Marck Asch hjá Reykjavik Grapevine skrifar um Keep Frozen, heimildamynd Huldu Rósar Guðnadóttur, sem nú er í sýningum í Bíó Paradís. Asch segir hana leggja áherslu á takt vinnunnar með því að einbeita sér að hinum reglubundnu hreyfingum manna og véla.
Asch segir m.a.
‘Keep Frozen’, the first feature-length film from artist and filmmaker Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir, considers the necessary anachronism of manual labour in the modern world. Shot in Reykjavík’s old harbour, just west of of downtown, the film documents the grueling workday of the dockworkers who unload tonnes upon cardboard-boxed tonnes of fish frozen at sea, from the dark of a winter morning into the dark of a winter night.
Hulda Rós, who has worked in sculpture, mixed-media, installation and performance art, attends to the rhythm of work, isolating the repetitive, inexorable choreography of men and machines: boxes are heaved, stacked, ferried by forklift and wrapped in plastic on a sort of Lazy Susan contraption, whirring sluggishly. Other visual artists and filmmakers have lately been attracted to the late-industrial majesty of the fishing and shipping sectors; with its focus on the stevedores servicing the floating fish factories that consolidated and transformed the Icelandic economy, you could consider ‘Keep Frozen’ the humbler dry-land companion piece to Peter Hutton’s ‘At Sea’, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s ‘Leviathan’, or Mauro Herce’s ‘Dead Slow Ahead’.
But despite the rigor of its visuals, this film is not strictly abstract. Voiceovers complement the drudgery, like daydreams, as the men—they’re all men—reflect, in Icelandic and Polish, on their work. Their concerns are very contemporary: in their acknowledgement of the linguistic and cultural hierarchies which persist in long-running blue-collar concerns in the Schengen era; and especially in their flashes of nostalgia, which recall ‘We Are Still Here’, the recent documentary about shuttered fish factories and dying Westfjords villages, or more than one recent fiction film about phlegmatic farmers clinging to a way of life, way off the Ring Road.
Sjá nánar hér: ‘Keep Frozen’ : Tote That Barge! Lift That Bale! – The Reykjavik Grapevine
