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Storm Alerts
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In today’s world, a widespread obsession with exact, textbook medical diagnosis goes hand in glove with pharmaceutical prescription as the cure for all ills. Bergur Bernburg’s Storm Alerts, however, forcibly returns us to the anti-psychiatric methodology of the 1960s and 1970s, when social normality was much in question, and those labelled mad were (sometimes) respected and valued for their radical insights. The contemporary, real-life hero of this “journey into the unknown territories of the human mind” is Marteinn Helgi Sigurðsson, who was a highly respected, university-employed Medievalist scholar until he fell into the depressive crisis that profoundly altered his lifestyle. Episodes of mania were followed by dawning euphoria. But the easy label of bipolar disorder obscures the worth of what Sigurðsson regards as his newfound shamanistic and poetic wisdom. I was strongly reminded of Wouter Kusters’ remarkable book A Philosophy of Madness (English translation 2020), a profound exploration based not only on the history of the arts and psychiatry, but also the author’s own “experience of psychotic thinking” (the book’s subtitle). The film, for its part, splits Marteinn in two: he appears as himself in frank interviews and candid material set in public spaces; and he is played, using wordless gestures and actions, by theatre performer-creator Kristján Ingimarsson. To call this approach docu-drama only weakly captures the vibrancy of the editing montage and inventive sound design woven around Marteinn’s unfolding life. We are thereby invited to enter into his world, rather than to judge it from a distance. © Adrian Martin 6 December 2024 |
