WORK SURVEYS - 2002

Apart from attention to the autobiographical there are film and video retrospectives of four prominent artists best known in the world of visual arts. A four-part work outline will be shown of Canadian video maker Steve Reinke, who spends a lot of attention to language in his work. Other artists whose work will get special attention are the Finnish Eija-Liisa Ahitila, the Israeli Uri Tzaig and the German Christian Jankowski.
Laura U. Marks, Brent Klinkum, Steve Reinke and Christian Jankowksi are present during the festival to elucidate their choice of programming or their work. On the occasion of the festival a catalogue will be published with descriptions of the various programme components, as well as essays by, among others, Laura U. Marks, Brent Klinkum, Wouter Koelman (on Eija-Liisa Ahtila), Edwin Carels (on Uri Tzaig) and Ivanmaria Vele (on Christian Jankowski).

The peripheries of stuff

Canadian film- and video maker Steve Reinke is shown in a retrospective by the festival, in which several of his most prominent works were brought together, among them a selection of ’The Hundred Video’s’, and the film shorts ’Afternoon’ and ’Sad Disco Fantasia’. Reinke is a master at opposing accepted conventions within the visual idiom. By appropriating film and video forms ranging from archival images, animation, talk shows, home movies and porn up to educational films, he creates multiple fictions crammed with black humour. The medium as well as the artist is hardly spared of the disenchanting touch of reality. The outspoken low budget aesthetics, with shaking camera movements, bad lighting and blurred images, reflect the imperfections of the libido-laden reality in which mankind lives. This explains his ambivalent relationship with conventional beauty, which he seems to keep undermining in a conscious strategy, repeatedly linked to themes of banality or boredom as well.

#1
19 okt 22.00/ cinema nova

Steve Reinke

Selections from ‘The Hundred Videos’ - 1
Video, b&w & colour, English spoken, 71’42’’, 1997

Ever attuned to the conceits of the art world, Steve Reinke declared that his aim was to “complete one hundred videos before the year 2000 and my thirty-sixth birthday. These will constitute my work as a young artist.” In 1997, Reinke had already finished the one hundred videos, well ahead of schedule.

Most of Reinke’s videotapes are short, as if made for the MTV generation, or perhaps those viewers with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). More particularly, they are part of a tradition of literature (a “tradition” of one, perhaps) that Reinke’s peculiar style and voice belong to - that of Franz Kafka’s reworking of myths of Western culture so as to introduce, because they assume a quasi-logical form, paradoxes that the reader stumbles over. Except, in Reinke’s case, the tapes’ narrators think them completely reasonable. Kafka’s unsettling of the commonplace shares the effects of the uncanny - when something known becomes disturbingly unfamiliar to us - a feeling that blurs the distinctions between the animate and the inanimate, the physical and the psychic…”Today, perhaps, the uncanny can best be seen in old videotapes”, suggests the narrator of one of the tapes, and so the lore passed on to us and preserved in the memory bank of old film and television footage is combined in Reinke’s videotapes with that other repository of popular wisdom - the clichés of language. The appeal of recognition thus lends to Reinke’s twisting of documentary evidence.

Reinke’s works, like Kafka’s “parables and paradoxes”, are populated by children and small animals (or other organisms), ghosts and the dead. Actually, in Reinke’s tapes there is no longer a distinction between the living and the dead; rather, we find one continuum of the pre-dead, the dead, and the un-dead, all of which speak. As the narrator of one of the tapes says, “while there may be no love among corpses, there is conversation”, so these tapes include a host of voices. These voices are emitted as if from a writing machine - their function is to produce sentences. So doing, words thereby bring forth new symptoms, disorders, and monsters of nature. Wishes and desires expressed by the narrators find fulfilment in new objects and organisms, and the libido is immediately gratified in the transformations it brings about. The language employed in these tapes sometimes mimics the clinical protocols of scientific method that, so to speak, describe these things into being…In these monologues of disembodiment, what divides and connects certain states (desire and fulfilment, the self and other, the living and dead) is some sort of skin, whether human or otherwise… (Philip Monk)

