Chelsea Ottaviani- Cold Fever Response

The movie Cold Fever was, to me, a very typical Japanese Film...meaning that it was quite strange and very artistic- thus this film was a perfect peice to show the class! By having this assignment it made me not only appreciate the film as an entertainment peice but it showed me that this film has a much deeper meaning, as do most films. The class has given me the ability to pick apart movies in a way I never have been able to do before, and by finding how Lane's four axioms played a part in this film is only one of the ways in which I have learned to find deeper meanings in the material presented in class.
Lane's first axiom- sacred place is not chosen, it chooses, was the most apparent axiom presented in the film. The Japanese business man has every intention to travel to Hawaii as a business vacation, but fate led him to travel to Iceland. He did not choose this place but outside factors chose it for his: his grandfather told him he must preform his parent's memorial rituals in Iceland, strangers discussed how fabulous the country was at random in his presence, and when he was playing golf in his apartment, he accidentaly hit a ball against the remote control causing a video to play on the television of his parents asking him to come visit them in their home of Iceland. Iceland seemed to choose him, he had no real choice in the matter.
The second axiom asserts that sacred place is ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary. Iceland was presented in the film as a very barren, deserted land. It seemed ordinary in a sense that nothing incredible was happening. The business man made the landscape extraordinary when he performed his parent's memorial ritual. He made a place that to anyone's eye seemed to be an orginary river in the middle of the barren landscape into something extraodinary by ritualistic activity. Something so ordinary was made into something symbolic of another world.
Lane's third axiom insists that sacred place can be tred upon without being entered. This was portrayed throughout the film form the moment the business man arrived in Iceland. He was walking and driving around the country hearing all of these opinions of people and how they thought it was the most amazing and marvelous place- even sacred. The man did not seem to find anything special about Iceland whatsoever. He was tredding through this sacred place of other's, but he himself never entered it until he connected with the landscape though his ritual at the end of the film.
The final axiom suggests that the impulse of sacred place is both centripetal and centrifugal, local and universal. This was shown in the film by Iceland calling out to him. Locally, Iceland was calling out to him through all of its inhabitants exclaining how much they loved their country and how amazing it was. Universally Iceland was calling to him by his Grandfather and the strangers in Japan telling him he should go to the country so far away.