(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
During this year's short film festival in Grimstad, the Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) launched what their launch adviser Ingrid Dokka described as a "representative selection of the best short films" they have supported from the past year. Since the 1980 century, this has been an annual tradition.
So far, this has mainly been in the form of VHS, DVD or Blu-ray, but this year NFI has for the first time dropped physical releases, making the films available exclusively on digital platforms.
The films in what is called "Norwegian short 2016" are now available on the film archives, Film Room and Filmbib. The latter allows anyone with national library credit cards to log in and view them for free. In addition, in line with the new slogan "platform neutrality", the service can be downloaded as an app – the main goal is to make short films as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.
There are some criteria, including that the films included must have had at least one public view and that there should be a diversity (gender, geography, etc.) in the collection. But how – beyond that – picking out the best movies? And what should be highlighted from this release, which consists of 22 movies?
Tradition believes there are several realistic, hurtful and evocative relationship portraits and childhood portraits focusing on communication problems. But we also find fresh animated films in the collection, such as the absurdist Self-destructive Robot, the expressionist The Outing, and the gymnastic line of thought in It was Mine. Documentary portraits are complemented by one mockumentary about conspiracy theories. And a sentimental look at the economic crisis in Greece, with superficial clues to neorealism (stagnation) is replaced by a suspected poem about a Swedish immigration reality (This is everywhere).
But instead of writing a general mention of all the diversity in "Norwegian Short 2016", I choose to focus on a uniqueness that dares to speak directly, personally and critically to us: Jørn Utkilens Statement Too, a portrait documentary about the musician Arvid Sletta.
On the sidelines. In conventional filmmaking, it is typical to organize the image from the human body as a dominant, active and well-informed center. IN Statement Too this conventional principle is violated. Yes, this break appears as a stylistic principle in Utkilen's film: The film's protagonist, Arvid Sletta, is often placed as an insignificant part of the picture, almost on the sidelines of the picture frame, if he is not completely out of the picture.
I Statement Too it is nature that dominates. Not an inhuman nature, but the nature of which man is a part. IN North, one of the other highlights of the collection, nature also plays an important role – here as an uncontrollable and inhuman force that the urban people must adapt to. In a Norwegian context, where nature is often completely out of focus (literally, since camera lenses often focus unilaterally on the human body), these films are liberating in how they destabilize and play with the classic human-centered perspective.
In many of the pictures in Statement Too Sletta stands as a small dot in a violent nature. There is both metaphilmatic comic and some existential poignancy in how his little head just so far looking up at the bottom of total images of snowy soils, oceans and huge skies.
Not least, Utkilen finds an extraordinary expressiveness in unenlightened images that makes Sletta's body an emotionally powerful silhouette. And when his body first appears as the center, enlightened and active, he does not really appear as active and dominant. He is a small part of the world, secluded, not one who "controls the scene".
At the risk of becoming too naive in the language, we might say that it is a natural, non-constructed, original humanity that is the focus of the film. Water flows are at least as important to the portrait of people as Sletta's face. Nature becomes metaphorically effective without being transformed into frozen, conventional symbols: Water flowing in two opposite directions, or a thin leaf that steadily rises every time the wind leaves it, opens – mighty or empty – images to us.
Portrait of us. It is up to each viewer to decide to what extent these images are only perceived as depictions of nature, and to what extent they are also perceived as representations of existential experiences – and this is precisely the theme of the film. Via a narrative voice, Utkilen asks us if we recognize ourselves in the pictures. In the image of the thin blade that resists the wind, he suddenly removes the blade and (the sound of) the wind, so that the only thing left is the background – a white, static void – and he wonders to us: “Or is this more representative of you? "
Such meta-grips allow this to become a kind of portrait documentary about us as well as musician Sletta and filmmaker Utkilen; a moody searching, partially teasing confrontation with our own experience of film, images and ourselves.
"Why is Arvid Sletta so important to me?" Asks Utkilen, finding the answer in expressing an irreducible uniqueness that does not fit into the typical cultural patterns and ideals of how we should be. By virtue of this basic attitude, he creates a formally playful, portrait-exploring and emotionally open film that cannot easily be put into a booth, and which raises some basic questions about cinematic representation conventions as well as the "normal" connections we often live with.
I Statement Too it is nature that dominates. Not an inhuman nature, but the nature of which man is a part.
Sometimes we have to throw ourselves out of the etiquette of communication to communicate our own intuisjon – and not just an easily communicable understanding of what is to be portrayed. And this is what Utkilen does Statement Too. The film embraces, with a kind of modest zeal, an originality that has its origin in expressing one's self, rather than an originality that derives from learned and projected creativity.
Statement Too thus expresses a genuine "otherness" – which extends entirely to a distribution question. Its idiosyncratic images should be experienced on a large cinema dish, and seeing the movie as part of an app series on a tablet is not easy. At the same time, NFI's dissemination is an important part of a greater availability of unique films like this – which often struggle to reach the audience. With its playing time of 36 minutes has Statement Too moreover, difficult conditions at cinema arenas – as it can easily become too long for short film festivals and too short for long film festivals.
Arvid Sletta doesn't find the right key, but he finds his own, and Utkilen praises him for it, recognizes himself in it, expresses it in his own originality, and asks us if we can feel it. And thus, despite the film being a personal portrait, we do not get a classic expression of individualism or a celebration of the winner or the loner, but a kind of ecological perspective on life, which implies that we dare to fall outside the cultural cage of society by following our tone deaf intuition.
Se nfi. no to buy the collection box.
