CoMo No. 2: Iceland (June, 2022)

[sally]

celebrating all things icelandic! gylfi rip!

films are sparse so recommendations welcome, almost mandatory
(& feel free to add any non-filmic detail or colour, because we might run out of movies pretty fast)

[sally]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXZdiXJpDV8

[Lencho of the Apes]

I'll drop this thing here,e since it popped up uninvited in my facebook feed. Haven't heard it yet, lately am mostly not liking hippie music I hear for the first time. Only movies I have on hand are from a package somebody sent out ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Eg-CqeKyDc&t=19s

[sally]

oh fab, thanks lencho!

i have been listening to this & failing to watch anything yet, but i do feel very icelandic now

https://youtu.be/TUPHBSzM4gY

[sally]

Only movies I have on hand are from a package somebody sent out ...

if there's anything you fancy, just shout! i'm sure someone can find it (although don't ask for anspach's back soon, cuz disgustingly there are no english subtitles)

is there anything from 50s/60s/70s anyone? (apart from the girl gogo/79 af stöðinni because i've already seen that)

[greennui]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loB0kmz_0MM

[greennui]

Not a single Snorri Sturluson biopic as far as I can see smh.

[niminy-piminy]

i guess i already mentioned experimental CAS which is part of FAMU → http://cas.famu.cz/en/center-for-audiovisual-studies/

in 2012, there was an exhibition of 3 diploma projects on CAS and one of them was "Ring-Road" by Klára Doležalová.
i did a few snapshots and (luckily) transcribed an English description in the leaflet (as captions to snapshots), so, now, i can share...

Klára Doležálková: Ring-Road (on the desert island two cameras and you)

The instalation interprets, in an open way the movie Hringurinn (1985) by F. T. Fridriksson in which he made a trip around Iceland shooting the front view from car. The result was feature film - videoart - landscape - island.


Ring-Road (on the desert island two cameras and you) adds new video-layers to the original, which is absent but felt in my installation. I've shot to its center (to the center of Iceland) and to its shore (edge). I'm intuiting the ocean, and it really occurs sometimes. I'm pushing the button in the most exact way; I don't want to be supported by the help of a software program, so instead, it is I, the decisionmaker. I experienced all four seasons in two days. The aim was not to build up a complex and literal record of the ring-road trip around Iceland, but rather to mediate the variability of the island landscape, to show where it is possible to live. That is why I chose an animation technique.


The instalation itself eventually shifts this performance/experience "back to earth". By the way: that is where everything happened.


And don't tell me we can live without cars!!!

[niminy-piminy]

all my recent (Iceland-related) viewing history...

1/
besides PAWEL AND WAWEL and REYKJAVÍK OF OUR DAYS, FIRST PART i watched (relatively) recently...

2/
THE HERRING SEASON IN SEYDISFIORDUR (Woody Vasulka, 1964)
WHALE CUTTING STATION (Woody Vasulka, 1964)
CANTALOUP (Steina Vasulka, 1980)
SELECTED TREECUTS (Steina Vasulka, 1980)
DISTANT ACTIVITIES (Steina Vasulka, 1972)
... gonna elaborate on Vasulkas in a separate post(s).

3/
LAST AND FIRST MEN (Jóhann Jóhannsson, 2020)
... must admit i was mildly disappointed (probably due to high (irrational) expectations).
https://youtu.be/f-lBSl4MqWY

4/
UNDER THE TREE (Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, 2017)
... i consider it amusing.

When Baldwin and Inga’s next door neighbours complain that a tree in their backyard casts a shadow over their sundeck, what starts off as a typical spat between neighbours in the suburbs unexpectedly and violently spirals out of control.

https://youtu.be/rQ6h-qCIS3M

5/
NORDIC GRAMMAR (Kaspar Peters, 2019)
... i like this film.
btw. the main heroine speaks Polish! (so, if you need a bridge from the last CoMo to the current CoMo, this is it!)
full movie with English subs...

A woman goes on a journey to the north. When she comes to an abandoned house, she settles there and appropriates the lives of the former inhabitants. We do not know who this woman is, where she came from and why she left. She is an empty figure, completely permeable to the world through which she moves. The light comes and goes. A storm is coming. Everything is in the process of dissolution: identity, home, the border between inside and outside, even the images themselves.