#2
20 okt 22.00/ cinema nova

Steve Reinke

Selections from ’The Hundred Videos’
Video, b&w & colour, English spoken, 59’35’’, 1997

/ 55. / Symposium 1:24 / 57. / Ghost Production 3:44 / 58. / Minnesota Inventory 10:37 / 60. / Three Examples 00:33 / 61. / Sparky 00:57 / 67. / Assplay 1:36 / 68. / Love Among Corpses 2:46 / 70. / Dr. Asselbergs 4:08 / 71. / Corey 2:51 / 72. / My Fear 1:05 / 78. / Treehouse 3:55 / 79. / The Boxers 1:10 / 80. / Talk Show 1:18 / 82. / I have already 0:15 / 81. / The Hand 0:46 / 84. / Stentor 1:38 / 85. / New York Loves Me 0:59 / 86. / Seventeen Descriptions 5:30 / 87. / Children’s Video Collective 3:20
/ 89. / 24 Jokes 3:38 / 91. / Falling 2:26 / 94. / Ants and Bees 1:13 / 96. / Camouflage 1:48 / 97. / Underwear 1:58 / 100. / Why I’ve Decided to Become a Painter 0:42

Everybody Loves Nothing (Empathic Exercizes)
Video, colour, English spoken, 12’, 1996

Completed while artist-in-residence at Video In. Reinke uses archival footage from the Prelinger Archives - films on the integration of psychiatric wards into general hospitals, dermatology, testosterone pellet implantation, various newsreels and home movies from the 30’s & 40’s - to construct seven discrete but interlocked ‘exercises’ which posit various relationships between author/audience and the subjects in the footage.

#3
21 okt 22.00/ cinema nova

Steve Reinke

Echo Valley
Video, colour, English spoken, 7’15’’, 1998

An echo is the return of an originating voice in a distorted and diminished way. In ‘Echo Valley’, there are no originating voices, but only endless, undiminished echoes. This slight, frothy videotape manages to juxtapose high and low culture idioms in a way that undermines their respective implications and creates new hybrids.

Incidents of Travel
Video, b&w, English text, 10’, 1998

‘Incidents of Travel’ is an adventure story in which each exciting incident or episode is relayed as a title. The titles are taken from John Stephens 1853 novel ‘Incidents of Travel in Yucatan’. The soundtrack, which proceeds very slowly, is a stretched version of ‘Popcorn’ by Hot Butter. This is also, maybe, a homage to (or parody of) structuralist film.

Fireball
Video, colour, English spoken, 5’, 1999

“Soon a fireball will descend upon the city, destroying everything. I will be one of the ones that will burn longest and brightest.”

Spiritual Animal Kingdom
Video, colour, English spoken, 27’, 1998

‘Spiritual Animal Kingdom’ is Steve Reinke’s alternative to a television show. It has comedy skits, musical interludes, and little animated aphorisms that act as commercials or bumpers. Reinke parodies, analyses and plays out the narratives and imagery employed in mass culture – while never appearing to take any of it seriously. Moving through the most banal forms of film and video imagery and the most exalted, collapsing the boundaries between documentary and fiction, Reinke creates a kind of shrine to a loss of the self on representation.

Afternoon (March 22, 1999)
Video, colour, English spoken, 23’, 1999

The artist spends the afternoon in his tiny apartment listening to music he dislikes and ruminating on what it means to be an artist. All the edits are in-camera and the monologues and songs are largely improvised.

Sad Disco Fantasia
Video, colour, English spoken, 24’, 2001

“Sad Disco Fantasia is Reinke’s episodic tour through the void of L.A., slips of pop culture and Reinke’s own astringent self-regard. Despite the blasts of dry wit and the hopeful embrace of gay porn, this is a lament. What grounds the tape like a bass line is Reinke’s response to the death of his mother. What stops it cold is his tossed-off remark that this is “my last, my final video.” (Cameron Bailey)

#4
22 okt 22.00/ cinema nova

Steve Reinke

Andy
Video, colour, English spoken, 8’50’’, 1997

‘Andy’ is a combination of a documentary portrait and amateur porn video. As Andy masturbates in his beautiful apartment, he describes (in voice-over) the process of and rationale for his decorating choices. Anthropology, lifestyle.

