the introducing episode, which depicts the representatives of “the main religions of the world”147 arriving at the meeting with the head of the National Church of Iceland in order to discuss the crisis that constitutes a serious threat to their churches. The bishop cunningly manages to set the discussion on postmodern problems aside148 and focuses the attention of his guests on the themes he

1 47 The scene does not show Buddhists, Hindus or Muslims though. 148 What is interesting, crisis in the church depicted in the movie is clearly related to the changing zeitgeist and is perceived by the delegates in completely various ways. The representative of Vatican claims that the expansion of Marxist ideology is the most important problem of the church, emissary of Russian Orthodox Church is worried by anti-Marxist currents in theology, while the delegate of the Anglican Church thinks that the meeting should be focused on homosexuality among preachers. The last of

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Fig. 3:  Under the Glacier (1989), dir. Guðný Halldórsdóttir. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

thinks they should be afraid of the most, that is, heresies, paganism and New Religiousness. Traces related to these problems can be found in an especially disturbing report, developed by a young emissary sent to the countryside.149 The plot of the movie is based on retrospection of the “Lutheran detective’s” stay at the mysterious ministry. the guests, supposedly a Lutheran pastor, wants to discuss the issue of “treating God like a TV product”. 149 Due to the presentation of people from various countries and various Christian factions, the importance of events that happened under Snæfellsjökull is elevated from local or national space to the status of transnational problem. We need to notice the fact that even though the adaptation of a dialogue between the protagonist and the bishop is quite exact and similar to the dialogue presented in the novel, the director decided to change one significant element. In Laxness’ novel, Embi was presented as a representative of the “new times”. The bishop did not know what the name of tape recorder was, he did not know television and was afraid to utter the word empiria. In the cinematic version however, it is the bishop who gives his emissary all equipment needed to record and does not give any ridiculous comments, so characteristic in Laxness’ narration. Such changes in critical potential of the original work appear in Halldórsdóttir’s adaptation many times, touching the issues of religion, Icelandic mentality and political contexts.

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Let us now continue to the analysis of the presentation of the supernal nature of time and space in the ministry. Authors of the movie adapt the chronology of the novel’s chapters to the particular scenes of their work. Here we need to highlight an important difference, which in the case of film adaptation changes its message in quite a disadvantageous manner. Numerous understatements, related to the manifestations of the sphere of wonder and time flow relativity, undoubtedly constitute one of the strongest sides of the novel’s narration. Laxness’ work uses these phenomena only in the form of stories told by the protagonists of his novel,150 which can be easily inscribed into inspirations with sagas and folk imagination, full of fantastic creatures and incredible events. Beyond doubt, the movie, which does not directly refer to any popular form of cinematic fantasy genre, needs to present the supernatural events within a context that may imply their legitimacy. That is how most of the scenes depicting paranormal events are made. Authors of the adaptation try to convey the unreal, subjective mood of the novel’s narration with the use of camerawork. Using bright lenses, they managed to soft the light and make the fantastic events depicted in the movie more unreal. Unfortunately, one of the last and most important scenes of the film does not take into account the prediction of the snow bunting being resurrected151 by enigmatic Ua. This way it specifies the supernatural status of this character and of the mysterious events taking place in the ministry. The originality of Laxness’ novel is based on the peculiar approach to its fantastic element. It needs to highlight the fact that the wonders of the nature presented in the story clearly supersede the codified Lutheran devotion. That is why the preacher under the glacier does not hold the mass or bury the dead. He boards up his own church and lets his followers burn the carved altar and wooden ornaments in their stoves. He is more interested in horseshoeing, repairing household appliances and philosophy on field lilies and birds’ life rather than in preaching. Moreover, for the inhabitants of the ministry, the unusual events such as reincarnation or metamorphosis of a man into fish seem to be equally real as the need to milk their cows. They believe that the wonders they witness are caused by the glacier itself, presented not only as the center of stories “saturated with weirdness”, but also as a means of communication with the energy of the universe. Ironical treatment 150 In the novel, the words of Embi’s report often warn us that the events described may be a result of illusion or hallucination. See: H. Laxness, Under the Glacier, trans. M. Magnusson, A Vintage International Original, New York, Toronto, 2005. 151 Novel’s narration often returns to the motif of the nature’s wonders. Icelandic birds (signifying freedom) such as snow bunting, seagull or eider, constitute the vital elements of this miraculousness.

