REYKJAVÍK

UPFRONT

City of the Imagination

In few other places (if anywhere) will you find such a high percentage of people with the urge to save, if not the world, then at least their own soul through some artistic endeavour.

The poet and novelist Thor Vilhjálmsson on Icelanders, as quoted in Peter Cowie's book Icelandic Film (Icelandic Film Fund 1995)

THE PACT THAT THE city of Reykjavík exists at all owes a good deal to the power of imagination. The laws of nature would suggest that the chances of a thriving young capital emerging from those ancient black lava fields, so close to the Arctic Circle, so far from most everything else, are slim at best. And yet here it is; a one-off against the odds, a pastel-toned and corrugated improbability fixed in the dark rafters of the world like a luminescent dream-bubble above us. The emergence of modern day Reykjavík as a creative force of nature finds an echo of sorts in the eruptive behaviour of the recently notorious Eyjafjallajökull and its volcanic cousins; it is a source of startling energy, originating in the ancient and yet in a state of constant rebirth, with a by-product that assaults the senses.

The extraordinary landscapes of Iceland have attracted many international filmmakers in recent years, especially those in search of spectacular, off-world backdrops for their action and fantasy epics. You will spot the country's interior region in films such as Die Another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002), Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005) and Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012). However impressive this use of the natural vistas has been, and however financially advantageous to the local economy, it is tantamount to typecasting the country as a visual source of hellish locations. It also draws the attention away from the small but quietly confident output of indigenous films, many of which feature Reykjavík, the singular metropolitan point in Iceland, as their setting. It is an incomparable city, one that has sparked into extraordinary life within living memory yet has found a way to draw on collective race memory to define itself amid its new found modernity, a feat that recurs in the films and themes discussed in this book.

It is worth briefly charting the legacy of film in Iceland and the path that led to the vibrant Reykjavík that we see on film today. The city saw the opening of its first cinema in 1906, but for many years with only a handful of exceptions when cameras rolled in Iceland they were operated by overseas film-makers, primarily Danish and Swedish, and were pointed at the countryside not the city. It was not until 1948 that Iceland produced its first feature film with sound and in colour - Loftur Guðmundssons pastoral love story Milli fjalls og fjöru/Between Mountain and Shore -indeed from the early 1960s for a period of nearly twenty years hardly any home-grown feature films were produced at all. However, leading up to and during that time a number of documentaries and short films were being made, and the importance of these two forms can still be seen in today's output. Among the intrepid local documentarists the work of Villi Knudsen and his father Ósvaldur is worthy of attention. Since the 1940s they have been risking life and limb to capture the country's volcanoes on film. The collective result, 'The Volcano Show', can be seen throughout the year at the small and wonderfully sweet Red Rock Cinema on Hellusund close to the Pond in central Reykjavík. They may be merely a tourist attraction but the Knudsens' films illustrate a characteristically Icelandic resourcefulness and determination to achieve results in their own way.

The post-war boom in Iceland, driven largely by the advantageous consequences of wartime Allied occupation, triggered a mass exodus from the country's rural reaches to the city, a process that has led to Reykjavík residents constituting four fifths of the national population. This social concentration deposited the nation's collective saga- steeped mindset into a contemporary city setting that was modernizing at light speed. It has been a place peopled since the late 1970s by a community of creative practitioners comprised in no small part by newly trained film-makers who at that point in time were returning in significant numbers to the land of their birth. They brought with them an air of confidence and a desire to find forms of expression that combined Iceland's storytelling tradition with its capital's sudden urban modernity. This injection of young returning talent coincided with the creation of the Icelandic Film Fund and the result has been a modest but steadily growing number of feature productions, along with an ongoing turnover of excellent documentaries and shorts.

Surprise is synonymous with Reykjavík. It is hoped that a leaf through this book will reveal a good deal of cinematic surprises even for the experienced movie-tourist. Who knew for example, that the first multiplex cinema in Europe was opened here, Regnboginn (The Rainbow) in 1977? Perhaps the biggest surprise, given the country's financial trauma of recent years, is that cinema continues to thrive in the city. Reykjavík has played host to a lively international film festival each September since 2004, described by Gerald Peary of the Boston Phoenix as 'one of the best-programmed film festivals on earth, and with some of the most exciting guests'. It also accommodates a short film competition, Stuttmyndadagar í Reykjavík, which ran for ten years from 1992 and was revived successfully in the summer of 2008. In 2010 the city acquired a new independent cinema in the form of Bíó Paradís, a state of the art facility occupying the same premises as Regnboginn on Hverfisgata. Despite the dark days experienced since the banking collapse it is possible to say that film is reflecting a glimmer of hope in Reykjavík.

79 Of STATION/79 AF STÖDINNI (1962)

LOCATION

Hótel Borg, Pósthússtræti 11, 101 Reykjavík

79 OF STATION IS an adaptation of the 1950 novella by Indriði G. Porsteinsson. The US naval occupation during and after the war is very present in the film and the story addresses American...