INTERVIEW WITH Fridrik Thor Fridriksson

September 12, 2000 Introduction In a way, this is another 'crossover' piece, linking two of the themes of this issue: an interview with the director of a film featured in the Toronto Film Festival, who is also the creator of at least two films that have had minimal public exposure but are readily available: Cold Fever, Fridriksson's best-known film, has been out on video for some years (regrettably not in the correct format, but it was never in full 'scope and so doesn't suffer too much-- occasional framings now look too tight), and Devil's Island can be found on an excellent, correctly formatted DVD. Two earlier films, Movie Days (Biodagar) and Children of Nature, are also nominally available on video, though I have never seen them in a store. Fridriksson has already built a substantial and impressive body of work. His films are not only immediately engaging, they repay repeated viewing. It would be a great error to think that, because Iceland is a small, sparsely developed country with a relatively small population, films produced there will be mere curiosities, marginal to the interests of those fortunate or unfortunate enough (take your pick) to live in countries closer to the throbbing heart of our much publicized 'globalization'. Fridriksson's is a cinema of the alienated, a cinema of displaced persons, of people robbed of their identities. And is not this, today, virtually a universal experience? Now that global corporate capitalism has (we are told) triumphed, bringing the possibility of world peace (of which there actually seem fewer concrete signs now than there were before) and robbing human lives of dignity; identity and a sense of value, aren't we all displaced and alienated persons? Watching Fridriksson's films I quickly cease to feel any sense of strangeness, of foreignness: the films rapidly become my friends. I have always found interviews very difficult to transcribe. The temptation is to turn them into elegant prose, which they never are, eliminating all the hesitations, the struggles to express something one is only just then formulating, and above all the things one wishes one hadn't said (for whatever reason--confusion, uncertainty, a lapse in 'political correctness'...). In this case the difficulty was compounded by language problems (Fridriksson's English is very good, but not entirely fluent, he occasionally searches for words that perhaps don't quite arrive) and by unforeseeable practical problems. We were taken to a bar in the hotel which housed many of the festival participants. It was only 10.30 a.m., and we were told it would be very quiet. True, it was at first deserted. But the bartenders had work to do (with which I hardly had the right to interfere), involving exploding espresso machines (at least they sounded as if they were exploding) and a great deal of clatter and conversation. Later, custome rs arrived, and their conversation was sometimes appreciably louder than Fridriksson's modestly soft voice. What follows is a compromise. I wanted to preserve something of the actual speech, and (except in cases where I thought the meaning might not be clear) I have left the spoken text alone. On the other hand, the resulting tape is occasionally extremely hard to decipher: I have struggled with it for hours, going over passages again and again. There are moments when I have had to make what I like to believe are intelligent guesses; there are others when I have been forced to admit defeat, and simply Omit a few words. But I think what follows constitutes an admirable introduction to Fridriksson's work: he is a phenomenally gifted filmmaker, and he is very much aware of what he is doing. He will give you far more insight into his work than I could offer if I wrote an article on it. I think his testimony will persuade readers who are unfamiliar with his films to check them Out and watch out for future developm ents. Above all, I hope that you will eventually have the opportunity to see Angels of the Universe, arguably his most important (and certainly his most ambitious) film to date, which, at the time of the interview, still inexplicably, had not been picked up by a distributor. …

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