Focus

Finland

Part 2 - Consumed, compressed, resurfaced

47 mins

For this compilation dealing with found images and other traces, I have chosen Finnish artists’ moving image works where the original materials have been given a new life. The use of technology by humans and the scars or scorched marks of history are being paid special attention. Like all bodies, film bodies can get old and damaged and still express lived vividity. The traces of the past are not resurrections but reminders that they are living entities, made freshly visible within new bodies of moving images.
Kari Yli-Annala

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Fri 22 Oct

22:30 - 24.00 / ACUD KINO

Juha van Ingen
(DIS)INTEGRATOR
1992, 4' 13, digital

In the second screening, Juha van Ingen’s starting point in (Dis)Integrator (1992) is an image and a counter-image of a man and woman from the 1950s sci-fi horror film The Fly. The man-scientist explains how the transmission of images functions in television and how similar it is to the teleporter he has invented. The woman agrees but also argues: “Yes, but this is different''. The sequence is repeatedly copied using a regular video home system (VHS) player and recorder procedurally, resulting in the step-by-step disappearance of the analogue video image.

Mika Taanila
KIILA: VERBRANNTES LAND

2002, 6' 38, digital

Mika Taanila’s found footage music video Kiila: Verbranntes Land (2002) pairs excellently with van Ingen’s work. It appropriates an instructional video about the degradation of video image through excessive use, showing how “it becomes ever less visible the more often it gets copied - scorched earth indeed, instructions, their sense vanishing due to excessive consultancy. Desire giveth, then taketh away” (words by Olaf Molten ler).

Sami van Ingen
EXACTLY
2008, 8' 00, 35 mm

In Sami van Ingen’s Exactly (2008), the images from the three scenes from the Hollywood movie Miracle on 34th Street (1995) are transformed into “three meditations on the international market economy”. The material had been cut in a film lab from a 35mm screening print into a 16mm leader, resulting in a stammering, slowed down sound and image.

Jarkko Räsänen
IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI
2011, 5' 00, digital

Jarkko Räsänen’s In girum imus nocte et consumimur gini (“We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire”, 2011) takes its name from an old Latin palindrome. We see photographs showing people burning books. The ones who burn the books are like the moths fascinated by fire. The software designed by Räsänen lessens the compression quality of the jpg-images step by step, making the images themselves disappear or burn away.

Seppo Renvall
THE PRICE OF OUR LIBERTY

1991, 8' 10, 16 mm

The last works in the program dive deeply into the matters of life and death in the last century of the last millennium. In The Price of Our Liberty (1991) Seppo Renvall has refilmed photographs of the soldiers from four different regions in Finland who were killed in the Finnish-Russian War during 1939 –

40. The photographs are from a 1941 book with the same name. Renvall uses a roughly applied frame-by-frame method to rapidly speed-up the images, creating a kind of image of an “unknown soldier”. ”The unknown soldier” is a much-cherished trope in Finnish culture because of a fictional book about the war written by writer Väinö Linna and several film versions made of it.

Sami Van Ingen
POLTE (FLAME)

2018, 14' 00, digital

In Flame (2018), Sami van Ingen gives a new life to the damaged scenes from the only surviving reel of the movie Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young (1937) by a studio era film director Teuvo Tulio (orig. Theodor Tugai or Teodors Turlajs, born in Latvia 1912 – deceased in Helsinki 2000). The reel was found in the Cinémathèque française in 2015. In Flame, the sublime beauty of decay is highlighted by the interplay between nitrate film and digital editing.

Finland

Part 2 - Consumed, compressed, resurfaced

Fri 22 Oct

Thu 21

Fri 22

Sat 23

Sun 24