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of such an important element of Icelandic landscape is a jocular reinterpretation of the omnipresent references to the axis mundi topos, present in numerous old folk tales. Let us now return for a moment to the analysis of genre traces related to the unusual treatment of time and space. Laxness’ novel seems to represent magic realism, literary genre popularized in the West in the time when the book was written. However, Icelandic writer clearly deconstructs the narrative ideas present in the works of Borges and Marquez. The fact is easier to see, when we use the definition of this literary current, proving that “magic realism does not use oneiric motifs like surrealism, does not deform reality and does not create the worlds of imagination, like science fiction …, but is merely a literary work, in which the narrator decides not the present magic as if it is reality, but rather presents reality as if it is magic. … Writer’s strategy here is based on the creation of supernatural aura, without departing from the nature. It is aimed at deforming the reality.152 … Magic realism is derived from specific reality, either natural, social, historical or psychological …. Due to the creative imagination, this specific reality is transformed into a process that gradually leads us to the fantastic dimension. This way, >a new reality is creatednew aesthetic reality< negates the laws of the nature, logic and rational thought”.153

In his text titled Marquez:  od realizmu magicznego do magicznej ironii [Marquez: From Magic Realism to Magic Irony], Adam Elbanowski claims that this type of literature uses the adjustment and coexistence of magical and real elements to differentiate between magic realism and fantasy, where miraculousness is a natural thing in the given fictional universum (fantasy) or constitutes an element that invades our reality (texts that use the element of fear). Laxness’ narration on the other hand, confronts the reader with the world that is treated realistically, where miraculousness is taken into parenthesis of subjectivity derived from Embi’s report and from the ministry inhabitants’ utterances recorded on a magnetic tape. It does not create a vision of utopian community that experiences the influence of the glacier’s energy, but rather constructs a portrait of collectivity of people who believe in their own phantasmal narrations and in similar stories told by the others. That is why the novel does not directly depict any of the wonders that supposedly happen in the ministry. All incredible events are presented as visions (or “collective hallucination”, understood in terms of Jung’s 152 A. Elbanowski, Marquez: od realizmu magicznego do magicznej ironii [Marquez: From Magic Realism to Magic Irony], [in:] “Literatura na Świecie” [World Literature], 1983, no. 9, p. 13. 153 Ibidem.

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terminology)154 or as elements of the protagonists’ verbal utterances. Obviously, we need to remember that the movie, as an audiovisual medium, cannot depict the subjectivity of experiences that transcend the framework of reality as easily as the novel. That is why the cinematic version of Laxness’ novel makes use of literal representations of “marvellous” threads from the novel. Undoubtedly, Guðný Halldórsdóttir’s film is not so willing to experiment with form and to discuss with the idealized tradition. However, we may find here the utopian perception of the rules of time and space as well, being inscribed into the realm of ironic references to anthropological conceptions of mythical time. Irony is expressed through the longing for the eternal return, but its laws can be bended in postmodern variation. Therefore, in their stories, the protagonists can travel in spacetime and reverse the calamitous results of various events. On the other hand, in the opinion of autochthons, the creatures related to pantheistic order most often try to use the unearthly chronotopes as a tool to create vicious paradoxes and jokes in the reality of mortal men. Unfortunately, the film depicts many aspects related to the process of storytelling directly, instead of applying the rules of subjectivity used in the novel. Using simplified forms of visualization, the adaptators of Laxness’ prose fail to reconstruct the hidden thesis that appears in the literary original and suggests that the miraculousness looked for by the protagonist is merely a domain of human imagination. Imagination, which even in the times of late postmodernism, is still strongly related to the folk, pantheistic conception of the world and nature. Icelandic sagas and other oral narrations attempting to describe the relations between human beings and the harsh world of nature constitute the textual embodiment of this imagination. Finally, we need to consider why the story in the novel and in the movie does not include the representatives of the “hidden folk”. After all, elves, trolls or ghosts of the brave Vikings are strongly connected with Icelandic folk beliefs. Instead, both cultural texts make use of the stories about mysterious women living under the glacier, or, to be more specific, a single character appearing in several incarnations, called Ua,155 or Ursula. She is a character that bears the responsibility for the “spacetime distractions”. It is significant that both in the novel and in its adaptation, the same notions are used to characterize the origin 154 Cf. C. G. Jung, Nowoczesny mit. O rzeczach widywanych na niebie [Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies], translated into Polish by J. Prokopiuk, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków, 1982. 155 Numerous names of the character and her enigmatic origin will lead a careful leader to the old Icelandic tales about Una. Her figure is also often associated with the elven queen.