J.-P.
Video, colour, English spoken, 7’’, 2002

A remix of the 20 minute ‘Tuesday and I’ by young Canadian artist Jean-Paul Kelly. Reinke leaves the 20 minute one-take monologue intact, speeding up and slowing down the tape (mostly speeding up) to extract empathy for the subject and squeeze sounds out of his body.

Amsterdam Camera Vacation
Video, colour, English spoken, 11’, 2001

Completed while in residence at Smart Project Space in Amsterdam. The artist refuses to see any of the sites and rarely leaves the abandoned research hospital where he is staying, but speaks in compulsive and frantic monologues.

Anal Masturbation and Object Loss
Video, colour, English spoken, 5’, 2002

The artist decides to found his own art school and begins by assembling materials for the library. Finding too many words are available, he glues together the unnecessary pages of books.

Vegetative States: An attempt to Instil and Measure Altered States of Consciousness in Household Plants
Directed by John Marriott,
animations by Steve Reinke
Video, colour, English spoken, 9’30’’, 2002

A polygraph machine is attached to a lily to determine if visual stimuli (a series of animations) alter the plant’s consciousness.

The Chocolate Factory
Video, colour, English spoken, 28’, 2002

Spoken in the voice of American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, with a soundtrack of a picked-apart Black Sabbath song, ‘Fairies Wear Boots.’ Dahmer has a monologue for each of his seventeen victims. The artist’s autobiography as serial killer.

Final Thoughts, Part One
Video, colour, English spoken, approx. 30’, 2002 (work-in-progress)

As his final work, Reinke is assembling a string of “final thoughts” - thoughts and images which are, if not definitive, final. The work will be added to as time goes on and not be completed until the artist’s death

Steve Reinke (1963) lives and works in Chicago. In 1993 he graduated from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He is artist and writer, best known for his video’s (’The Hundred Video’s’). He is also editor of many publications on video and film (By the Skin of their Tongues: Artists Video Scripts (1997) and Lux: A Decade of Film and Video by Artists (2000)). Currently he is teaching at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona).

Art is magic

In the overview of the work of Berlin video artist Christian Jankowski there is a focus on the reflections about possible intersections between seemingly disparate worlds. By twisting the context and preserving the narrative structure of the film he transforms regular conversation, improvisation and shared experiences in parallel realities, for which he often exploits himself. Thus Jankowski’s work broadens the dialogue about the artistic and the role of the artist. Interacting with others, outside the reticence of the studio, he allows his work to be defined by the unpredictability of human behaviour. He asks himself, for instance, what would happen if art were the work of wizards, customs officers and children. In his playful work, urged by individual reflections and intentions of the artist, he offers unusual perspectives on the contemporary reality of consumption and entertainment.

#1
24 okt 20.00/ cinema nova

Christian Jankowski

The Hunt
Video, colour, non spoken, 71’, 1992

For the duration of one week all products for daily consumption (e.g. groceries, toilet paper, etc.) are being hunted with bow and arrow in supermarkets.

My life as a dove
Video, colour, Dutch spoken, 5’41’’, 1996

The master magician Wim Brando transformed Jankowski for the duration of his exhibition in the Antwerp Gallery Lokaal 01 into a dove. The message from the magician to the audience was “You’re standing in front of Christian’s transformation into a dove. Be kind to him and remember that a real artist may sometimes be inscrutable, but a true person as well.” With the aid of the gallery owner, visitors responded to Jankowski as dove, feeding him, taking photos and video documentation and documented his life as a dove in a guestbook. After the three weeks show, the magician came one more time to the gallery and transformed Jankowski back to a man.

