The Culture Club (Film/Music: Heima (Sigur Rós)) July 12, 2009

This is the next study session in a series of culture studies where something from the media (e.g. a book, a film, a music album) is discussed from a Christian perspective but the session is for people of all faiths and people of no faith at all who want to explore the message behind the media.

The session will start at 5:30pm when we will watch the film on the big screen and discussion starts at 7:15pm.

There is no charge for this event and is open to all.

FILM INFO
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Trailer:



Gerard Kelly calls them "the Best Worship Band in the World who don't know they are one...", see his blog post @ http://xrds.vox.com/library/post/the-best-worship-band-in-the-world-who-dont-know-they-are-one.html

A summary of the film follows (taken from http://www.heima.co.uk/):

"Last year, in the endless magic hour of the Icelandic summer, Sigur Rós played a series of concerts around their homeland. Combining both the biggest and smallest shows of their career, the entire tour was filmed, and now provides a unique insight into one of the world’s shyest and least understood bands captured live in their natural habitat.

The culmination of more than a year spent promoting their hugely successful ‘Takk…’ album around the world, the Icelandic tour was free to all-comers and went largely unannounced. Playing in deserted fish factories, outsider art follies, far-flung community halls, sylvan fields, darkened caves and the hoofprint of Odin’s horse, Sleipnir*, the band reached an entirely new spectrum of the Icelandic population; young and old, ardent and merely quizzical, entirely by word-of-mouth.

The question of the way Sigur Rós’s music relates to, and is influenced by, their environment has been reduced to a journalistic cliché about glacial majesty and fire and ice, but there is no doubt that the band are inextricably linked to the land in which they were forged. And the decision to film this first-ever Sigur Rós film in Iceland was, in the end, ineluctable.

Shot using a largely Icelandic crew (to minimise Eurovision-style scenic-wonder overload), ‘Heima’ - which means both “at home” and “homeland” - is an attempt to make a film every bit as big, beautiful and unfettered as a Sigur Rós album. As such it was always going to be something of a grand folie, but one, which taking in no fewer than 15 locations around Iceland (including the country’s largest ever concert at the band’s Reykjavik homecoming), is never less than epic in its ambition.

Material from all four of the band’s albums is featured, including many rare and notable moments. Among these are a heart-stopping rendition of the previously unreleased ‘Gitardjamm’, filmed inside a derelict herring oil tank in the far West Fjords; a windblown, one-mic recording of ‘Vaka’, shot at a dam protest camp subsequently drowned by rising water; and first time acoustic versions of such rare live beauties as ‘Staralfur’, ‘Agaetis Byrjun’ and ‘Von’.

Heima is the first chance to see Sigur Rós live on DVD. November 5, 2007.

* The huge horseshoe canyon at Ásbyrgi was, according to legend, formed by the hoofprint of this mythical beast."

Previous Sessions
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This series continues to be popular. Previous evenings have looked at "The Squid and the Whale" (film), "The Bourne Supremacy" (film), "Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling" (book), "Into The Wild" (film), "Atonement" (film), "Iron Man" (film), "The Lives of Others" (film), "Pan's Labyrinth" (film), "Utopian Dreams" (book), "Breaking and Entering" (film), "Little Miss Sunshine" (film), "Evan Almighty" (film), "Babel" (film), "The Zahir" (book), "Paradise Now" (film), "Life on Mars" (TV series), "Collateral" (film), "Arthur and George" (book), "Moulin Rouge" (film), the Robbie Williams album "Intensive Care", "Lost in Translation" (film), "Whale Rider" (film), "The Incredibles" (film), "The Da Vinci Code" (book), the U2 album "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" and "Chocolat" (film).