Despite my long-time worship of Sigur Rós, I managed to miss the limited theatrical run of their 2007 documentary Heima (which apparently translates to at home). There was, if I recall correctly, even a one-night showing at a theater nearby where I used to live in Baltimore, but, alas, even that convenience couldn't prove enough to actually get me out of whatever else I had had to do that night. But, nevertheless, I finally got around to watching this beautiful, amazing documentary* and have to immediately rank it among the best music films I've ever seen.
*It's on youtube, though I recommend (nay, demand) one watch it with a higher quality to fully appreciate the landscape footage.
Now, keep in mind, I am a huge fan of Sigur Rós. I love their music and they have probably continuously been one of my five favorite bands since I was back in high school. I have no idea how this film would strike someone unfamiliar with their music, though I imagine there would still be a tremendous amount to enjoy about it.
This premise of the film is simple: After a worldwide tour, Sigur Rós returned to their home country of Iceland to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in cities, small towns, and countrysides alike. The film blends both performance footage, band interviews, and Icelandic scenery to simultaneously convey ideas of sharing music, connecting to a place, and preservation. It is not overt or condescending, trying to paint Sigur Rós as magnanimous music heroes or attempting to color progress and technology as unstoppable evils, it is instead an honest, uncomplicated chronicling of a band who wants to share their music with the people* and places that inspire them.
* Seeing the faces of the little, Icelandic children listening to Sigur Rós is one of the best details in the film.
Sigur Rós does, however, come off exceptionally well in this film. They are humble and unpretentious, good-natured and bashful. One of the qualities that I admire in musical artists--and one that is hard to define and relies often on hunches and feelings--is an unadulterated love of music and an innate desire to share that with other people. Sigur Rós is a band that, from all I have been able to discern, could do without the pageantry and attention of being rock stars, content instead to simply have people come listen to them and enable them to continue making music.
"I think on stage, when everything is how it should be, like good sound, and like when everything feels right, you just kind of float. And then it's just like the best feeling ever, to sing for people. And you actually don't know you're singing, you're totally empty-headed, you're just like kind of floating there."
- Jón Þór "Jónsi”" Birgisson, from Heima
Similarly, this film enforces that their approach to writing and composing is of a similar ilk, as while their music is quite different and their presentation of it often intentionally unorthodox, is also comes off as natural and unselfconscious. This quality is displayed by the way their music seems to represent so perfectly the Icelandic landscape and lifestyle. So perfectly, in fact, that there are times when it seems the music must have been written to score the shots on the screen. It reveals a deep connection with the land they grew up in and still call home. It voices not only the majestic beauty of it--the sweeping plains and foggy mountains--but also the desolation and the way it is threatened.*
* Numerous times in the film, the band speaks about how development and tourism has changed their homeland.
This leads me too, to another elusive quality that I seek to ascribe to the bands that I love--that I am listening to the songs that truly must be mined from deep within the beings of the musicians. Again, this is perhaps an abstract idea and difficult to defend, but I don't want to hear songs that are designed, I want to hear songs that are born. I want to hear songs that speak truths about the lives of their performers. I want to hear songs that the performers must work to find somewhere within themselves, something that only they could write.* Some bands make this evident through profound lyrics, speaking against oppressors or to the human condition, yet Sigur Rós still accomplishes this without words as their focus (some of their songs are in Icelandic** and others consist only of syllables). Their songwriting is preternatural, their song-forms taken more from the classical playbook than the pop vernacular. Ultimately though, their songs are utterly beautiful--ranging from ethereal masterpieces to fierce explosions of feeling. No emotion is absent from their lexicon.
* This will again be a theme when I reveal my album of the year.
** I also usually enjoy the English translations of their lyrics as quasi-poems.
Heima is a film that, I feel, speaks to this requirement I have. It allows me to understand Sigur Rós in a way I never was able to before. To see the places they choose to play, to hear them talk about the experience, is enlightening, confirming the feelings that their music already gives: that these are creators worthy of my attention and admiration. In this film, their personalities are so intertwined with the music and the land, it is, in a figurative way, difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.
I cannot say what anyone else's reaction will be, especially since I was prepared so fully for this film by both spending years with the Sigur Rós catalog as well as having a romantic, idealization of my own cold, gorgeous landscapes (Maine), but Heima is, at worst, a beautifully filmed movie a wonderful soundtrack. At it's best though, it captures everything that is good about music. It shows what is possible from the desire to create and share, especially when removed from the distractions of posing and self-aggrandizment. It is a simple movie, straight-forward, but its two stars (Sigur Rós and Iceland itself) allow for an epic that is among the greatest unions of music and film.
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