Transcript from post screening Q&A with Kaspar Peters, director of Nordic Grammar, at Slow Film Festival 2019.
This Q&A was led by Emre Çağlayan.
→ https://movingimageartists.co.uk/2020/0 ... ar-peters/

https://vimeo.com/369032389

[niminy-piminy]

oh, and in the long past, i watched and can recommend...

GRANDMA LO-FI: THE BASEMENT TAPES OF SIGRÍDUR NÍELSDÓTTIR (Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, Orri Jonsson, Kristín Björk Kristjánsdóttir, 2011)

At the tender age of 70 years, Sigrídur Níelsdóttir starts to publish her music – directly from her living room. This modern Icelandic fairy tale is one of the most beautiful stories to be told about music. In seven years, Grandma Lo-Fi recorded 59 records and wrote more than 600 songs. The creative senior is a cult figure of the Icelandic music scene and thus it seems obvious to go through Grandma Lo-Fi’s life accompanied by artists such as Múm, Sin Fang and Mr Silla.

https://youtu.be/6xCmr7W63o0

[niminy-piminy]

BURST (Reynir Lyngdal, 2003) #CoMoIceland

Artistic director of the Iceland Dance Company Katrín Hall choreographed the dance for the latest music video to “Did It Again” by pop star Shakira. .. Shakira requested Hall herself because she liked her dance from the short film Burst, made by Hall and director Icelandic Reynir Lyngdal.

[rischka]

does the northman count

[rischka]

also i want to know if rasmus can understand icelandic. where's gylfi ...

https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/natu ... our_email/

[rischka]

https://youtu.be/kbfD_lX1Tog

[sally]

there's an icelandic comedian show on netflix that i have lined up. the clip i watched, he was doing it in english, taking the piss out of danes, and doing the danish impression in english. so it was english with icelandic accent doing english with danish accent and he nailed it. i guess danes sound funny to everyone?

did gylfi even join this iteration of scfz, i don't think he did

[greennui]

also i want to know if rasmus can understand icelandic.

No way, it's like trying to understand really, really old Swedish.

[niminy-piminy]

for me, the most "natural" way to relate to Iceland (from a cinematic pov) is via Steina Vasulka who married my countryman Woody Vasulka (née Bohumil Vašulka)...
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steina_and_Woody_Vasulka
→ https://monoskop.org/Steina_and_Woody_Vasulka



at one point in the past (for some strange reason), a girl named Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir left her idyllic/picturesque homeland (Iceland) to study (in a damn CEE shithole) at *HAMU (violin and music theory), and there she met Bohumil Vašulka, the student of documentary filmmaking at **FAMU.
AMU = THE ACADEMY OF PERFORMING ARTS IN PRAGUE
1/ DAMU = THEATRE FACULTY
2/ **FAMU = FILM AND TV SCHOOL
3/ *HAMU = MUSIC AND DANCE FACULTY

in 1965, they moved together to the U.S.A. (and Bohumil became Woody).

but prior to that (in 1964), Bohumil shot two (relatively "traditional") documentary films about Iceland (that i have seen in the past)...
THE HERRING SEASON IN SEYDISFIORDUR (Woody Vasulka, 1964)
WHALE CUTTING STATION (Woody Vasulka, 1964)

practically all i know about Steina & Woody, comes from a book by Lenka Dolanová called A Dialogue with the Demons of the Tools: Steina and Woody Vasulka (orig. published in Czech in 2011, ca. 10 years later published a revised version in English).


in 2016 (2018 respectively), an institution called "Vašulka Kitchen Brno" (VKB) was started (in Bohumil's birthplace).
(despite i planned several times, i didn't visit it yet.)

https://vasulkakitchen.org/en/about-us

At the end of 2016, an initiative was established in Brno to found Vašulka Kitchen, an art space referring to the work of the artists Steina Briem Bjarnadottir and Bohuslav Woody Vašulka. In October 2018, in the cooperation with the Vasulkas, we ceremoniously launched the activities of the New Media Art Center in Brno Art House. Our goals are to preserve and mediate the work of the Vasulkas and develop their legacy.

