Bjork made her film debut in the 1990 feature The Juniper Tree<\/em>, an intimate cinematic adaptation of a Grimm fairy tale. The plot reads like the lyrics to a Bjork song: After their mother was stoned for practicing witchcraft, sisters Katla (Bryndis Petra Bragad\u00f3ttir) and Margit (Bjork) leave home. Katla falls in love with the flinty widower Johann (Valdimar \u00d6rn Flygenring), but his son Jonas (Geirlaug Sunna \u00deormar) refuses to accept Katla into the family. Margit and Jonas\u2019s visions of their late mother pull the family apart and leads to tragedy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Director Nietzchka Keene brings a naturalistic approach to what could have been a more fabulist retelling of this folk tale. She frequently shoots the cast in wide shots against the rolling hills and craggy seascapes of rural Iceland, grounding them in a world both mythic and recognizable, and her screenplay treats Margit and Jonas\u2019s second sight as a natural outgrowth of the grief they both experience. The performances have a similarly lived-in quality, particularly Bjork. Her halting, singsongy line readings, tentative eye contact, and trembling physicality reflect the pain Margit has experienced and the fear she has towards her future. As in her otherworldly music videos, Bjork gives Margit\u2014the point-of-view character for the film\u2014an appealing vulnerability that allows audiences to empathize with the fantastical events of the plot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Juniper Tree<\/em> was shot in 1986, but due to budget issues was only released four years later. Before its premiere, Bjork starred in the Icelandic made-for-TV movie Broken Glass<\/em>. The film seems to depict a teenage girl\u2019s descent into mental illness and institutionalization after joining a cult. (I say \u201cseems to\u201d because the only available version is in unsubtitled Icelandic.) DP Krist\u00edn J\u00f3hannesd\u00f3ttir\u2019s use of smeary analog video, blue-tinted lighting, and dutch angles recall the kinds of experimental videos you\u2019d see at modern art museums in the 1980s, and the juxtapositions between ancient Icelandic edifices and contemporary appliances (as in the opening scene, which seems to be set at a laundromat) suggest a spoof on the \u201creject modernity\/embrace tradition\u201d meme. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If the film looks avant garde, the acting\u2014at least to this non-Icelandic speaker\u2014was consistent with American made-for-TV movies in the 1990s. The cast seems to be competing for a Best (or Most) Acting award with their high-decibel line readings, big, sweeping gestures, and contorted facial expressions. Bjork, the teenage girl protagonist, is the smallest member of the cast, and her incredulous facial expressions and pauses for breath in the middle of sentences are the kinds of things a teenage girl tired of fighting to be heard would do. Her costumes in Broken Glass<\/em>\u2014particularly the bottle-green tights and shocking pink Chuck Taylors she wears in the opening scene\u2014are a neat bridge between her early dalliance with acting and the quirky outfits she wore onstage with The Sugarcubes<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 15 years between films, Bjork sang for the critically acclaimed Icelandic band the Sugarcubes and eventually forged an influential solo career of her own. Music video played a significant role in her ascent, and her charismatic, slightly loopy screen presence made some of her fans wish she would appear in a feature film. Dancer in the Dark<\/em>, the film in which Bjork would eventually star, feels like a monkey\u2019s paw wish. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the film, Bjork plays Selma Je\u017ekov\u00e1, a Czech immigrant who has moved to Washington state in the mid-1960s so her 12-year-old son Gene can get surgery to correct his degenerative eye condition. Her landlord, the town policeman Bill (David Morse), takes advantage of her own near blindness to steal the money she\u2019d saved for Gene\u2019s operation. When Selma attempts to recover the money, she accidentally kills Bill, and the fallout from his death leads to tragic consequences for Selma and her son. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bjork\u2019s ability to find the humanity in mythic stories and her knack for depicting strength in vulnerability gives her performance as Selma a palpably raw quality. Director Lars Von Trier frequently shoots her in uncomfortable, unflattering close ups that underscore how defenseless Selma is throughout the story. At times Von Trier\u2019s screenplay and direction undermine Bjork\u2019s performance and her public image as a whole; by casting a short, average-sized woman with dark hair and a thick Scandinavian accent in a cast of taller, slimmer blonde women who speak with midcentury American accents, he emphasizes her foreign place of origin, which is used against her in one of the trial scenes at the end of the film. Selma\u2019s love of musicals at times seems less like a means of escape than like a hyperfixation (as in an early scene where she\u2019s scolded for bringing the script for a production of The Sound of Music<\/em> she\u2019s starring in to her job at the factory). Bjork\u2019s unruly singing voice works surprisingly well in the glimpses we get of her performance as Maria in The Sound of Music<\/em>, and her disarmingly direct style makes musical theatre standards like \u201cMy Favorite Things\u201d sound fresh and new. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Writing about Dancer in the Dark<\/em> without discussing the effect it had on Bjork is almost impossible. When the film was in production, the press reported on her eccentric on-set behavior\u2014such as defiantly eating a shirt<\/a>\u2014with a mocking tone that implied \u201cthat\u2019s just Bjork being Bjork\u201d. The singer was rumored to have given up on acting after the grueling production for Dancer in the Dark<\/em>. But she released a statement in 2017 about Von Trier\u2019s abusive and exploitative on-set behavior<\/a>, describing unwanted touching and verbal sexual advances as well as the director\u2019s anger when she set boundaries. (She also refuted one of the more notorious stories about her behavior during the film\u2019s production: \u201ci have never eaten a shirt. not sure that is even possible.\u201d) It\u2019s difficult to watch Dancer in the Dark<\/em> in 2022 with the awareness of Von Trier\u2019s treatment of Bjork and not see pain and confusion in her eyes during some of the film\u2019s pivotal moments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bjork would return to film one more time in 2005 with Drawing Restraint 9,<\/em> an experimental feature she made with her then-romantic partner Matthew Barney. The film is a surreal travelogue in which two Occidental Travelers (played by Barney and Bjork) fall in love and seem to transform into sea creatures during their time on a Japanese whaling vessel. As with much of Barney\u2019s work, Drawing Restraint 9<\/em> makes a kind of intuitive sense as a deep dive on the subjects that interest him. Bjork\u2019s unique screen presence makes her scenes the most accessible and compelling moments for those who aren\u2019t entirely on Barney\u2019s wavelength. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Bjork has kept busy since the release of Drawing Restraint 9<\/em>, releasing a string of innovative albums and compiling a retrospective exhibit for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. What made her decide to work with Robert Eggers on The Northman<\/em>? Her frequent collaborator Sjon co-wrote the script with Eggers, who describes the \u201cfamilial atmosphere\u201d<\/a> of his set as a possible component for her work on the film. Bjork\u2019s moonlit introductory closeup and her gleefully malevolent line readings suggest the rebirth of a movie star\u2014or at least a character actress\u2014and could portend a second attempt at a sideline in film, but this time on her own terms.\u00a0 She has a key role in the new Robert Eggers film, so we look back at the Icelandic singer-songwriter’s cinematic legacy. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"featured_media":18184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381],"tags":[162,34],"class_list":["post-18181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","tag-movies","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21996,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18181\/revisions\/21996"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/dancer-1024x571.png\")
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