Nordic Watchlist’s newest writer, Jes Gislason, recently interviewed famed Icelandic author and poet Sjón. Sjón will be in the UK next month for a special event hosted by the Cinecity 23rd Brighton Film Festival. The event features the author in conversation with writer Amy Raphael, followed by a screening of an episode of Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (France, 1915–1916).
Nordic Watchlist: Many who know you know that you are quite the film enthusiast. So before going into anything else, would you like to start by telling us a bit about where your love of film began?
Sjón: I think it started the first time I saw a film at the cinema, and that was Mary Poppins. I went with my mom to Gamla Bíó (the name of an old cinema in Reykjavík), and I don’t know, I might have been around four years old, something like that, and it was a magnificent experience.
I believed everything that was happening on the screen. And I remember having a big enlightenment when Mary Poppins came sliding down the stairway handrail, and the film cuts to the umbrella she’s holding and the parrot starts moving and talking. Seeing that opened a new world for me. I was completely mind-blown, and ever since, I have believed in the movies. They have always since then been a big part of my life.
That was when I was four years old, but when I was around six years old, I started going to the Sunday cinemas, like kids in Reykjavík always did at that time. Every cinema in Reykjavík started screening films at 3 PM every Sunday, and they showed a lot of different varieties of films at those screenings. The cinema ticket itself was cheap, which meant everybody could go.
Nordic Watchlist: Considering how ticket prices are today, then yeah, I imagine it was a bit better then.
Sjón: Yes, everyone went to the Sunday cinema screenings back then, no doubt about it. I was just handed a bit of change, and that was enough for a cinema ticket. I lived fairly close to two cinemas at the time and went quite often… I might actually have been more like seven years old, not six. I don’t know if my mom would have let me go alone to the cinema at six years old.
So, at least by seven years old, I had started going with friends to the cinema on Sundays for the 3 pm screenings. And like I said, they showed a lot back then. The cinemas that had access to the cartoon collections, for example, Gamla Bíó had access to all the Disney films, and Háskólabíó (The University Cinema) had Warner Brothers, and they showed Looney Tunes. And they absolutely bombarded the kids with Looney Tunes from 3 pm and for the next hour and a half. Can you imagine being a kid and being bombarded like that with Looney Tunes for an hour and a half straight? It was incredible.
But like I say, these cinemas showed a lot of different content. I remember one film that I always thought was an old Tarzan film, but I found it again recently, and it’s a series called Darkest Africa from 1936 that follows an explorer travelling through Africa. There was one scene about people who lived in a hidden city and had a sort of wing mechanism on their backs; they were standing on the balcony, and then they took flight! Seeing those men flying on the big screen was another one of those big moments for me.
I didn’t understand how it was done. It was so realistic; I just couldn’t grasp it. This film was always stuck in my mind for years and years. So yeah, the Icelandic cinemas back then often just found whatever to show the kids, not just cartoons but also old westerns from 1943, and they probably thought to themselves, “Ah, this is old stuff; the violence isn’t that bad for the kids.” So yeah, sometimes they showed Disney or twenty-year-old westerns, so it was very diverse what they showed us at those 3 PM Sunday cinema screenings. That’s where it all started for me at least, because back then, you never missed a Sunday cinema screening.
At this time, there were maybe 6 or 8 cinemas in Reykjavík, all showing at 3 PM on Sundays, so that’s when everyone got hooked in.
And when I was a teenager, there was nothing to do in Reykjavík at that time. So it easily became a big part of kids’ culture to go to the cinema together. And when you were a teenager, you started going to the 7pm cinema screenings, and similar to the 3pm screenings, they showed a very diverse range of films: car chases, kung fu, and many more, so you can say I grew up on a very healthy cinema diet.
Nordic Watchlist: You mentioned earlier that you saw something on the screen that was not real but you believed it, Mary Poppins’ umbrella and the flying men, for example. And this brings me to your current work as both an author and filmmaker.
A big theme I have noticed in your work, ever since your animation Anna and the Moods and the film The Northman, and your book Moonstone, is that they all have one thing in common: they perceive reality a bit differently. In your work, the line between what’s real and what’s not is often blurred. Like the ghost scene in The Northman, the audience can decide for themselves if that actually happened or not. Can you talk to us a bit about this theme in your work?
Sjón: Well, yes. When you go to the cinema and submit yourself to the film in front of you, then you are really in two places at once. You’re both right here and now in the auditorium with the other audience members, so you are experiencing that, but your mind is also taking in the reality of what’s happening on the screen in front of you. And these two realities exist and live side by side in the whole cinema-going experience.
And that process has made it easy for me… ok, maybe not easy, but it has still made it easier for me to explore one of the things that I am interested in working with. In everything I write about, we are never existing in just one reality. We are always in a layered reality; there is this thing known as ‘The Reality,’ but we are also in our mind’s reality, or our ‘Mental Reality.’ And that is always clearest at the cinema.
