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INSOMNIA
director Erik Skjoldbjaerg insists that he looks just like the photograph
of him. But he doesn't. At the Toronto interview, he looks much
more carefree, though anything but silly. He seems, well, less film
noir.
Skjoldbjaerg
says that he began making music videos in his early 20s. During
that time, he visited a great number of film schools, with the aid
of an Interrail Pass, and settled on London, the National Film and
Television School. He was himself rather obsessed with what had
been the topic of an earlier SVHS video: a metaphysical journey
into the cocept of subject. His idea was that whatever cannot be
shared, expressed, one must carry as a burden of self-enclosure.
In Skjoldbjaerg's view, human responses become twisted. One loses
touch with the self, with sexuality. The police inspector of
INSOMNIA takes a similar jourey, a process of exposing
repression.
When Cinternational
mentioned the sense of the detective's intensified search for truth
as striking similar chords with Kierkegaard's EITHER / OR,
Skjoldbjaerg confessed that he had read Kierkegaard in tandem with
the screenwriting process. As with Kierkegaard, Skjoldbjaerg places
a highly intense, explosive sort of individual in a nearly fatally
intangible situation.
The themes of
INSOMNIA are identity, fictional reality, the discrepancy
between one's inner reality and others' views of it. It is a tour
de force that such abstractions become urgently tactile and suspenseful
in the Skjoldbjaerg vision. .
Cinternational
reviews "Insomnia."
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