What’s it concerning the idea of geological time that you just discover so fascinating?
There is a quote from a author named Robert Macfarlane—who’s type of a peer of Andri’s—who talks about how, with the gaze of deep time or geologic time, issues that appear inert to the human eye come alive. A glacier, a mountain, really do include a life cycle. There are these sorts of patterns and rhythms. And I feel by exhibiting that life pressure, there is a means that it acts virtually like a rebuttal to those actually damaging, violent narratives about how the wilderness is a barren wasteland—that there is nothing there. We’re listening to, for instance, that Greenland is that this wasteland, however there’s individuals who have lived there for hundreds of years. There’s a lot richness and life there. So I feel that geologic time is a paradigm that may articulate that life pressure. And to play with it visually and sonically is actually thrilling to me—to point out that, no, this isn’t a useful resource to extract. It has its personal ontology, its personal life.
I feel wherever we are able to see ourselves in kinship with not simply nature however our ancestors from the previous and our future descendants, that may conjure a unique sense of accountability and caretaking—not only for the land that sustains us, but additionally accountability to future generations, whereas honoring the previous and the place we come from on the identical time.
I have been pondering so much about the way you and your workforce introduced the glaciers to life within the movie. There’s some actually unbelievable photos, and I additionally think about it should have been a little bit of a problem to seize one thing that’s so huge, that does not transfer in a means people can understand. Are you able to inform me extra about the way you and the workforce approached that?
I’ve a tremendous workforce, each in North America and in Iceland. They had been so expert at discovering the suitable areas, how we may movie on glaciers responsibly, ethically, and safely. After which I set to work with an unbelievable director of images, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, and an unbelievable sound designer, Björn Viktorsson. We had been actually speaking about this concept of glacial sentience to seize visually and sonically. Pablo, as each a cinematographer and a director, he is so expert at working particularly with water, fog, ice. He was discovering these compositions the place you would actually really feel the movement of the ice and the water, even when the composition appeared nonetheless. However since it is so onerous to understand precise motion of glaciers, the one means we may actually get at motion with out time-lapse photos was by sound. And that is the place Björn, working with this wonderful sound marketing consultant named Konstantin Vlasis, labored with these geophones and hydrophones to seize the sounds of the motion of the ice.
Certainly one of my favourite scenes within the movie is the place we’re on this ice cave and also you simply hear these creaks and groans. And Andri, by the narration says, like, “That is how a glacier sounds. You’ll be able to’t fairly see it, nevertheless it’s transferring.” And in order that’s how we’re actually attempting to ask the viewers into feeling not simply the motion however the aliveness of the ice—which, in a movie that’s concerning the dying of a glacier, we first need you to know it is alive.