Rosa
Video, colour, German spoken, English subtitles, 18’54’’, 2001

Jankowski’s work presented in 2001 at the second Berlin Biennale raises the question of the relationship between commercial film and art film. In the mainstream film ‘Viktor Vogel- commercial man’, which opened in German cinemas during the Biennale, the director Lars Kraume tells the story of up-and-coming artist Rosa. Kraume uses two of Christian Jankowski’s works, which feature as works by Rosa in the film. One of them is a 1992 video work, ‘Die Jagd’, in which Jankowski goes shopping in a supermarket with a bow and arrow. The other is the 1996 performance ‘My Life as a Dove’, in which the artist has himself transformed into a pigeon for the duration of an exhibition period. Unlike the usual artist films, such as ‘Vincent van Gogh’, the artist does not become an object at the mercy of the desires of populist film directors. By means of a precisely formulated contract, Jankowski makes demands of the film industry, which then allow him to generate a work of his own. And again, unlike the usual artist films, like Julien Schnabel`s ‘Basquiat’, the visual artist does not become a mainstream director, but instead skilfully mediates between ‘High and Low’. Jankowski achieves this by asking the actors personally tailored questions about themselves and their roles during shooting. Their replies are recorded on 35-mm film and complete sequences are spliced into ‘Viktor Vogel’ in exactly the scenes in which Jankowski`s two works are to be seen. As a result, Jankowski’s art and Kraume`s film enter into a tense dialogue in which it is the artist himself who determines the context and the tone. (Raimar Stange)

#2
24 okt 22.00/ cinema nova

Christian Jankowski

Telemistica
Video, colour, Italian spoken, English subtitles, 22’, 1999

This work deals with the phenomenon of fortune-telling and with several basic questions, which the artist – faced with the process of creating works – asks himself. Fortune-tellers are very popular on Italian television: the viewer gets the opportunity to call the television-station and to post a question to the fortune-teller. Subsequently, the fortune-teller predicts the caller’s future by reading the cards concerning subjects such as love, profession, wealth and success. This process happens in a live broadcasting situation.
For the video ‘Telemistica’, Christian Jankowski called five different fortune-tellers during their shows and asked each of them a different question about his works. His five questions were:

1. Is this idea that came to me the right one?
2. Will I realise my new art piece?
3. When my work is ready, will it be beautiful?
4. What will the public think about my work? Will they like it? Will I be successful?
5. In the end, will I be happy and satisfied with my work?

These five questions were, together with the respective prophecies, directly recorded by Jankowski in his Italian hotel room and assembled in a video.

The Holy Artwork
Video, colour, English spoken, 15’ 52’’, 2001

The video ‘The Holy Artwork’, is based on a co-operation between a clergyman and Jankowski. The artist got inspired to that idea by the picture of the painter Juan Bautista (1578-1649). On his picture you can see a painter in his studio, who collapsed in front of his painting. The unfinished, painting which is still on the easel, and where you can already see the motif of a saint, is going to be finished by an angel, who is taking the position of the artist.

In the work ‘The Holy Artwork’ Christian Jankowski is planning to express the idea of a perfect contemporary artwork with the words of a priest. It is absolutely planned that the priest has a strong influence on the process (form and meaning) of this work and that he demands of to take over the position of the artist in this work. For Jankowski, it is important that this work is both shown and interpreted in the context of religion and in that of contemporary art.

Commercial Landscape
Video, colour, Italian spoken, English subtitles, 13’25’’, 2000

In Italy, since 1999, there is an on-going debate as to the possibility to deposit a copyright on the Tuscan landscape. In the five sequences of ‘Commercial Landscape’, which was shot in a video clip fashion, Christian Jankowski asks different groups of people (teenagers, a young couple, two aged men, a priest, children with their grandmother) to comment the advantages and disadvantages of such an arrangement. Every discussion is introduced by a stationary, one-minute plan of a Tuscan landscape.

