(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The 51 minutes long documentary Icon portrays a psychiatrist and a psychiatric institution in the countryside of today's Siberia. "Where do we find the human soul?" The psychiatrist asks at the beginning of the film. Is it in the heart? Or in the brain? Or somewhere else?
Large parts of the film are long sequences where film cameras fly on the wall while daily life and the barrage take place at the psychiatric institution. The gaze of the patients is a hundred percent unsentimental – the mentally ill are neither idealized nor manufactured in any sickening way. In the sequences, patients talk to each other, or they activate themselves motorically and verbally, as we are used to seeing people with heavy psychiatric diagnoses do. Sometimes it quarrels and fights, and scenes where some of the patients help the nursing staff to practice violence and coercion work easily shocking to the outside viewer.
The Siberian pictures in the 2010 century are in themselves exotic. Buildings, landscapes, costumes, fauna and machinery are not like what we surround ourselves with in Norway today. The scenography may be confusingly similar to the photographs from the Soviet Union we saw in the o-science books of the 1980 century.
The hidden world. In the midst of this throng that is displayed indoors and outdoors at the psychiatric institution, the old psychiatrist wanders around with gray-haired hair and an intrusive calm. We hear him chatting with the patients. He is gentle while asking them confrontational questions. "What do you mean this is a terrible place? There is good food here, and the caring staff are good and friendly. Tell me why you think this is a bad place? "And a little later in the dialogue:" So you mean you're healthy? How come you ended up here then? "
Parallel to the passive observing scenes that make up most of the film's playing time, there is another thread that sheds light on the situations we are seeing from the institution and partly to produce a message regarding the film's theme. In this thread, we hear the psychiatrist's inner voice reflecting on what mental illness is in general, and how this sheds light on the body / mind issue in particular. The psychiatrist's reflections are simple, almost mundane, yet precise and understandable. The fact that the patient's inner world is hidden and only belongs to the patient is a major topic that is discussed in various ways. The patient's drama, her hopes and fears, takes place in this hidden world. This is how the patient becomes lonely and isolated, his or her life is only partly played out with other people.
Is the situation any better for "regular" healthy? Or are they equally isolated? Do they also live primarily in their fantasies? Somewhere in the movie, the psychiatrist tells us that the mentally ill despise healthy people; Healthy do not take themselves – and thus not life – seriously. On the other hand, so does the psychotic patient – he relates his senses, his thoughts and his ideas with absolute seriousness, whether the ideas are true or false; whether the thoughts are constructive or destructive; or whether the sensory impressions come from real events in the external physical world or are a product of their own imagination.
The psychiatrist tells us that the mentally ill despise healthy people; Healthy do not take themselves – and thus not life – seriously.
An inner common area. The film's narrative approach – the observational, long-awaited look at the patient's everyday situations – illustrates and emphasizes the psychiatrist's main point that the patient's inner life is inaccessible to anyone other than the patient himself. When we see the patients with their mimicry, motor skills and complex actions, we realize that there is something we do not understand, that there is something that is hidden from us. With the "healthy" it is different: We can better understand a healthy person by studying what they do. The inner world, which is epistemologically hidden from all but the person itself, is still available in a different way – it is a generally understandable correspondence between what is going on at the inner plane and what the person is doing in the outer world. Socially recognizable actions and universal mimicry and motorism become the cogs that other people can use to get into a person's place. In this way, the inner world can become a common area. In the psychotic patient this connection is obscure.
Although the film won an award at the Krakow Film Festival in May this year, I'm not sure if I would immediately recommend it to others. For me, writing about the film has been more rewarding than watching it. I really appreciated the cinematic and pictorial, as well as the insight into a rural psychiatric institution in today's Siberia – a completely foreign world I would never have otherwise seen. Still, I am left with a feeling that the filmmaker has done little more than hang on to the psychiatrist and follow this for a few hours around the institution. The film is long-running and repetitive. I should like to see something more constructive, some clearer grips, a clearer and more vague message. Some hypotheses, simply.
