H is for House

This short film was the first movie directed by Peter Greenaway that I've ever seen. I heard a lot about his works, but I didn't dare to watch any of them for a long time.
As far as I know, Greenaway is fond of creating sort of visual vocabularies. We certainly won't look for any connection between the things and ideas, designated with words beginning from the same letter, but at the same time these things are inseparably linked in our mind by means of language. So the movie shows us the absolute illogicality of it by providing us with an absurd set of words beginning with H. Some things that should be connected begin from different letters, e. g. sun and heliocentric. And some opposite ideas both begin with H, e. g. heaven and hell.
The interesting thing is that the older we get, the less we notice this absurdity of words. We get captured by our language and don't even realise it.
What Greenaway also shows in this short film is that things that we say or do can have as little sence as this simple enumeration of words. The most hard and most important altogether is to single out the meaningful segments. And you have to do it in your real life as well as while watching the movie. Although the film was shot in 1973, I think the ideas that it reveals are still topical issues.

Noi the Albino (Nói albinói)

Finally I've watched it, and I liked the movie a lot. "Noi the Albino", filmed by Dagur Kári in 2003,  seemed very nice to me, and it contains a great number of interesting, original scenes that attract the viewer's attention.
It gave birth to many thoughts in my head, and I think it's one of the main tasks for a good movie. Some concerned the everyday life of people in Iceland. For example, I wonder if the scene of a cooking lesson in French was fictitious or not.

The other thing I'd like to mention is that the idea of a small remote village in Russia and in Iceland differs a lot. Actually, I wouldn't have called what I saw on the screen a village at all.

Two birds (Smáfuglar)

While I don't have enough free time to watch a full-length film, I try to content myself with short ones.
The movie "Smafuglar" was shot in Iceland in 2008 by Rúnar Rúnarsson and won lots of awards.
At first I didn't like it. Was it longer, I might even have switched it off after the outset of the plot. But I knew it would last only 15 minutes, so I kept watching.
The main theme is sex, as well as in "101 Reykjavik", and it seems to me that there are many more icelandic movies concerning it. The characters in "Two birds" are much younger, I'd call them kids. This makes it harder to watch the film.
But the upshot is so great, that every thing that caused any aversion just fades away in its radiance. It turnes the movie into a story of love and self-sacrifice, where a young boy has to make a mature decision. And I think the boy who played the main role did it great.
Surely the movie is oppressive. But you don't lose faith in people after watching it. At least in some of them.

Meyrink vs Kafka

Both these writers lived in Praha at the same time, in the beginning of the 20th century. It was a tough time, so it's not surprising that it affected the writers deeply.
But I had no idea of them being contemporaries or compatriots until I read their books. At first I noticed similar motives concerning the authorities in "Process" and "Golem". That's why I looked up in Wikipedia if the writers knew each other, and it turned out that they just lived in the same place.
Recently I've finished reading "The Walpurgis night" by Meyrink, and there I found an intersection with Kafka once more. The beginning of "The Walpurgis night" seems to be sort of reflection of Kafka's "The Castle". Kafka writes about life in the Village ruled by the Castle, which is in some way mythical, though it can be seen from the Village. And in the Meyrink's novel we see the world from the point of view of the Castle. For the people who live there crossing the bridge separating them from the lower part of the city seems to be very dangerous or even impossible.
It's no wonder that the writers described similar things, for they were under similar and rather strong circumstances, but that's really interesting and amusing to find these parallels while reading various books.

101 Reykjavik

I wanted to watch an Icelandic movie in order to learn something about the culture of this country. I hadn't heard much of their cinema before I decided to watch something, so it was a completely random choice, but I can't say it was a good one.
Not that it is a bad movie. It's not a masterpiece, but not a failure either. It's just an average Scandinavian movie, showing all there is to know about the society and its hidden problems. I would say it's too gloomy though. The film is said to be a comedy, but I didn't find anything to laugh at.
It seems that there is nothing but windy evenings and night bars in Reykjavik, and I hope that's not true. The main character is an ordinary jobless man living with his mother. He strives for nothing, and at the same time he complains about boring and meaningless life. He can't even commit a suicide, it's too much for him to do that.
The other theme of the movie is sex in any possible form. Other viewers praise the brilliance of the plot, but I don't see anything great in the story of a man having sex with his mother's lesbian lover and impregnanting her. It may be a way to attract attention to the real problems of the society, but it seems to be some sort of delirium nevertheless. As if people were so shallow that nothing else could be of any interest to them.
There were some good moments in the movie, but the overall impression is rather dreary. If life in Iceland is really like that, I wouldn't like to visit this country. I can only hope that watching this film was the same as watching a Russian movie, where everybody is an alcoholic with no future. The only difference is that we wouldn't call that a comedy.