Christian Jankowski (1968) lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg. He was trained at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunste in Hamburg and came first to international attention on the Venice Bienal of 1999 with his videowork ’Telemistica’. Recent presentations of his work were held at Maccarone Inc., New York (’Point of Sale’), Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, (’The Holy Artwork’) and at Klosterfelde, Berlin (’Lehrauftrag’).
 

The game of rules

Israeli artist Uri Tzaig will be present at the festival with five video works, among them the world premières of his new videos ‘Fin Fin’ and ‘Two Balls’. In his multimedia practice Tzaig develops techniques decentralising the attention of the spectator and continuously provoking expectations. By episodically delivering narrative elements without any coherent plot and mingling the ordinary with the magical his works defeat all narrative convention. Among his most remarkable projects is a video series in which the attention of the audience is shamelessly disrupted by introducing a second ball into football and basketball games.


#1
23 okt 20.00/ cinema nova

Uri Tzaig

Tempo
Video, colour, sound???, 63’20”, 1998

‘Tempo’ is composed of sixty time slices, or more precisely 59 minutes and one additional minute adjunct to the rest. This is the minute that opens the movie even before the title: a reconstructed cover version, filmed randomly by a photographer – maybe an amateur, maybe haphazardly; the film which caught the murder of Ishak Rabin. This is the only minute in which the camera is apathetic, static. To a stranger’s eye this minute may seem empty or casual (a dark staircase, back parking lot of an office building, random movement of figures), and yet the viewer becomes aware how much a lone-minute unit of time can form a destiny, how the world after is painfully different from that which preceded it. The awareness that every ‘empty’ site can become a potential arena of an event, evident as a shadow or an insight, each moment afterwards. Even the last segment of the film – seemingly a minute where a Drag Queen quartet sings – deviates from its continuity in such a way that only a text appears. This text, which talks about freeing oneself from a suppressing system, becomes the object of the journey and even its purpose. (Ninio Moshe)


#2
23 okt 22.00/ cinema nova

Uri Tzaig

Infinity
Video, colour, sound, 20’, 1998

Uri Tzaig invites dancers from the Montpellier City Centre for Dance to play a game. In this game there is no referee, there are two mixed teams (men and women) wearing the same red clothes, the field is constantly shrinking and expanding making the players re-examine their relationship to the space. From time to time one of the players pastes a coloured sticker on his/her body while time continues to vanish without mercy and the ball moves from one to another without ever having the rules of the game explained.

Allah Akbar
Video, colour, sound???, 7’30”, 2001

‘Allah Akbar’ (For the Love of God) stands as a poem for the creation and universal qualities of nature, using some archetypal forms such as a ball motif, re-appearing as the moon, the sun, and the fruits on the trees. ‘Allah Akbar’ follows objects and materials through transformational processes, liquid to sold, forms of sublimation that illuminate the gap between the ritual and the virtual, the sensuality of the real and present, and the conceptual way it is presented on screen.

“This seven and a half minute long video functions as a mantra for the beauty of nature and different ways we construct it in form and meaning. The images are taken from the Israeli landscape, all within 40 minutes from my house: olive trees, orange trees, green fields under the rain etc. Isn’t the original essence of art to embrace God and celebrate the beauty of life?” (Uri Tzaig)

Fin-Fin
Video, colour, 5’, 2002

This short video was made for Israeli TV as a documentary about the Dead Sea. Tzaig typifies the film as a compact variation on ‘Tempo’, this time exclusively composed of images of the surroundings of the Dead Sea, not lasting sixty minutes but merely five. They are current recordings of a very charged place, full of biblical-mythical and political resonances. The Dead Sea is simultaneously the lowest point on our planet.

2 Balls
Video, colour, sound???, 10’, 2002

A new re-edited version of 2 major works by Uri Tzaig: ‘Universal Square’, a Soccer game, and ‘Desert’, a basket ball game, both played with 2 balls. The visual accompanied by a sound from a performance at the Foundation Cartier (Paris), based on a text by Uri Tzaig.

