Architechture of Home (Thorunn Hafstad, 2010)
This was the most original film I saw at Hot Docs and probably the most original thing I’ve seen this year. This reminds that not only are there new and interesting things you can do with the documentary form but also that even digital video can be beautiful. I just wanted to high five Hafstad after I saw this (but I actually just said, ‘Hey Melissa, want to skip the Q & A? They’re usually bad I find’). Anyhow, this was a very simple topic: a government housing complex founded in Iceland in the 1930s and maintained to this day as an exemplary instance of old school elegance and of modest yet sensible modern design.
Various residents are encountered but we don’t learn their names, occupations, or how they came to live there. Instead we learn their small, idiosyncratic obsessions. One character agonizes over socks. He washes all the socks for the household, hangs them up all one by one, and goes on and on about how unacceptable even two brown socks of varying thicknesses can be (‘One foot will be too cold, while the other will sweat too much. Something like this will ruin your entire day’). Another character collects super balls. She has garbage bin-sized container of the bouncy rubber balls that are similar but a little bit different. She demonstrates how she organizes them by genus or by colour. Another character makes brownies that are designed to look like Olympic stadiums (‘It’s not hard, you can do anything, you just need to think of it and then execute’).
Hafstad is great because she incorporates this obsessive fussing over minutiae and incorporates it into the aesthetic of the film. It’s an OCD aesthetic. Close ups of baseboards, circuit boxes, and piano hardware only conjure a feeling of old world design mixed with the comfort of kitschy, out of date typography. The anthropomorphic close up of the kettle and later the magic of the drops of water landing on the element, sizzling, and then vapourizing was a nice touch.
This film just made me like Iceland.
Various residents are encountered but we don’t learn their names, occupations, or how they came to live there. Instead we learn their small, idiosyncratic obsessions. One character agonizes over socks. He washes all the socks for the household, hangs them up all one by one, and goes on and on about how unacceptable even two brown socks of varying thicknesses can be (‘One foot will be too cold, while the other will sweat too much. Something like this will ruin your entire day’). Another character collects super balls. She has garbage bin-sized container of the bouncy rubber balls that are similar but a little bit different. She demonstrates how she organizes them by genus or by colour. Another character makes brownies that are designed to look like Olympic stadiums (‘It’s not hard, you can do anything, you just need to think of it and then execute’).
Hafstad is great because she incorporates this obsessive fussing over minutiae and incorporates it into the aesthetic of the film. It’s an OCD aesthetic. Close ups of baseboards, circuit boxes, and piano hardware only conjure a feeling of old world design mixed with the comfort of kitschy, out of date typography. The anthropomorphic close up of the kettle and later the magic of the drops of water landing on the element, sizzling, and then vapourizing was a nice touch.
This film just made me like Iceland.