From the end of the 80's and the beginning of the 90's, several (non-profit) artistic initiatives in Czechia dealt with the art of video, electronic media, and later digital art. Today, VKB is one of the few specialized (non-academic) projects in this area. It is important that in the international context it becomes part of a network of institutions focused on the promotion, archiving, research, or distribution of art based on moving images, sound, electronic networks, coding, and performativity as an artistic practice.

Vasulka Kitchen Brno is a place for study and research. It gives the public access to the digital archive, the Vasulka media library and provides accompanying programmes. In cooperation with the Vasulka Chambre at the National Gallery of Iceland, we take care of the archive and the artworks in our collection. We take care of the acquisition and cataloguing of materials related to the work and life of the Vasulka family. We continue to map and reflect on their work in a broader cultural and international context, and we also research and process works by other artists in the field of new/electronic media art. We provide facilities for Czech and international researchers, students, teachers and curators and initiate research projects and conferences.

in 2019, Woody/Bohumil died.
one of the obituaries → https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/w ... 202673647/

during this CoMo, i expect to focus either on films by Steina or by Steina & Woody (for now, putting aside films by Woody alone).
so far, i have seen only 3 films by Steina...
CANTALOUP (Steina Vasulka, 1980)
SELECTED TREECUTS (Steina Vasulka, 1980)
DISTANT ACTIVITIES (Steina Vasulka, 1972)
(hopefully, gonna watch many more during this month.)

https://vasulkakitchen.org/en/vasulkovi

Steina

Born in Iceland and trained as a violinist, Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir (Steina) is a major figure in the field of electronic and video art. She received a scholarship in 1959 to study at the Prague Conservatory, where she met Woody Vasulka. They married in 1964 and moved to New York in 1965, where she worked as a freelance musician. She started using video in 1969, and embraced it wholeheartedly when she discovered that, with it, she could control the movement of time. It was the glorious age of the Portapak (used by a number of conceptual artists such as Nam June Paik, Gillette, Nauman, Serra) and of feedback experiments. In 1971, along with Woody Vasulka and Andres Mannik, she founded The Kitchen, a performance space devoted to electronic media.

Her collaborative work with Woody in that period was remarkable for its interworking of audio and video signals: by attaching the Portapak to a synthesizer, they created video images from the audio signal and sound with the video signal (Matrix I & II). The goal of these phenomenological exercises was to explore the essence of the electronic image and sound. Steina's installations often involved electronically manipulated visual and acoustic landscapes. For example, the installation Orka, shown at Iceland's pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale, juxtaposed two transformative natural forces - water and fire - which, in their various manifestations (volcanic eruptions, waterfalls, glaciers), reveal the workings of time. In 1991, she undertook a series of interactive performances with a MIDI violin, which let her generate video images as she played (Violin Power).

She performed this piece in analog form from 1971 to 1978. In tandem with Woody, she was awarded the 1992 Maya Deren Prize and, in 1995, the Siemens Media Art prize. In 1992, with Woody and David Dunn she curated the exhibition and catalogue Eigenwelt der Apparate-welt (Pioneers in Electronic Art) at Ars Electronica in Linz. Her installations and videos have been shown throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. Since 1980, the Vasulkas have been based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

also, i hope to watch "The Vasulka Effect" (Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir, 2019)...

https://letterboxd.com/film/the-vasulka-effect/

The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.

https://youtu.be/6eJPG205eBk

[greennui]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdSEpXrw8vY&t

https://letterboxd.com/film/volcano-saga/

[niminy-piminy]

BINARY LIVES: STEINA AND WOODY VASULKA (Peter Kirby, 1996) #CoMoIceland

This illuminating documentary is a comprehensive view of the life and work of Woody and Steina Vasulka, pioneers of electronic art. From the late 1960s in New York, where they founded The Kitchen, to their present home in New Mexico, the Vasulkas trace their involvement with video and their relationship to the technologies they deploy. In fascinating insights, the Vasulkas reveal the sources and philosophical underpinnings that inform their work. For Woody, this focuses on an attempt to expose the inner logic and architecture of the electronic machine, while Steina focuses on images of the world and how they can be manipulated. Shot over a two-year period, this program includes excerpts from the Vasulkas' video works, as well as interviews.

