QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM SAN SEBASTIAN
At a relatively brief 62 minutes, this Icelandic film sees two prepubescent males – Þorgils and Grímur – dig a big hole on a quiet cliffside of their country’s misty coast and bury a large wooden pole. Next they attach a dummy to it and dress it in an armour, complete with the headset. They then throw stones at the unusual sculpture, before attaching some long hair to it and deciding that their creation more closely resembles Joan of Arc, the French nationalist hero burnt alive in the 15th century. They continue to attack their victim, the assault growing more vicious, They nearly set fire to it after a large firework hits it, however the bow and arrow if their weapon their weapon of choice. Female teen Ída occasionally joins them.
The camera is entirely static and exactly in the same position throughout the entire film. This means that every single cut is a jump cut. Sudden changes in the landscape – full snow, sparse snow, sun, fog and rain reveal the passing of time. It could be a year or a week (those who have been to Iceland know how abrupt and deceptive the local weather is). The camera faces West, often catching the sunset. That comes at a price. The images against the sunlight are often little more than silhouettes. Pálmason opted for partial intelligibility of the images.
The conversations deal mostly with vikings, women and violence. During a trip to France, one of the young males picked up a few words in the language of Sartre, such as “bonjour” and “merci”. Thus may have impacted their sudden choice for the French martyr. He does not know the French word for war, though. That’s a major gap in his knowledge since he seems to think that such aggression defines ethnic and national identity. He finds comfort in the knowledge of the Spanish word for it, “guerra”, which he picked up in the television series Narcos. He boasts his viking background, and that his predecessors stole the beautiful women from the nations they invaded. His friend is far less enthusiastic about their background: “have you evet seen a good movie about vikings?”, he asks rhetorically.
In reality, the three characters are siblings, and the children of 40-year-old Hlynur Pálmason. The three young people also appear in their father’s The Love That Remains (2025), as the two films have been described as “companion pieces”. They use their real names in both movies. Perhaps the biggest difference between the two films is that the dialogues of Joan of Arc seem a lot more spontaneous, suggesting that this blend of film and art piece sits somewhere between autofiction and documentary.
The short duration and the unusual frame ratio (of nearly 1×1) make Joan of Arc the perfect audiovisual installation for a museum rather than the Friday night screening at your local cinema. It is necessary to sit close to the screen in order to grasp the subtle changes to the static frame. I was unfortunate enough to sit on the last row of a long and narrow movie theatre, meaning that I failed to see a lot of the detail. A satisfying watch, as long as you know what you’re in for.
Joan of Arc showed in the 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival.
