• MoMA.Björk exhibition: art and celebration

Long before dancing in darkness for the perfidious but great Lars von Trier ( Dancing in the Dark , Golden Palm and Best Actress Award at Cannes 2000); long before reaching the peak of the pop of the 90s (with that sensational Debut of 1993), and not too much before being known worldwide meowing that delicious birthday song ( Birthday , on the first album of The Sugar Cubes of 1988), Icelandic Björk starred in The Juniper Tree , by Nietzchka Keene, an absolute cult film , practically invisible in its day, which now arrives on the screens, properly restored, first to the Sitges festival, and then, on November 8, to the more select cinemas, with the title of When we were witches . We speak of a disturbing delicacy in black and white magnetic, shot in rugged Icelandic landscapes, set in the end of the cruel Middle Ages , and based on both a gruesome tale of the Grimm ( Juniper ), as well as ancient local legends, that the director knew very well.

A native of Boston, Nietzcha Keene studied at UCLA the first texts in the Icelandic language that date back to the Middle Ages. In that same Californian university he also studied cinema. Not surprisingly, in 1986, he traveled to Iceland to prepare his first film. At that time, Björk Guðmundsdóttir was not unknown either . At least in your country. He had recorded a record of traditional songs at the young age of 12, and was traveling through various musical formations. Then I was in a punk band called Kukl (Witchcraft, in Icelandic, go where) that, that same year, turned to the crystalline pop of The Sugar Cubes. I was 21 years old, and had just been a mother . For the director, it had to be evidence. There was something supernatural in her. Some madness in that affected candor, as contemporary as timeless, that was very good on the screen. Too bad that Von Trier, whom he accused of harassment, later took away the desire for more cinema .

The young Björk heads here a brief cast of five unknown actors, to give life to a girl who flees with her older sister from the place where they burned, by witch, her mother. The two sisters have powers. The elder will love a widowed farmer, father of a blond boy (embodied by a girl), to take care of them. But coexistence will be a drama, with tragic outcome , even indigestible. Margit, Björk's character, is rather visionary. His dead mother appears, with whom he has unforgettable exchanges, and his visions are integrated naturally in his day to day. Of course, everything fits in your everyday life. Appearances, rituals, enchantments, metamorphosis, a magic tree, and even an episode of cannibalism. The two sisters are, of course, survivors, and the elder will not recourse to anything, in order to maintain her new status as a stepmother and housewife.

Björk, in a frame of 'When we were witches'.

Aesthetically flawless, When we were witches it is a minimal, low-budget film with the natural tendency to abstraction of exteriors shot under a 22-hour sun in stunning lonely landscapes, which are now Instagram grass. Many things happen but the constant intertextualities, recited by the actors give it an epic air, like those Nordic sagas lyrics that the director knew so well. Inevitably, it also refers to all those other Nordic classics , ranging from Häxan (1922), the universal treaty of witchcraft by Benjamin Christiansen, to The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957), passing through Dreyer. But above all it is a movie, and an experience, unique, that should have been better luck.

It was very difficult to finish it, and after its presentation at the 1991 Sundance Festival, it was hardly released anywhere. And Keene, apart from a TV movie, even more invisible ( Heroine of hell ), could not complete any of his projects. So he took refuge in teaching. He taught film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, until he died of cancer in 2004, at age 52. It was precisely that university that drove the present restoration, and the rescue of the oblivion of this little great jewel .

That was not the only tribute that his colleagues have given him. Just a couple of months after his death, a story by the great Lorrie Moore, which was dedicated to him, appeared on the pages of the New Yorker . Unequivocally titled The juniper tree (or Juniper, included in Thank you for the company , Seix Barral), is a teacher, who learns of the death of her friend, victim of cancer: «I was going to see her last night but it was done late and I thought it would be better to go see her in the morning ». With two other teachers abused by life, he goes to his house at dusk, repairing in passing "the sorceress strangeness of the place . " There the deceased appears, "with the stately coldness that only then did I discover that I had always associated with the dead." As if she were Margit's mother, before her own daughter. And they all celebrate it naturally. Witches all of them. Nothing but witches.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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