The image is divided into two equal parts on the screen: in the upper half of the screen the basketball game is visible, in the bottom half the soccer match is shown. In the basketball match the resolution is transformed by means of digital manipulation into a visual echo. Contrasting with the usual situation in which the rules of the game are known and identifiable by everyone beforehand, the same game rules here are presented against the background of a different philosophical notion: there is no aim whatsoever. The same goes for ‘Universal Square’, in which two soccer teams – Jewish Israelis and Palestinians - encounter each other. Tzaig’s match allows both teams to interact in a place removed from the conflictual reality in which playing is more important than winning. In this reworked edition one can hear the intermingling accounts of two commentators reporting on the match.

It is not clear which account belongs to which match. As with the game Tzaig, by means of the commentary, undermines our tendency to stare at the center; as well as our conception of movement that unfolds according to a fixed narrative structure. The text accompanying this video originates from a performance as held at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, based upon a text by Tzaig.

Uri Tzaig (1965) lives and works in Tel Aviv. In 1990 he graduated from the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem in the department of Theatre Direction, Design and Writing. Since then he has been working mostly in the domain of the visual arts. The work of Tzaig was shown in the exihibitions Documenta X (Kassel, 1997) and Let’s Entertain: Life’s Guilty Pleasures (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2000). Recently an overview of his work was held at the Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2002).

Empirical references to a personal world

The argos festival will show five important films from the body of work of the Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Ahtila herself typifies her films as ‘human dramas’. Delicately and meticulously using the visual language in which image build-up, narrative structure and physical space play a central part, she records the psychological conditions and emotions at the base of human relations with painstaking accuracy. The process of emotional reconciliation is a recurrent motive in Ahtila’s work. Her characters move back and forth between past and present without falling back on the conventional flashback, but rather according to the non-linear functioning of the human psyche.

#1
25 okt 22.00/ cinema nova

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Me/We, Okay, Gray
35 mm, colour & b/w, Finnish spoken, English subtitled, 3x90’’, 1993

Originally shown on Finnish television in the breaks between mainstream programmes, these three short films consider issues of identity, sex, control and the boundaries of the ego. At first glance, they resemble TV commercials, with their snappy dialogue and swift visual techniques - jump-cut editing, camera movements replicating the protagonist’s pacing. However, their disconcerting emotional territory is far from the upbeat world of advertising.

‘Me/We’ features the archetypal nuclear family, whose story is told by the father. He begins by addressing the camera directly. As the plot unravels, other members of the family start to embody his voice, and it becomes unclear who is speaking or whose story we are watching.

In ’Okay’ a solitary woman strides up and down her room, as if incarcerated, analysing the frustrations and desires of her sexual relationship with a man, who is not revealed on screen. The voice of the character switches gender, consequently blurring the meaning of the narrative.

More collective anxieties and catastrophes are considered in ‘Gray’. Three women discuss the chain of events connected with a nuclear disaster as they descend in an industrial elevator towards a watery chamber. Their conversation may refer either to an impending calamity, or the onslaught of foreign influences on their own language and culture.

If 6 was 9
35 mm, colour, Finnish spoken, English subtitled, 10’, 1995

Female desire and sexuality are examined through a series of frank declarations and confessions by a group of adolescent girls. On the brink of womanhood, their sentiments appear to fluctuate between childishness and precocity. They switch from reminiscences of fairy tales to candid admissions of the intimate exploration of their own bodies. Despite its objective, documentary approach, the film is ultimately a complex fiction. Split across three adjacent screens, the narrative evolves in a non-linear way, giving as much precedence to background movement and sounds as to the ‘story’ of the teenagers. Eventually, a girl discloses that she is really a 38-year-old woman, with a sexually mature body and appetites, raising the possibility that the entire account is a construct of the past.