Steina: Can you fix my motorcycle?
Woody: Marry me! Get me out of here!

https://youtu.be/uYyR6EWbPC0

[sally]

surtur fer sunnan / birth of an island - ósvaldur knudsen (1964) #CoMoIceland
eldur í heimaey / fire on heimaey - ósvaldur knudsen, vilhjálmur knudsen (1974) #CoMoIceland

loved these - both amazingly shot, very droll narration and the music on birth of an island was great. and the sangfroid of everyone involved! everyone is so calm when the place they live in is exploding




also watched
ari eldjárn: pardon my icelandic (2020) #CoMoIceland

not a great fan of modern stand up (stop shouting) but i did chuckle a couple of times at the intra-nordic piss-taking

[sally]

oh and looks like there's a few knudsen here - subless, but if they're shot as well as those other two, i might give them a scan

https://filmcentralen.dk/museum/island- ... &type=alle

[sally]

i dunno where CoMo went?

it's here! why can't you see it?


ísland í lifandi myndum / iceland in moving pictures - loftur guðmundsson (1925) #CoMoIceland

v picturesque, fishermen are ALWAYS delighted, either the director or all icelanders really really love animals (a commendable national trait) the wrestling is hilarious (a propensity for pseudo-balletic leg-twiddling that even shows up during the dance or die of cliff-based egg theft, which i also laughed at) and WTF i never ever knew a farmer that was that ripped, truly viking-y










incidentally have also started on the icelandic black n' burnt barley chocolate and god you can really taste the burnt, it's like eating a sweet ashy volcano! very appropriate! (but not sure i'm gonna finish it that quickly)

[rischka]

hmm i dunno but i couldn't find those volcano films on letterboxd either

dementia???

[sally]

oh no! we can't have the site fucked up & you go mad as well. that's too much!

[niminy-piminy]

Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Miles Davis, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads, Philip Glass, Beastie Boys, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jacke Curtis, Doris Cross, Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Stan Brakhage
(and many more) in a single film
or
Brno, Prague, NYC, Buffalo, Santa Fe, Reykjavík
=
THE VASULKA EFFECT (Hrafnhildur Gunnarsdóttir, 2019) #CoMoIceland

[rischka]

i found the CoMo! tidal is giving me sigur ros which i'm sure i haven't listened to in years

https://youtu.be/Bz8iEJeh26E

[sally]

end of summer - jóhann jóhannsson (2014) #CoMoIceland

first i was thinking this is just some dull music video, but then those little madmen penguins strolled and stumbled across the screen, arm in arm like those valiant old men in a beckett farce, and the whole thing became much more entertaining, like icy ancient world sci-fi (with cantankerous grumbling old men - at one point a penguin chick loudly calls for food and the older one strides past, ignoring and indignant )



look at this big easter island stone head in the iceberg! any moment now there's sean connery in a nappy!

[niminy-piminy]

https://youtu.be/-WnzRqCK6Fs

[niminy-piminy]

watched...

ísland í lifandi myndum / iceland in moving pictures - loftur guðmundsson (1925) #CoMoIceland

and played along (as a soundtrack) over and over and over the afore-mentioned song...

To form a mutual core


This eruption undoes stagnation

[niminy-piminy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_magical_staves

Icelandic magical staves (Icelandic: galdrastafir) are sigils that were credited with supposed magical effect preserved in various Icelandic grimoires, such as the Galdrabók, dating from the 17th century and later.

Draumstafir = to dream of unfulfilled desires.



The way it is used is explained in the Huld Manuscript by Geir Vigfússon from 1860:
“Scratch these symbols on silver or white leather, on St. John’s Night and they who sleep on them dream about what they want when the sun is at its lowest.”
St. John’s Day is known as Midsummer: the Nothern European solstice between 21st and 25th of June.
However, St. John’s Night may refer more specifically to St. John’s Eve: the night before the 24th of June.