Hyde Park Pick: Time and Water

Time and Water is a unique time capsule which offers a personal snapshot into the lives of the narrator Andri Snær Magnason’s family through his home videos, as well as his country, Iceland, and its glaciers, which are captured in magnificent, artistic detail. At one time, it would have been unthinkable that, like grandparents, glaciers have to be documented and memorialised for future generations. By linking his personal family time capsule with that of glaciers, Magnason has a huge impact in helping us to conceptualise the demise of our planet – something we too often struggle to, or choose not to, grasp.

I love how poetic Time and Water is, which is not surprising since its narrator is a poet. I appreciate the way Magnason anthropomorphises glaciers to amplify grief at their deaths. I also enjoyed how much I learnt from the film, including the excellent Icelandic word ‘fuglabjarg,’ meaning ‘bird cliff.’ It’s also used to describe a noisy gathering – the volumes of a busy wedding couldn’t be more perfectly conveyed than a cliff full of gannets! Magnason’s point that this double meaning may become extinct as our bird populations decline really hit me hard.

So many of Magnason’s lines have stuck with me. Another example is when he wonders about his country’s name, Iceland, and whether saying its name will summon a ghost as the ice disappears. Gutting but also so beautiful! Speaking of beauty – the traditional Icelandic folk song-poems, known as rímurs, in the film are breathtaking. This is another wonderful example of Magnason’s determination to archive beauty and not allow it to go extinct.

I think that’s such a meaningful message viewers can take away from the film. Firstly, we need to do more to reverse the catastrophic damage to our planet to delay its extinction. But also, wherever we can document or make art out of something we would like to cherish and hold onto in some way, we should. This is a passion I share with Magnason. Something I cherish is the range of dialects and idiosyncrasies of speech we have. However, it’s sad to see the English language become increasingly standardised, with regional dialects becoming rarer and Received Pronunciation feeling more dominant. While at university, I took the opportunity to study some of my favourite accents, write poems using words and phrases that would particularly accentuate these dialects, and then record people with those dialects reading my poems. I now treasure this collection and feel especially grateful that the recordings of my Grandma are a kind of time capsule because her accent was indescribably beautiful and songlike, similar only to her sisters who grew up in their remote one-room house in Tonevane near Tralee. Sadly, my Grandma and her eleven siblings are no longer with us. So, there’s no way of chatting to someone with the most magical cadences I’ve ever heard. But at least I have these recordings of her reading my poems and the memories of her pronouncing ‘th’ as ‘t’, which led to my cousin’s great concern at my parents calling me Martyr, and the bullying that might lead to.

One of the many impactful lines from the film I noted down while watching was, “The more I film, the more I can hold onto Grandpa’s every word. It’s as if recording him can transport him into the future where I can meet him once again.” This is how I feel about my audio recordings of my Grandma. We can’t stop the ageing of our grandparents, but we can do something about how alarmingly geological time is beginning to shift towards human time. ‘Glacial speed’ is beginning to lose its meaning. We don’t want Time and Water to be one of the last documents of glaciers. We want future generations to be in awe of glaciers, rather than mourning them. So, I hope this incredible film inspires action: both to document everything we love and to save our planet. Not small tasks but crucial ones.

If you’re as captivated by the film as I was and want it to live on long beyond its 93-minute runtime, you might enjoy this discussion guide, which contains further reading, activities and discussion prompts.

Time and Water is showing at HPPH from Fri 12 Jun. You can book tickets here.