Today
35 mm, colour, Finnish spoken, English subtitled, 10’, 1996/7

‘Today’ is a short film in three episodes. Its subject is the relationship between a father and daughter, and the formation and shifts of personal identities within a family. On a summer night, the grandfather dies in an accident. The event is seen from the viewpoint of three different characters. The three episodes are connected thematically, and via dialogue, visuals, sound elements and the actors. Together, the parts present the story of the family’s members in different periods. The first part deals with the relationship between a young girl and her father. The girl is throwing a ball in the yard; the father is weeping bitterly in the bedroom. Everything is seen through the girl’s viewpoint. Her narrative voice-over talks about her father, her grandfather, and their relationship. The use of sound gives the work rhythm and carries it forwards. The main character in the second part is an old woman. The episode takes place in her apartment during the early hours of the morning. The emphasis of the narration is on sounds. The woman expresses her views of the surrounding society. The sound evokes her world, and introduces a temporal dimension. In the third part a man conducts a dialogue with the camera. In this he relives his relationships with his father and his own daughter. He recognises that he is both a child and a parent at the same time. The text is structured like a poem or the lyrics of a song: short, descriptive sentences and chorus-like repetitions.

Consolation Service
35 mm, colour, Finnish spoken, English subtitled, 24’, 1999

The end of a marriage forms the basis of this work, which is one of Ahtila’s most linear narratives. The film commences with a female narrator setting the scene for the tale of the separation of a young couple, Anni and JP. Set in early spring in Helsinki, with its frozen landscape on the cusp of thawing, the atmosphere is one of inevitable endings and the possibility of new beginnings.

In the opening scene, a counselling session with their therapist, the couple are given advice on how to come to terms with the end of the relationship. As Anni and JP’s discussion escalates into a row, they are asked to express their feelings using only sounds. They choose to bark at each other, after which they are joined by a group of silent onlookers, who observe the therapist’s practical guidance. The plot moves to the celebration of JP’s birthday in the couple’s apartment with a group of friends. As they leave to continue the evening at a restaurant, taking a short cut across an icy lake, an uneasy conversation ensues about the physical consequences of falling into freezing water. At that point, the ice breaks, plunging the group into the abyss. The camera moves through the water, as the drowned friends drift to the bottom of the lake, while voiceovers ruminate on the past, and the sudden manner of death.

In the final part of the film, JP suddenly appears in the hallway of Anni’s apartment. As she moves forward to embrace him, he bows, shrinks and de-materialises into tiny fragments. This process recurs several times until Anni finally understands what is required and returns JP’s bow, a gesture, which heralds the disappearance of his apparition and a form of final acceptance on the matter of their divorce.


#2
26 okt 20.00/ cinema nova

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Love is a treasure
35 mm, colour, Finnish spoken, English subtitled, 55’, 2002

‘Love is a Treasure’ consists of five episodes containing five different stories about women who have developed psychoses. Special cinematic techniques have been used to seamlessly situate impossibilities thrown up by the mind into realistic settings. ‘Love is a treasure’ is based on research and interviews with several women, but the stories and dialogues are a fictional combination of various elements. ‘Underworld’ - In the first episode a woman prefers to stay under her bed because of the imaginary killers hunting around it. ‘Ground Control’ - In the second a teenage girl becomes an assistant to the UFOs who control sounds on earth. ‘Bridge’ - In the third a woman crawls over a bridge because things have become unstable, due to the emergence of past events. ‘Wind’ - The fourth depicts how anger takes the form of a wind in a woman’s apartment. ‘House’ - In the fifth episode a woman starts hearing the sounds of other places and shuts out all images by covering the windows of her house so as to be able to be in the space where the sounds are.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila (1959) lives and works in Helsinki. She followed courses at the Helsinki University, London College of Printing, UCLA in Los Angeles and the American Film Institute She exhibited among others in Tate Modern (Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations, London, 2002) and at Documenta 11 (Kassel, 2002). Her films are frequently shown on film- and videofestivals (Media City Festival, Windsor, Canada, ’Crossing Boundaries’, Danish Film Institute, Denmark).

This event is part of argosfestival 2002