BETWEEN UTOPIAN TOURISM GAZE AND DYSTOPIAN INAUTHENTICITY: THREE ROAD MOVIES ABOUT ICELAND

The road movie is a genre associated with the American counterculture breakthrough of the late sixties, which both criticised the American way of life” and in a sophisticated way also strengthened the capitalistic system. Icelandic road movie uses the semantics and syntactic known from the American productions by combining them with national and transnational components. Marked by irony, the postmodern perspective of such movies as Júlíus Kemp’s Blossi/810551, Fridrik Fridriksson’s Cold Fever and Sólveig Anspach’s Back Soon may be read as a visual invitation to get acquainted with the touristic utopian image of Iceland. However, the close reading of these productions can also indicate that they may be regarded as cultural texts that attempt to deconstruct the inauthentic images of the utopian island.