I was reading a book the other day about dreams and movies. Showing a dream in a film is really interesting because people have figured out that making a surrealist dream in a film does not work, simply because the film itself is like a dream for the audience; we are experiencing it as a dream.
Ingmar Bergman has, for example, said that his greatest regret was creating a surrealist dream sequence in Wild Strawberries; in that film, the old man has a weird surrealist dream with odd angles and clocks and so on. It’s a very nice scene from Ingmar Bergman, but he still said he regretted it because it was such an obvious fabrication. When we dream, we are present in the reality of the dream and we don’t question it, not until we wake up. So, Bergman said he learned after that that if you are going to have a dream in a film, you have to make it a realistic experience because we are already in a dream, which is the film that we are watching. It’s a mental experience.
One of the masters of filming dream sequences is Jean-Claude Carrière, who worked a lot with Luis Buñuel. He wrote a brilliant book called The Secret Language of Films and was the head of the Paris Film School. Anyway, Jean-Claude was talking to a writer friend of mine about this subject, which was dreams in films, because he had a dream sequence in his script. Jean-Claude told him, “I have reached the conclusion that the only way to make a dream work in a film is if someone talks about it.” So don’t show it, just talk about it. That was the only way to have a real dream in a film. I thought that was very interesting because this is a filmmaker who went on an incredible filmmaking journey with Luis Buñuel, and they made a film called The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
There is a sequence in that film where people are trying to get somewhere to eat, but there is nothing odd or strange in these dreams except that they never get anything to eat; they are always going between places to grab something to eat, but something always happens, and they never manage it.
Nordic Watchlist: This is a common enough theme in dreams that many can relate to, so it’s quite brilliant.
Sjón: Exactly, and very realistic in itself. So, yes this is something that I have always been interested in, how to create these things in a film that is already a different kind of mental reality. And like in The Northman, everything that happens in that film, but this is obviously created and thought of by Robert Eggers as well, he is very conscious about all of this, So when Robert and I were working on The Northman, we were really exploring how we could move between realities in the film. And sometimes moving between realities in the same shot, even. It happens when he sees Odin, when he fights the Haugbúi (draugur / ghost)
Nordic Watchlist: Or when Ingvar E. Sigurðsson is talking as the skull?
Sjón: Yes even then, so yes, it is a lot of fun to work with those boundaries of reality because the film itself is already a mental reality. And what helps us is that human beings always live every day on the line between their mental realities and Reality. This comes a lot from Surrealism, surrealists loved a concept that Sigmund Freud called the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle, and that man always stood between those two principles. The pleasure principle is the thing in our minds and the reality principle is the thing that meets it. So we are always walking through life with these two principles clashing.
When I was a teenager, maybe around 15 years old I discovered that ‘other’ films existed. This is around the time I started going to the cinema alone.
Nordic Watchlist: My life changed when I realised I could go to the cinema alone, and just fully form my own opinion and not be painted by my friends opinion.
Sjón: Yes, and when I was going downtown to run errands, I would end by going to the cinema and just watch what was on at the time. And then I started to discover films that are maybe not arthouse films but I was then discovering Robert Altman, Alan Rudolph, so yeah, finally seeing films that were not action and car chases, or anything aimed at teenagers. I remember seeing the film The Last Detail with Jack Nicholson, and discovering then that films could actually be about something, and not just about the action.
But at that time I had not yet realised that someone actually created this film. Children, for example, have no interest in who actually writes the books they are reading; they are just reading the story, oblivious to who actually wrote it.
Nordic Watchlist: I remember that happening to me when I was a kid; someone asked me about Astrid Lindgren, and I said I didn’t know who that was, even though her book, Brothers Lionheart, was then and is still today my favourite book.
Sjón: Yes, exactly. Kids don’t care who writes them; they just read the story. There is a brilliant book by Peter Bogdanowitz called Who the Devil Made it. I remember when I discovered for the first time that ‘Someone made this’—that someone chose that I should watch this. Because when you are young, the films are just there, and you are not necessarily thinking about who made them. I can’t recall who says this in Peter’s book, but they are describing the moment when you are sitting there in the auditorium and you suddenly realise, “someone created this.” Someone decided how I am experiencing this right now.
The first time I had that realisation was when I was watching Autumn Sonata, directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Ingrid Bergman. It’s a serious drama, and I remember being fascinated by this film. There is this one scene in the film when evening arrives and the lights change on the film set, altering the atmosphere; then I realised that this was a decision made by the director to bring me to the next phase of the story. I saw that someone was controlling it. That was a big moment for me to realise that someone is conducting the movie I am watching.
Nordic Watchlist: Would you say that it’s a good thing or a bad thing when you realise this while watching a film?
Sjón: This is obviously something that you shouldn’t notice when you are watching a film, but in that specific moment when I was fifteen and noticed that someone was conducting the lights and the camera and choosing how I see it was a good thing, because it taught me something important. It was a fun enlightenment.
