Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.


October 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 46

Total Comments: 12


Full Archive



L’Iceberg / The Iceberg / Belgium / 2005

At times looking like a James Whistler painting left out in the rain, L’Iceberg’s charm is its absences. Devoted to the art of pantomime, we are offered long, beautiful scenes peppered with rare instances of dialogue. The sound of clocks and doors and, eventually, crashing waves occupy much of the soundtrack, and our heroine’s ever-changing world—from a cookie-cutter European suburb to the floating iceberg of her dreams—is presented with an unflinching artistic eye. (Many of the scenes are evocative of a happier Roy Andersson.)

Fiona is a diligent fast-food manager; as her husband turns off the lights to sleep across town, she is turning off the lights to her restaurant, her implied home. Only now, returning briskly to finish an overlooked task, she becomes locked in a walk-in freezer. Freed the next morning by industrious employees, who march around the restaurant in the odd choreographies of routine, Fiona finds that nobody noticed her absence. Not her staff, her husband, or her two children. At the same time, she has a strange new fixation—she is drawn to anything remotely cold. It represents an inner freedom, the chance to do something for herself, and so she leaves her family for an iceberg in the Arctic.

The best moment comes as Fiona backs away from a lone commuter bus in an empty parking lot. Her backward steps slow and cautious and eyes ever fixed on the open door, she seems to regret any notion of fleeing. Just then, a group of elderly men and women shuffles into view. They walk like packed sardines, stomachs pressed to backs and feet barely leaving the pavement, and as they move towards the bus they absorb Fiona. It’s a recurring theme for the filmmakers, and for Fiona—separating one’s self from shifting sameness of everyday life. This same group of men and women appears later, still packed tightly together, as a mute fisherman prepares to kill himself; they are centered, with Fiona and the fisherman existing on the brink of the screen, and turn as a one between the two opposing figures. Pure beauty.

by Adam Balz | Source: DVD
07 Oct 2007 12:08 AM | Submit Comment


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