Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022)
The title is not a translation of the original Vanskabte land, which literally means 'Malformed Land', so it's more like Wretched or Godforsaken Land.
It's a wonderful film. Despite being filmed in Academy ratio, 4:3, and with rounded corners to make it look like something from long ago (tho it's in colour), it nevertheless has an epic scale – not just in the landscapes shown, but also in the editing, which often simply presents a scene for some seconds, and then another, perhaps like something in the Edda (which I admit I haven't read). The main character is a (fictional) early photographer, as well as a priest, and is shown using the collodian process to prepare his glass plates.
I liked Peter Bradshaw's review (I usually do).
Peter Bradshaw:
I left the cinema dazed and elated by its artistry; it is breathtaking in its epic scale, magnificent in its comprehension of landscape, piercingly uncomfortable in its human intimacy and severity. There is such superb compositional sense in the still life tableau shots and the almost archaeological sense of time, creating something deeply mysterious and unbearably sad. The Guardian.
Peter Debruge sees colonialism going together with religion:
... at once visually striking and emotionally austere, in its almost Bressonian restraint — takes the country’s colonialist past as its subject, pitting a late-19th-century man of faith against a force far stronger than him, like some kind of Arctic, art-house There Will Be Blood. ... Framed in a rounded-corners Academy ratio, the film can feel as alien as its characters and place, grim like a Lutheran church service, demanding reflection. Pálmason is an artist with a most unique sense of pacing, devoting months if not years to capturing images of a single location under changing conditions. Variety.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 28 December, 2023 | Now: 28 December, 2023