Around this time, I also joined the club called Fjalarkötturinn, which was a high school film club. There, they showed films by Federico Fellini, Buñuel, Kurosawa, and other directors, and I finally reached the level of ‘Cinephile,’ where I began to have a great interest in the art of filmmaking and realized that this is a world phenomenon.
Nordic Watchlist: The reason you are coming to Cinecity Brighton is because they are showing extracts from the film Les Vampires, which has a connection to your novel Moonstone, could you talk to us about the connection there?
Sjón: When I am writing Moonstone, I write my main character, Máni Steinn, as a 16-year-old boy in Reykjavík in 1918. And when I was writing him, I realised I had taken everything away from him. He was dyslexic, he had no job, he was an orphan, had no friends, and he was gay, so I had pushed him to the very brink of society at that time and taken everything from him. But then I thought that won’t do; he has to have something, because I’m not writing a sad violin story here. I suddenly remembered that I had a lot of files about the early film life in Reykjavík at the very start of cinema history, so I thought to myself, he’s sixteen; he loves movies!
He is a part of that adventure, as films are arriving in Iceland. And not just in Iceland but in the world, and just like me, he became a cinema lover at sixteen. So now I have something in common with the main character that I am writing and it will be a joy to write this book and how he tackles it when the Spanish Disease arrives in Iceland. And I started to look up what had been at the cinema around that time.
I try my best in my work to keep things historically accurate and correct. So if I am writing a story that takes place from Sept – Dec in Reykjavík in 1918, and I have a character who loves film, then I want to know what was shown then. And that will affect him in the book because they closed the cinemas because of the Spanish flu. But I also wanted to explore what he might have already seen in the cinema before. So I researched news articles from around 1910 and saw what had been showing at the time.
Film arrives to Reykjavík fairly early on, and it’s brilliant how big and early the cinema culture grows in Reykjavík, and at that time there are maybe just 10.000 – 15.000 people in Reykjavík. And then there are already two cinemas in Reykjavík, so yes, I wanted to know what he might have seen at the time, and I wanted it to be something that I would have enjoyed as well if I had been sixteen years old then as well. So I am now starting to mix myself and Máni Steinn together.
Nordic Watchlist: So the line between the main character and the author becomes blurred.
Sjón: Yes! It is fun to have something in common with him, even though we are different in other ways. But I noticed that films by Louis Feuillade had become popular in Iceland, before he made Les Vampires he made the Fantomas series, and I was familiar with Fantomas from surrealism.
Surrealists loved Fantômas, which was a super thief that put Paris and French society in turmoil. I started looking at that series for my book, but it didn’t really fit with the time of the book. But then I discovered that Les Vampires was at the right time and that the lead actress, Musidora, was a big icon for surrealists. And she becomes The Woman! She fights with the men in the film, she even dresses like a man; overall, a brilliant woman character, the provocative woman of the new age.
There I found a good middle ground with the main character in the book and myself, the surrealism, the films, everything that I enjoy. And also, the reality of gay people at the time, there were a lot of books that I found that said how the cinema was almost the only safe space for gay people at the time. Where they could see themselves on the screen before coming out themselves. And at the cinema, they had space to explore themselves. There have been many articles written about the cinema being the first haven for homosexual people.
And the vampires themselves in the film became a big part in the book, because one of the biggest events in the book is that the Spanish Disease comes to Iceland.
Also, Máni Steinn in the book is experiencing cinema, this new groundbreaking thing, so he and the people in Reykjavík then, people who had almost nothing, now for the first time had access to other worlds and another way of thinking. Because the upper-class people in Iceland then went only to the Danish plays in the theatre, but the lower class had cinema. So the film Les Vampires is about this criminal gang of vampires that terrorizes Paris.
Nordic Watchlist: Just like the Spanish disease is terrorising Iceland.
Sjón: Yes, precisely! So this film series, Les Vampires, became very important for the book Moonstone and is a tangled theme throughout. The book has as many chapters as the film series has films. There were ten films, or ten chapters. In every chapter of my book, there is a reference to the vampires.
Nordic Watchlist: Would you recommend watching Les Vampires before reading the book?
Sjón: Haha, maybe not, it’s almost seven hours, so no one has to do that. But I remind the reader about the important parts in the films in the book, so it’s all there.
One last thing as well. When I was doing my research for the book and reading memoirs from people from that time, people who were young around the years 1912 – 1920, it was peculiar that no one described their first time going to the cinema, no one.
But then I realised that the people at that time who wrote books and memoirs and were in a position to tell their stories didn’t go to the cinema. It was kids and the working class who went to the cinema, and they don’t write memoirs. So I had to really imagine what it must have been like. That’s why Máni Steinn is just a kid going to the cinema, like me.
You can find out more about this exclusive event at Lewes Depot on November 8th by clicking the link HERE
Interview recorded in Icelandic and translated into English.