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and “properties” of this ethereal being. In accordance with one of the tales, again referring to the narrative structures of old Icelandic tales, the enigmatic protagonist is a noble woman brought to Iceland from the British Isles or Spain. Following another version, we may learn that the mysterious character wanted to visit the island herself and “no sooner had Ursalei stepped ashore at Stapi than the Glacier men set to with all their celebrated broadmindedness and, saving your presence, gave the girl a baby”.156 On the other hand, previous statement made by Tumi Jonsen proves that Ursula is actually Þórgunna, a supernatural woman who “came here one day from Dublin”,157 capable of resurrecting the dead. Tumi also claims that the heroine of his story was resurrected after her death, in order to bake bread for gravediggers who carried her coffin to a cemetery located five days of walk away. Further stories included in the novel and movie put even more emphasis on the marvellous character of Ursula (also called Þórgunna).158 Here, in order to present the manner in which the literary subject exposes the fictitious character of her own story, I will quote an entire fragment of a dialogue: “Mrs. Fina Jonsen:  It is said of Ursula the English and these women, and no doubt applies to Þórgunna, as well, that they never wash. (Embi begins to get bored with all this):  Haven’t they got smelly armpits, then? Mrs. Fina Jonsen:  Always clean. The cleanest women at Glacier. Never seen to eat, but always plump. … Never known to read book, but never stumped by anyone, however learned. Oddest of all, though, they never age. They disappear one day like birds, but never decline; always as doughty as Þórgunna; even come back from the grave”.159

It is easy to understand that phrases like “they say” or “as it is known” are used to give us a hint that we are in fact in the land of “the great hoax”, full of tales similar to the stories known from ironic works of Cervantes, Stern or Joyce.160 In the case of this story, however, we need to look for their origins in folk tales. Moreover, any relations of these tales with the truth are doubtful even in the opinion of

1 56 H. Laxness, op. cit., p. 49. 157 Ibidem, p. 46. 158 Þórgunna is yet another character of Icelandic tales. The motif of a woman from abroad coming to Iceland is present for example in the poetic novel by Sjón, titled The Blue Fox (Skugga-Baldur). Cf. Sjón, The Blue Fox, transl. V. Cribb, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2013. 159 H. Laxness, op. cit., p. 51. 160 Arkadiusz Lewicki claims that the novels of these writers are in fact texts that anticipated the appearance of postmodernism. Cf. A. Lewicki, Sztuczne światy: postmodernizm w  filmie fabularnym [Artificial Worlds:  Postmodernism in Feature Movies], Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, Wrocław, 2007, pp. 29–39.

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people who keep telling them. This fact is exposed by Tumi Jonsen, the master storyteller, who during his oratory show admits with charming honesty that his ancestors “believed everything in the Icelandic sagas and I  go alone with them sort more or less, though I am not the man my father and my forefathers were”.161 However, at the end of Embi’s report, Ua ceases to be only an imaginary character. Both in the novel and in the syuzhet of the movie she appears in her supposedly most real incarnation. The protagonist introduces herself as Gudrun Sæmundsdóttir, wife of the preacher, who lived abroad for 35 years. She sometimes signs herself as Sister Helen (she explains that she used to live in a Spanish monastery), who rejected religious ways in order to establish her own entertainment business in Buenos Aires or sew gloves for Peruvian fishermen. In order to complicate the matters even more, the protagonist does not negate her previous incarnations. The conversations between the church emissary and the enigmatic character often constitute another examples of consequently repeated strategy, based on highlighting the existence of this mysterious figure beyond the rules of time that govern the lives of mortal men. But who is that constantly reincarnating person and what is her status in the narrations of the novel and of the movie? In my opinion, the phantasmal figures of “marvellous women from the glacier”, presented in Laxness’ novel and in Halldórsdóttir’s movie, were created in order to arrange the conditions for ironic discussion with Icelandic nationalist symbolism and to criticize the political situation of the country. Ua may be treated not only as a suggested incarnation of pantheistic energy of the glacier, but also as a figure related to the symbolic perception of eternal “national spirit”, characteristic for Icelanders’ perspective. Identification of Ua with allegorical representation of Iceland seems to be supported by the surprising element of the narration, which appears during her conversation with Embi. The woman informs our protagonist that she left the island because she had been sold to Godman Syngman, who, “in accordance with the British law”, adopted her162 and took her away from Iceland. The appearance of a foreign thread in the novel and in the movie should come as no surprise. The author, sympathizing with communism, both in private and in public opposed the presence of the British and American armies in Iceland, and decided to use the words of his heroine to criticize the American imperialism:

1 61 H. Laxness, op. cit., p. 47. 162 Motif of the “sold island” appeared in the previous work of Laxness, titled Atom Station. The title of the novel was even translated into Polish as The Sold Island.

