TOO FAR NORTH The Self-serving Cinema Vérité of Atlantis, Iceland
It all begins with three children on a road in Iceland in 1965. From this vision in Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil to Peter Hanlon’s 2017 ode to the iconic documentary, Atlantis, Iceland, the figures we see symbolise something unobtainable and ethereal, referred to by both films as ‘the image of happiness’. As the voiceover in Marker’s film recounts:
He said that […] he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: ‘One day, I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film, with a long piece of black leader. If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’
Marker’s exploration of life in the early 1980s uses footage primarily from Japan and West Africa to create a collage. A textbook example of cinema vérité, the film movement dedicated to arms-length observation as a way of engendering authenticity in people and place, Sans Soleil commentates on the banalities of consumerism and expresses a desire for transparency in what drives us and in the choices we make, both as a society and as individuals.
In Atlantis, Iceland, Hanlon and his crew journey to Reykjavik in the hope of finding the three children, and to see the land they come from. They arrive in time for Iceland Airwaves and, though this renowned music festival
