Echo is a film from Iceland made in 2018 and conceived by Runar Runarson. The movie is an hour and fifteen minutes long and consists of 57 vignettes, each presented in a single, uninterrupted take without camera motion. The vignettes are too short to contain narrative-- some of them seem documentary; others are like scenes from domestic melodramas that don't exist-- clips from pictures that were never made. A movie like this requires some structure since it has no plot and the director makes no real effort to establish pictorial or dramatic themes. Despite the movie's title, the vignettes don't echo one another -- this isn't a lyric work in which the episodes allude to one another or can be viewed as comprising some sort of system of cross-references. If Runarson is trying to make some point about Icelandic society, or post-modernism, or modern marriage or, even, the the weather and geology in the country, I couldn't detect it. The film's only pattern relates to the passage of time: the movie seems to begin on Christmas Eve, or, perhaps, a few days before Christmas, and ends, as far as I can tell, on New Year's Day -- accordingly, the picture's episodes track the passage of time in chronological fashion across a period of a week or so.
Of course, there are some precursors to the film, but none of them really model what Echo shows us. Walter Ruttmann's 1927 Berlin, the Symphony of a City shows people in various walks of life navigating a single 24 hour period -- the different hours of the day structure the movie. But the main point is a poetic, objective depiction of life in a city. (There are several other city symphony movies that have a similar form; notably Jean Vigo's A propos Nice and Manoel Oliviera's Doura; the prototype for the genre is a 1913 American film, Manhatta, derived from a poem by Walt Whitman.) In Whitman's Song of Myself, there are extraordinary sections consisting of dozens, even hundred vignettes of things happening simultaneously -- some of these events are trivial while others are greatly consequential. Whitman's point is that he embodies all of mankind and assimilates this panorama of action to himself -- he contains as he says "multitudes." There is no overt proclamation of intent by the director of Echo, however, and we don't get the sense that Runarson is expressing his own personality through the vignettes, although, of course, there is a principle of selection at work in which we might discern some glimpse of the film maker's interests. Some scenes in the movie suggest the influence of the Swedish film maker Roy Andersson (On Endlessness and A Pigeon sat on a Branch contemplating Existence), but Andersson's pictures involve tiny anecdotes, most of them designed to make a funny point and his work has some of the flavor of a fantastically accomplished series of TV commercials. Echo is really nothing like this and seems to me sui generis in the director's "negative capability" -- he doesn't force any interpretation of the material on the viewer. The work reminds me of some of Robert Rauschenberg's collage paintings -- there are all sorts of images available on the canvas and the viewer can assemble them into different motifs and patterns, but those systems of meaning remain in the viewer and are not necessarily controlled by the artist. The ethic of such work is to not impair the viewer's freedom to make what he or she will out of the raw material that comprises the collage -- in Echo's case, the collage consists of bits of film. (It's interesting to observe that Rauschenberg has made several "combines" including the word "echo" including "Echo when" (1978) and "Eco Echo (1992-1993) and, certainly, there's a possibility that Runarson is referring to these images.)
The movie is very entertaining. It shows some great Icelandic landscapes and there's quite a bit of wry humor. Children at a Christmas pageant imitate the manger scene and, then, Santa Claus appears identifying himself as "Mr. Santa who brings the Coke." During a New Year's Eve fireworks display, a small dog huddles under a table and, then, crawls off in morose terror to the side. A yuppie quarrels with his mother on the phone saying that he won't eat whale meat for ethical reasons at their Christmas feast and that he never liked the stuff anyway. Middle-aged men drink beer in a garage where they are fermenting shark meat -- their wives won't let them in the house with stuff. A group of shady-looking men (they look like drunks) are playing monopoly and taunting one another. A group of meat-cutters in a slaughterhouse dance to "Jingle Bells" playing on the radio. When Iceland's prime minister delivers her traditional New Year's Eve address, there's a political row and a man wearing a funny pointed hat storms out of the house. Some of the scenes are disturbing -- an undertaker arranges crepe around a dead child in a church before the funeral and, then, calls his own child to make arrangements to pick her up. An angry girl is berated by a teacher for breaking a boy's nose. At a bus stop, a well-dressed woman encounters a sad little lady who seems somehow disabled -- the well-dressed woman was part of a group of people who mercilessly bullied the other woman in high school. The little dwarf-like woman says that she forgives her persecutor, but, then, adds that she doesn't want to talk to her and limps away. Divorced parents angrily accuse one another of violating court decrees over the holiday custody. Immigration authorities drag two men out of a Church in which they have sought asylum. A Black American athlete says that he has signed up for another year of play in Iceland but misses everyone at home -- he can't take the perpetual Winter dark and has been lying in a tanning booth. A woman working in a store that seems to sell bird toys, possibly puffins, weeps inconsolably when she learns that her ex-husband has bought plane tickets for their children to visit him over the holidays. A handsome old man with Alzheimer's disease sits with his daughter who talks to him about the holidays -- he has a blank expression on his face and doesn't seem to know who she is. An old lady visits a cemetery with her grandchildren and daughter and says in a matter-of-fact way that she will soon be buried next to her deceased husband, then "your mother will die and be buried here and, then, you will also die and be in a grave in this graveyard." A woman gives birth to a little boy. An addict talks to two kind women at a needle exchange -- they give him a box of needles and, apparently, drugs with which to inject himself. A huge choir sings "Silent Night" in a frosty public square. We see a mountainous headland draped in mist across a fjord. The film ends with a shot taken from a seagoing vessel of colossal rolling waves. The first two shots of Echo are characteristic: a SUV is slowly pulled through a glass-walled car wash -- huge brushes batter the vehicle. Then, Runarson centers a pyramidal icy peak in the center of the frame, we see some men wearing orange coveralls marching toward the peak across the level, stony plain. More and more men become visible forming a line in which each man is separated by about 15 feet from his fellows. I couldn't interpret the image until I had slept on the movie. I now believe the vignette shows a search party, systematically moving across the plateau, possibly looking for someone like the handsome old man in the suit with dementia -- perhaps, someone has wandered off into the wilderness and must be found. And, there, you see how the film works -- I have constructed a little narrative linking two sequences. The film is an example of the Kuleshov effect. Although we understand that the individual shot aren't related, we nonetheless create patterns as we construe the film.
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