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Immortal, existing in “time beyond time” and observing humanity, Ua may be also treated as an ideological phantasm that returns to Iceland in order to (in opinion of the countrymen) seduce “innocent young men”. Perhaps Laxness wanted to use the story about people seduced by women from the glacier to depict some more universal truth, noticing that we all tend to succumb to the illusions of various phantasmal ideologies and narrations. Basing on the theories of Jaques Lacan, Todd McGowan proves that “ideology … needs fantasy to compensate for its constitutive incompleteness. No ideology can ever provide all the answers for the subject, and fantasy fills in the blank spaces in an ideological edifice”.164

Characters depicted in the novel, living in humble conditions in one of the most desolate areas of the world, believe (or at least pretend to believe) that the mountain and Snæfellsjökull glacier constitute the center of the world, where one can communicate with “galactic powers” and use them to manipulate the laws of spacetime. However, first of all, the pantheistic and new age beliefs constitute an attempt to absurdly valorize the transforming national identity. That is why the people of ministry eat only cakes and drink only coffee, goods that were once luxurious on the desolate island, while the mere suggestions of eating fish, food that for many centuries has constituted a basic element of survival, are considered to be vulgar and distasteful. Inhabitants of the ministry, this ironic allegory of Iceland, believe that they live in the time of eternal narration and refuse to accept the postmodern order. Nostalgia for mythical time is depicted here as caricaturist negation of reality. The motif of gargantuan amounts of cakes, consumed by fish-despising locals, seems to prove such an interpretation. As in the case of Alfheim vision presented in both movies analyzed previously, this time we are also confronted with the order of an eternal utopia, strangely similar with its debauchery, carelessness and reversal of the imposed order to the madness of carnival. What is interesting, foreigners that come to the ministry also believe in their own, slightly different narrations and ideologies. Pilgrims coming from three sides of the world offer nothing more than gibberish and out-of-context theses of various New Religiousness movements. Only Embi considers himself to be an 1 63 H. Laxness, op. cit., p. 199. 164 T. McGowan, The Real Gaze. Film Theory After Lacan, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2007, pp. 35–36.

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Fig. 4:  Under the Glacier (1989), dir. Guðný Halldórsdóttir. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

empiricist and presents himself as such to the character he meets. However, at the end of the story presented in the novel and in the syuzhet of the movie, Embi appears to fall under the spell of Ua’s story as well. The young man experiences his sexual initiation with the Mountain Woman and follows her to “the wilderness beyond time and space”. Bishop’s emissary’s adventure ends when the lovers reach a strange, abandoned house. After a night spent with his beloved one, the protagonist wakes up in an empty bed. Disturbed by the absence of the woman, he starts to look for her. We see him for the last time when he rambles in the fog on the beach, looking for the source of Ua’s laughter. This mocking laugh of a seagull, heard in the scene full of archetypical references, may be also a chuckle of the author himself, who ends his story leaving its protagonist (and the reader) with strong conviction that they fell prey to a sophisticated prank. This way, the narration forces us to reconsider the symbolism and message of the “open novel” that did not define or specify anything. On the other hand, film adaptation of Under the Glacier, even though it is concluded in a very similar way, leaves its audience with a feeling of insufficiency, caused by the specification of fantastic elements and by the reduced intertextual layer. However, it is significant that the

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irony and distance towards the folk traditions of Laxness’ work, written in the 1960s, inspired the following generations of Icelandic film directors to depart from the nostalgic longing for the lost magic of the past and to focus more on ferocious criticism of Icelandic everyday reality.

