Atlantis, Iceland

A career and a quarter interrupted my interest in the image of three children in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.

 

In the mid-1980s, I saw the 16mm film in a film studies class at the then South Australian College of Advanced Education. The lecturer said something like “this is what film is all about”. I was certain the film was mostly about Iceland. The image of those three children, described as the “image of happiness”, stayed with me. I didn’t see the film again for some twenty years when it was finally released on DVD. I can’t say if it was just that image, but it felt like I’d always had this thing about Iceland.

Since the Global Financial Crisis and that volcano (Eyjafjallajökull), the world seemed to join me in my fascination with Iceland. My wife and I spent a week there at the end of an Arctic adventure. It whetted my appetite. I wanted to go back. Next time for a music festival.

 

In 2014 I started preparing for retirement. I was going to focus on the three things I loved: film, music and politics. A film lecturer friend, Cole Larsen, asked me to help him make a punk music video. I loved punk. He’d had quite a bit of experience in the film industry and had directed a sci-fi feature (Double Happiness Uranium). Should be fun, I thought.

 

A drive around South Australia’s Hindmarsh Island the following year led to a suggestion to Larsen. “Hey, why don’t we go to Iceland for the Airwaves Music Festival? Maybe even make a couple of Icelandic punk music videos.”  Of course, secretly, I was wondering if I could also look for the three children, as they were likely my age. I started researching and discovered no-one knew anything about them. Not even on a Facebook page dedicated to Chris Marker.

 

A polymath friend decided to come. Rick Davies is a keen photographer and traveller, and had similar music and political tastes. Plus he was an engineer and a lawyer. Living Not Beige Films was born when Larsen, Davies and I joined forces. 

 

Then Robert Habel decided to join us from a painting trip to Spain and Portugal. Equally interested in politics, he liked punk, and metal as well. He’d worked around film quite a bit, quite a lot of it with Cole. It was starting to look like a boy’s own adventure (well, one for middle-aged men anyway).

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Our original plan was to make a series of music videos from the Airwaves off-venue program (and maybe look for three middle-aged Icelanders who had once been in a film – two girls and a boy, I thought).

 

We hatched a plan to maybe interview some of the Icelandic punk band members and show it to some of the bands we knew back home. We hadn’t had much luck convincing anyone else in Adelaide let us film them. This could encourage them to want our help. Maybe.

 

In April, as we were preparing, the government fell and an early election was expected in the Autumn. Autumn? Just before the music festival in November. We were well in to our preparations in August when the election was announced. October 29. The day after we were due to arrive. I decided to leave a week earlier than planned. We didn’t time it this way, but the US Election was two days after the end of music festival. Should we zip across to Washington or New York? I was unhealthily obsessed with US politics.

 

And then we did the improbable – we shot a film. In three weeks. In Iceland. I’d never written a treatment or directed a film, Rick had never held a movie camera, luckily Cole knew about film stuff and Rob could cook and was great at chasing bands to whom we could speak. Would we discover what it was that so interested me (and a few other million people) about Iceland: its music, its politics, and it’s amazing scenery, or would that image from 50-year old film haunt my sanity? I knew there was something about Iceland. I just had to find out what.