Echo Film Difficulty Ranking: 3
Why Watch Echo?
- If you want to see a composite 80 minute film made from 56 parts
- Experience a wide range of Icelandic society
- Join the debate on the current state of Iceland
From: Iceland, Europe Watch: Trailer, Mubi, IMDb Next: Involuntary, Hale County This Morning This Evening, Coffee and Cigarettes
A 56 Part Composite Film
Echo is made up of 56 one to three minute long short films. You won’t see any characters in more than one of these vignettes and there’s no connections between them in terms of narrative. However, they are all held together by time. Each one slowly progresses from late November time through to the New Year.
Whilst it feels unique on the big screen, the 56 short film format feels more in line with modern day viewing. Every day, most of us scroll through our social media feeds, pausing for any video that catches our eye. At most we might spend 2-3 minutes watching one video or reading one article, before we scroll onto the next one. So Echo‘s collection of short films feels fairly natural to watch. However, unlike social media, we can’t scroll through one short film to the next one. We’re forced to watch each one in full. And because of it, we get a more rounded observational picture of a country that we might have otherwise missed if we had a skip button.
A Microcosm of Iceland
This 56 part film is a microcosm of Icelandic life. Whilst the 56 parts don’t have any shared characters or narratives, they combine to create a feel of the country. Even though each short film is staged, together they resemble a documentary. Every scene feels real. Each vignette focuses on the mundane everyday motions of life that fictional film largely ignores. In one scene, there’s a man celebrating New Year’s alone with a microwave dinner and in another there’s a group of kids sneaking up to a house to steal a beer. There’s also a few that are distinctly Icelandic such as an water aerobics group in an outdoor pool in the snow.
Furthermore, the fixed camera gives the film neutrality. It never zooms into a specific character to generate an emotional response from the viewer and never moves away from anything in the frame to hide anything. Everything in the frame is given equal space. As a result, everything is presented without judgment or opinion, much like an observational documentary.
A Zeitgeist Open to Interpretation
Because Echo is presented like an observational documentary, with a compilation of everyday scenes like a ready to scroll social media feed, the zeitgeist of the movie is open to our interpretation. Just as we might scroll by videos in our social media feed that don’t appear to interest us, we might not remember a lot of the vignettes in Echo that don’t interest us either. Instead we’ll remember the clips that catch our eye and they’ll combine in our memory to create a unique interpretation of the zeitgeist of Iceland. For example, I picked out a growing opposition to anti-free market capitalism from the following vignettes that caught my eye:
- A man burning down his own house because it’s cheaper to burn and build a new house to put on AirBnB than restore it as a neighbor reminisces on his old memories at the house.
- A construction manager complaining to his superiors at an empty building site because the workers are striking against their low wages.
- Two people watching TV and arguing about the growing wealth divide that the politicians have chosen sides on.
But that’s just what caught my eye. Someone else might watch this film and pick out a collection of vignettes linked to a different theme that interests them. If so, each viewer will finish Echo with a different view of Icelandic society.
What to Watch Next
There are a lot of great vignette films to watch, such as Magnolia and Traffic, but very few contain a bunch of unrelated vignettes like Echo. The closest film I can think of would be the brilliant documentary Hale County This Morning This Evening, featuring a lot of clips of people from Hale County, Alabama to give a sense of the area. You could also try Involuntary which features 5 different stories from Sweden or a Jim Jarmusch composite film like Coffee and Cigarettes.
Or if you’re looking for more films from Iceland, check out Rams.
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