Elves and Globalization As far as the contexts of plots analyzed in the previous parts of this paper are clear only to Icelanders themselves, the transnational turn in Icelandic cinema began with the appearance of movies that made use of the coexistence of postmodernism with the mythical dimension coming from the imaginary world of sagas and folk tales in a manner much more approachable to the foreigners. Works of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson constitute probably the most famous example of such an approach.165 Full of both pantheistic and Christian motifs, the works of the author of Children of Nature (Börn náttúrunnar, 1991)  refers mostly to the themes that can be understood abroad (See also:  chapter about Icelandic road movies). Instead of Alfheim and elves, we will see ghosts of the dead, protective angels and demonic creatures. The act of escape from the angel’s guardianship (performed by the German actor Bruno Ganz) from the last part of the film is one of a few moments in the movie which force us to consider the religious significance of its plot. Natural fusion of elements related to folk beliefs, Nordic mythology and Christian toposes constitutes one of the key features of Icelandic culture. Even though it may sound unbelievable to most Europeans, many inhabitants of the postmodern Ultima Thule still admit that they believe in the “hidden folk” (huldufólk), which gave birth to the figures of elves or trolls, closely related to the order of the nature. What is more, the island is also a home to the Ásatrú church. Its followers celebrate Vikings’ rituals, considering themselves as Neopagans. When we complete this general picture with numerous Friðriksson’s utterances, for example, taken from Nisha Inalsingh’s documentary titled Huldufólk 102 (2006), where the director admits that he believes in spirits and other fantastic creatures and claims that all supernatural events presented in his Movie Days (1994) are authentic, then the pantheistic trace seems to be even more evident. In our search for Neopagan key in the meaning of the movie (and its title) we may be aided by a small detail related to the music for Children

165 Cf. J. Gogacz-Sowińska, Film islandzki dzisiaj. Sylwetka Friðrika Þóra Friðrikssona [Contemporary Icelandic Cinema. Profile of Friðrik Þór Friðriksson], [in:] “Kwartalnik Filmowy” [Film Quarterly], 2002, no. 39–40.

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Fig. 5:  Children of Nature (1991), dir. Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

of Nature. It was composed by a constant associate of Friðriksson, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, who used to create electronic music inspired by occultism and New Age. Apart from producing soundtracks and recording with British artists, he also acts as a chief priest of Ásatrú church in Iceland.166 If we gather all those facts together with some elements of the movie that seem not to support the Christian doctrine, such as funeral rituals performed by a secular person on an unholy ground, presence of a naked woman’s spirit on the island or unusual opinions of Stella, who believes that she will be reborn on the Earth that was not contaminated with civilization, and when we add the connection of the funeral with natural elements and the concluding act of Þorgeir’s disappearance, we will obtain a vision of the movie that treats religious toposes quite syncretically. Probably, this syncretism stands behind the abroad success of the movie full of typical Icelandic themes. Using cinephilia and the whole network of cultural references, Friðriksson managed to create an original, maybe even too direct cinematic allegory of transition and definitive things. Nevertheless, the marvellous cinema of Friðriksson was not the source of inspiration for the following generations of Icelandic directors. Attempts at reinterpretation of the clash between folk traditions and postmodern forces may be 166 L. R. Gissurarson, W. H. Swatos Jr., Icelandic Spiritualism: Mediumship and Modernity in Iceland, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, London, 1997, p. 47.

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found only in couple of feature movies produced in the 21st century, usually connected to the important Icelandic theme of overcoming the traumas related to various calamities (both natural and economic). On the other hand, there is Grímur Hákonarson’s Summerland (Sumarlandið, 2010), a movie that tries to refer to the sagas and to exploit the theme of hidden folk. The script is based on a popular theme of attention paid to the artifacts of the nature, supposedly inhabited by the elves. It is often analyzed by the media or in articles on cultural studies and became an important source of income for tourism industry. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that such an attractive motif is used by Hákonarson in his film that tells a story of an affable Icelandic home. Lára is the head of the family, (her character was acted by a popular Icelandic actress, Ólafía Hrönn Jónsdóttir) who apart from bringing up a couple of her children is a professional medium. Privately, she is a friend of a protective spirit of a dead girl. She is married to Óskar, skeptical “loser”, who struggles to provide for his family by managing a museum of paranormal phenomena located in the cellar of his family’s house and by taking groups of foreign tourists167 to places related to pantheistic beliefs. Lára and Óskar have two children. Their younger son, Flóki, inherited his sixth sense from his mother  – he is accompanied in his games by Thrand – a mysterious boy from the past. On the other hand, there is Ásdís, a teenager who, just like her father, cannot see supernatural creatures. Instead, she dates an activist from “the sceptics’ association”, who makes fun of the family business and tries to convince the citizens of Reykjavík to stop paying taxes for church and to give money to universities. The sale of the elf-stone from the family garden to an art dealer from Germany constitutes a turning point of the story. Due to a successful transaction, entrepreneurial Óskar manages to save his house from the bailiff. What he does not know is that through the conclusion of the sale agreement, he brought a curse of the hidden folk upon his family. The curse becomes a cause of various adversities, including the mysterious sickness of Lára. Short before that, the woman is invited by the city council to a séance, related with the plans based on the removal of yet another object of old legends from Reykjavík. Friendly protagonist contacts the immortal inhabitants of the Grey Stone and has a strange seizure. After that event, in the night after the Elf-stone was sold, she falls into a coma.

