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Eija—Liisa Ahtila is not going crazy: a veteran of Documenta and of biennials from Istanbul to Venice to Sydney, Eija-Liisa Ahtila has become Finland's leading film-installation artist. Her dense yet concise narratives probe a range of human experiences, commonplace and extreme, while extending the medium's formal and expressive reach - Cover Story
Art in America, Oct, 2002 by Marcia E. Vetrocq
The opening voice-over in Eija-Liisa Ahtila's three-screen DVD installation The House (2002) is that of a woman enumerating all that is "routine" about her home and her habits, about her garden and the diurnal movements of the sun. The camera confirms the inventory with a series of establishing shots that show the hallway, the sitting room, the narrator at breakfast, the spruce trees outside. The routine, however, is crumbling: sounds and things are coming unmoored from their appropriate sources and contexts. At first there is merely an infantile doubt: when she shifts position so that a striped curtain blocks her view, can the woman be certain that objects remain in their customary places? But before long, the car which she parked in the garden traverses the wall behind her like a mechanized bug; a spotted cow initially seen on TV saunters though the room; a ship's horn wails in the dense forest, eventually conjuring a sunny harbor just beyond the porch rail.
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The very phenomena which indicate that the woman is incrementally going insane are realized as flourishes of the filmmaker's craft. When the narrator appears to levitate and approach her house from among the trees, her airborne point of view is conveyed by a crane-mounted camera. As she describes a vessel on the horizon, which is a red ship, a blue ship and a green ship--the same as all the other ships, she says--the three screens assume those colors in a sequence of monochrome triptychs. And when she attempts to manage her madness by draping the windows with blackout curtains, the house becomes a darkened screening room. With ordinary vision obliterated, the Woman can "be" wherever the sounds are, and becomes any of the people who, she discloses, come inside and occupy her.
The narrator was to have spoken a final fretful monologue over closing shots of a vacant apartment interior and buildings scattered in a landscape. In the event, Ahtila chose a quite ending, but the excised commentary remains in the script for The House reproduced in the book accompanying a recent survey of the Finnish artist's work which was shown in Helsinki and London. The distressed woman's final efforts to grasp the shape-shifting environment read like the transcript of a hypothetical planning conference between the exacting artist and her crew:
The arrangement of the houses, the distances between them. I looked at the way they were an angles to each other. I thought about the position of the door and how far it was from there to the next building, and how you get there. Who gets there. Which building is biggest? What colors are they? What is the terrain like around them and what is the boundary of the zone formed around each building. (1)
Did I tell you that the troubled woman's name is Elisa?
Of course, it isn't necessary to read "Elisa" as a contraction of "Eija-Liisa" in order to appreciate the correspondences between the constructed realities of the filmmaker and those of the mentally ill. The proximity between the two realms of fabrication--more specifically, the ability of film to represent madness as a condition of altered perception--has been dear to filmmakers of all stripes at least since Surrealism. Ahtila herself has plumbed the analogy, with a twist, in Anne, Aki and God (1998), an installation incorporating casting videos. (The material was extracted from a work still in progress called A Quest for a Woman.) The artist presents recorded line readings by five possible Akis and two would-be Gods (all actors) along with a series of interviews with seven aspiring Annes (amateurs recruited through a want ad). Installation notes explain that the dramatic situation is based on taped conversations between a therapist and his patient, Aki, a delusional young Helsinki man (formerly employed at Nokia Virtuals) whose psychosis led him to comb the city for his imagined girlfriend, Anne Nyberg. Aki's desperate search is clearly an "audition" for the right Anne. He claims to have had hundreds of encounters with hookers as part of a "Hollywood education" and believes he has been chosen to lead the film industry in determining the fantasies of others. He describes his psychosis as a film rolling in his head. From this point of view, to be mad is to attempt a real-world exercise of the filmmaker's will.
If Ahtila pursues the creative challenges and interpretive implications of equating psychotic realities with cinematic ones, her method is wholly rational and technically punctilious, and embraces all stages of production and presentation. She seems to thrive on editing for the short-film format; her longest film clocks in at less than an hour, and, so far, one discerns no "Cremaster"-length cycle straining for release. Footage for a project is shot on Super-16mm film and edited (with Tuuli Kuittinen) into compositions of varying lengths for video monitors, single-screen presentations (in 35mm) and multi-screen DVD projections.
Ahtila specifies the optimum configurations of gallery rooms where her works will be shown, the make and model of the projection equipment, the relative proportions of screens and their height from the floor, the color of the gallery's walls and draperies (plum and green for Anne, Aki and God; dark ocher or mustard for The House), and even--bless her--the provision of sofas and chairs for viewers. Rigorous timing is observed. The DVD loops for the five-monitor installation "The Present" (2001) are precisely adjusted so that only two of the anthology's five episodes are playing at any given moment. Multiple projections are synchronized to ensure that subtitles appear simultaneously on all screens. (The actors speak Finnish. Subtitles are printed in English.) In one telling departure from that rule, the subtly differing paces of the readings by the prospective Akis are rendered visible by the unsynchronized subtitles on the monitors which display the five actors' screen tests. For Consolation Service (1999), the story of the collapse of a contentious marriage and the beyond-the-grave reconciliation of the erstwhile spouses, Ahtila specifies that viewers be admitted only at the start of designated screening periods in order to preserve the momentum of the narrative and the surprise of its otherworldly conclusion.
