Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, Rock in Reykjavik (1982) has a fair claim to be the most influential documentary in Icelandic cinema history. Its maverick director Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, later to launch the Icelandic Film Corporation and to secure an Oscar nomination for Children Of Nature (1991), was still in his 20s when he made it. He filmed performances from, and interviews with, the most talented and rebellious punk and New Wave bands of the period.
Among those featured were Björk, Bubbi Morthens and Purrkur Pillnikk.
Fridriksson has been contemplating “making a new film to see what happened to these people,” but thinks he’ll wait another ten years, health permitting. “These people are still very active in the music field. It would be a much better film if they were almost invisible…”
Rock In Reykjavik may now be acknowledged as a classic but, as Fridriksson recalls, he and his crew were regarded with extreme suspicion when they were shooting it.
“It was very important for all of us because we made it without any subsidy from the government. We were very brave. We got into trouble with censorship and stuff like that.”
TV broadcasters refused to buy the documentary. Spectators under 14 weren’t allowed to see it because of the outspoken interviews it contained. Newspaper editors pointed out that this was absurd – if they had published the same material on their front pages, the censors would almost certainly have left them alone. Somehow, Rock in Reykjavik even became caught up in debates around politics and local elections. It was “crazy” but such an outcry, the director suggests, is what “happens in a small society” like Iceland.
Rock in Reykjavik wasn’t profitable in itself but “the most important [thing] was that I got to know so many people.”
The project marked the beginning of Fridriksson’s collaboration with cinematographer Ari Kristinsson with whom he would work many times in the future. “And, of course, I got to know the best musicians in the country…and I got so many friends. I got to know so many people that I didn’t know before.”
Fridriksson may not have had a big budget but he still released the film in Dolby Stereo. Kristinsson was “a technical genius” and the ”sound people” were able to figure out how to record the music on eight-track and to “keep it in synch.”
Several of the musicians, among them Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, collaborated on Fridriksson’s later movies. The documentary was also seen and admired by Iceland’s artistic community. This was a period before MTV and pop videos but Fridriksson was giving exposure to figures who weren’t then part of the mainstream culture.
“It gave us courage, the same courage the musicians got when they saw themselves on the big screen.”
It was during the making of Rock In Reykjavik that Fridriksson himself decided he would spend “the rest of my life on filmmaking.” The director was making commercials for TV in order to earn money. His next step was to start working with actors. This was significant not just for his own career but for that of the Icelandic film industry. He set up a production company and acquired equipment. His own movies like Children Of Nature and Cold Fever were international hits but he also produced many Icelandic and foreign films including Lars Von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark (2000) which starred Björk.
Since making Rock in Reykjavik, Fridriksson has returned to documentary several times with projects like Horizon (2019), about landscape artist Georg Guðni Hauksson, and A Mother’s Courage: Talking Back To Autism (2009). “I like making documentaries very much,” the director declares. “I’ve been involved with the Icelandic Film School for the last five years or more. There, I tell my students to watch documentaries because in documentaries, you can see what creates atmosphere. Great documentaries have a very unique atmosphere…you catch atmosphere when you are shooting documentary. That is what it is – you are really catching stuff, just like fisherman with a fly. If there is a bite, you know something is going right for you. The same when you catch the atmosphere in a documentary. Then you know you are on the right track.”
Fridriksson will be participating in the Nordisk Panorama Forum as well as screening Rock In Reykjavik at the festival.
And, yes, the director is still touch with Von Trier. “He called me on my birthday,” he says of the Danish director who cast him in an acting role in his 2006 comedy, The Boss Of It All.
Outside his filmmaking, Fridriksson also still plays football three times a week “all year round.” He also remains a passionate, if long-suffering, Manchester United fan. He was there in Barcelona in 1999 on that famous night when United beat Bayern Munich with two last gasp injury time goals.
The director is guardedly optimistic that Man Utd’s latest manager, Dutch coach Erik ten Hag will lead the team out of the wilderness. “I think he will manage to do something but it will take time. I think this year will be so and so. I hope we be in fourth place and so we can make it to the Champions League again…he [ten Hag] is doing it his own way, but that will take three years!”