167 In one of the scenes we may see Óskar “stealing tourists” from a bus company that transports visitors to Blue Lagoon. Blue Lagoon is a spa located near Reykjavík, famous for its thermal springs and advertised in Iceland as a place where modernity meets the nature.

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Grímur Hákonarson’s movie is not remarkable. However, if we analyze the script, we may find numerous interesting comparisons between various forms of tradition and lay spirit of postmodernism. Here we will discuss only the most interesting motifs related to the world of sagas and folk tales. For instance, the scene when Lára meets with the representatives of the city council shows a long table that symbolizes the distance between those two different world views. Lonely Lára tries to establish contact with the inhabitants of Alfheim, while sitting at one side of the table. On the other side we may see the supporters of the mayor, who want to get rid of the elfstones and who cannot understand weird reactions of the medium. They claim that Lára pretends that she is being imaginative or (in the worst-case scenario) that she is simply a lunatic. Another fine example of the clash between mythical chronotopes with lay, postmodern spacetime is clearly visible when Óskar tries to reclaim the elf-stone he sold abroad. Germany was chosen for a reason. This country is perceived in Iceland as a representative of European Union (not very popular among Icelanders) and was a direct reason for the occupation of the country by the US Army. In the scene shot in Goethe’s homeland, we may see a familiar Icelandic stone treated by snobs as an artifact of artificial world of modern sculpture. Such a presentation is clearly ironic, especially when we consider the fact that the home of the elves is inscribed into foreign, Bavarian simulacrum, created in the space of art gallery. With such measures, the author of the movie bluntly suggests that Icelandic tradition became an element of the theatrical culture. It is significant, however, that the screenwriters themselves, while ironically treating the strategy of providing tales and beliefs to the foreign tourists, become a part of a similar process when they create a transnational movie adjusted to the market needs. Let us return to the plot. Another clear example of the war between tradition and modernity can be found in the conclusion of the movie, when Óskar, Flóki and Ásdís decide to support the followers of old Scandinavian deities (mostly pensioners, who used to take part in Lára’s séances168) and to take part in the protest against the removal of the Grey Stone from Reykjavík. During the strike, the protesting members of Ásatrú church169 are laughed at by the members of “the sceptics’ association”. 168 In another scene, Óskar decides to substitute his sick wife and conduct a séance himself. Airy clothes and peculiar facial expressions cannot camouflage the deceit, because the faithful supporters of Lára’s talent (who will appear to be the members of Ásatrú church) immediately recognize the false medium. 169 Cf. M.  Strmiska, Ásatrú in Iceland:  The Rebirth of Nordic Paganism? [in:] “Nova Religio:  The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions”, 2000, vol.  4, no.  1, pp. 106–132; L. R. Gissurarson, W. H. Swatos Jr., Icelandic Spiritualism: Mediumship

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Fig. 6:  Summerland (2010), dir. Grímur Hákonarson. Photo from the National Film Archive of Iceland.

Juxtaposition of generational conflict and “war of world views” (and concepts of truth about reality!) is generalized further in the following takes, where a simple metaphor of contrast between wonders of the nature and artifacts of progress is used. Forces of civilization and technology are presented in an ironic form of a bulldozer, approaching the home of Iceland elves in order to destroy it. This idea is a clear, visual borrowing from iconographic materials that illustrate a difficult, albeit possible coexistence of forces of the nature and culture, of tradition and postmodernism.170 Similar, directly presented contrasts can also be found earlier, in the scene when the family’s elf-stone is sold. We witness parallel editing of the attempts at lifting the huge stone up and loading it onto the truck. Later on, we may see Óskar and Ásdís shopping in a mall. The man buys himself an “ersatz of real magic” – modern, flat screen TV (that will later stop working,

and Modernity in Iceland, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, London, 1997, p. 47. 170 This visual concept is also present in a photograph taken by Maciej Dębski, showing a bulldozer on the background of a majestic Icelandic cliff. The photography was used by Anna Pietrzkiewicz in her article with a caption “technical civilization interfereing with >magical civilizationsomething