Rebecca Culbreth-Cold Fever

Cold Fever follows a young man in his journey toward self discovery and realization of the importance of ritual. To honor his deceased parents he travels from Japan to Iceland to perform a post-death ritual ensuring their peaceful passing. Because ritual has no meaning to him, the trip was insignificant and tedious, as his attitude obviously shows early in the film. However, as his trip goes on, he comes to understand how important ritual and sacred place truly are. Through the people he meets and the obstacles he encounters, he begins to cling to rituals and in the final scenes of the movie he is overwhelmed by how sacred the place where he stands truly is.
There are four main axioms for understanding sacred place and each one of them ties into the movie Cold Fever. First, “Sacred place is not chosen. It chooses.” This axiom rings very true for this film because upon arriving in Iceland, Hirata’s disgust with the country is blatantly obvious. He is disgusted with the place. The viewer can obviously see that he would never choose to visit that country. He did not choose to go to Iceland, he needed to. Iceland chose him. The second axiom states that, “sacred place is ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary.” This relates obviously to the movie. The whole reason for Hirata’s trip is to perform a ritual. The riverbank he stands on would mean nothing to someone else. However, because he is performing a ritual, the place is made special by that ritual. The third axiom: “Sacred place can be tread upon without being entered.” Again, in the beginning of the movie, Hirata had no appreciation for ritual and sacred places. This comes into play when his taxi driver stops to re-enact the “Christmas scene.” Hirata becomes angry and leaves instead of realizing the importance of the sacred place he had entered. The fourth and final axiom states that, “the impulse of sacred place is centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal.” In Lane’s book, the sentence after this axiom is, “One is recurrently driven to a quest for centeredness… and then at other times driven out from that center with an awareness that God is never confined to a single locale.” For Hirata he had to leave Japan in order to find God; the same God that so many others in Japan knew. He had to leave; he was driven out, in order to find what some found in their center.
This movie, while not on my top-ten-favorite-movies-of-all-time, was easy to relate to Lane’s four axioms. Hirata experienced all of those axioms and eventually found himself bonded to both ritual and the importance of sacred place.