‘Godland,’ a visionary journey to the extremes of the Earth and art

A film about pioneers and about the existence of God and the power of his two most relevant creations, the Earth and the human being — the former as a force capable of subduing the latter through the wrath of nature — which is at the same time a western and the best kind of adventure film, mystical and physical. It makes perfect sense, because the extremes sometimes align. And auteur cinema, complex and transcendent, can be rooted in certain aspects of genre cinema. Thus, by giving each other meaning, they end up composing a major work.

Godland, the third feature film by Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason, presented to wide acclaim in the Un Certain Regard selection of the Cannes Film Festival, could be the film of the summer for the most exploratory cinephiles, those who look beyond the confines of what everyone else sees. Like the protagonist, a Danish priest who, at the end of the 19th century, is commissioned by his church to travel to inhospitable Iceland, to “that miserable flock of wretched and mediocre people,” to build a church and photograph its inhabitants. In fact, an opening text informs viewers that the story is inspired by the first surviving photographs of the Icelandic coast, of which there are just seven, taken with the wet collodion process.

Along with the concepts of travel, frontier, and conquest in the style of the western genre (in the words of its director, it would almost be better to describe Godland as a northern) presented with purpose and continuity in the first half of the story, there is the confrontation between two energies: that of progress, the mind, spirituality, theological wisdom and even technology (and that primitive camera), represented by the Protestant pastor; and that of tradition, physical strength and the wisdom of the land, personified in the man who guides him from civilized Denmark to Iceland, a land without trees, at a time when the latter country was not yet independent from the former. A fascinating tussle of mind and body combat that ends up merging because in this moral as well as physical journey, which involves the conquest of the new territory, both men contaminate each other until they become conflicted.

A film of a dazzling plasticity as ethnographic as it is pictorial, Godland also appears on the screen in unusual forms, which fit perfectly with its photographic origin: in 1.33:1 format, narrow, almost square, and with the four corners of the frame rounded, in the manner of ancient images. The impression for the spectator, therefore, is that of another trip, this one cinematographic, to a time and a place that forms at the antipodes of the room in which the film is projected.

Between the imposing landscapes, through which the journey to its destination takes place, and the inclement weather, Alex Zhang Hungtai’s dissonant soundtrack emerges as a constant omen of danger and estrangement. And Pálmason applies rigor in its staging, with beautiful lateral movements and a composition that in its interior shots may refer to Carl Theodor Dreyer, but in it exteriors, aided by the old format, that of silent films, displays almost mirror images of that denouement in the vast desert of Avarice (1924), by Erich Von Stroheim.

The protagonist priest is a man of the church whom God, through his creation, the Earth, intimidates with his omnipotence, degrading him to the point of becoming aware of his insignificance. Godland, cinematographically, reminds us of our own before a supreme screen.

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