We interviewed and photographed Eija-Liisa Ahtila in 2000.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Eija-Liisa Ahtila was born in Hameenlinna, Finland, and studied film and multimedia in London and Los Angeles. She has been working in the audio-visual arena since the late ’eighties, exploring experimental story-telling techniques - the connection between short films and commercials, split-screen techniques and the possibilities or narration in multi-screen installations. She makes complex human dramas dealing with the problems of identity and ‘otherness’. Her films experiment with the established conventions of cinema and documentary, music, video and advertising, to reproduce an eclectic new experience for today’s audio-visual audience. She lives and works in Helsinki.

Interview

Your films have been described as being ‘in the no man’s land between conventional genres: between cinema and TV, and between big screen and monitor’. You describe them as ‘human dramas’. How do you match the story with the medium?

Of each work - with the exception of Anne, Aki and God - there exists a 35mm film version and a DVD installation. Certain works are more filmic or have more to do with the narrative traditions of short films and some have more spatial qualities and so function better as an installation.

In 1993, I made a video installation called Me/We, Okay, Gray. I wanted to do something for TV, for the space where you usually see advertisements. And so I contacted a TV channel and made three 90-second long stories to be shown in advertisement slots. With them I tried to explore the differences and similarities between advertisements and short films. They were intended to be short human dramas. The first film resembles a washing powder advertisement but it’s more about the relationships within a family. You only hear the father talking, and when other members of the family are seen speaking, it’s always with the father’s voice. Okay, the second one, is about a love relationship and how, when you are really close to someone, you lose your own boundaries and the clear idea of where you end and the other person starts. The third one, Gray, approaches the theme through the concept of nationality and boundaries. It has a lot to do with where I’m living. There is a nuclear power station near the border on the Russian side; the film shows a group of women talking and I used the spreading of nuclear power as a kind of metaphor. The title, Gray, when written with an ‘a’ also means a radiation measurement. The last sentence in the film is ‘One hundred rads equal one gray’.

When I made Today I wanted to explore the question of what makes you what you are, and especially so in a family. We all know that we have similarities with our parents, that I inherit something from my father but then again there is something in my father that’s me. To explore this theme I made this three-screen installation, set out like three walls of a room. There are three people, one on each screen and they are talking about an accident. The grandfather has been driven over by a car. First the viewer doesn’t know what has happened or who is who. There is a young girl, her father and an older woman. They all speak towards the camera, or through the camera directly addressing the viewer. The girl says in the end of the first part: ‘I’m sixty-six years old, I have a boyfriend, I have something in my lap.’ The next image is of this older woman and she’s sitting in an armchair and has an ashtray in her lap and she talks about her views of her surroundings and her life. And you don’t know whether this is the grandmother or whether this is the girl when she’s old. She stops talking and the third screen starts with an old man walking towards the screen and then he looks at us through the camera, doesn’t say anything, turns around and lies down on the road and then a car comes, the accident happens. For me it was also about the death of the patriarch. My aim was to create a story that didn’t have one beginning and one end, not a chronological story but a story that can be placed within a narrative structure.

How critical is the use of sound in your films?

It’s important since I work with a medium that expresses, gives information and makes contact with the viewer in so many ways - through sound, image, rhythm, the actors, the installation space. I try to keep all the elements present when I write the script but later, during the sound editing, I work together with my sound designer. We are two minds working together and exchanging ideas and experimenting.

How do you arrive at your narratives? Do you start off with a conception of the whole?

Kind of, I have an idea. In the case of Consolation Service, John Peter Nilsson, who curated the Nordic Pavilion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, suggested the theme of ‘ending’ - the end of the millennium, the end of the Gregorian era - and I thought this was a really interesting topic. Because it’s so far been typical of me to depict things through human relationships, I decided that I would like to do a story about a couple who are separating - ending their relationship. First comes the structure. I ended up using two projections for this topic of the separation of two people. Second I start making files of ideas with images and sounds and some dialogue. When I do this, part of it can be in English, but then when I rewrite it I translate it into Finnish.

With Consolation Service I started with the epilogue and the decision that I wanted to have a narrator. Then I decided there would be three parts - the first an instruction on how to end something, the second where the ending happens and the third would be a kind of ‘consolation service’.

Where to get instructions to end a relationship nowadays? I put the couple in this therapy session, where the therapist is giving advice on what to do when people divorce. I interviewed a therapist and asked her about the problems of a young family in this situation. The second part is greatly influenced by a book I read about a shipwreck. A ship goes down and a lot of young people are lost. It stayed in my mind and from this I included people walking on ice and falling through and this became the metaphor for the ending. The third part is the consolation service. The woman is alone in her room with the child. It’s evening and she’s watching TV. She hears something and goes to see if there is someone in the hall but there is no one there. She puts the light on and then after a while something happens - the man materialises in the hall. It’s an effects shot. He shows her how to bow - how to give up, how to accept - and then he disappears for the last time. It’s her illusion. Only the woman is talking in the scene. You hear the man’s voice but he speaks in the third person like the narrator.

In the earlier films the characters talk to the camera. In Consolation Service the actors were asked to address each other but not to avoid the camera; that they would pay attention to it when they felt appropriate. The aim was to create a separate story world - a filmic illusion - and at the same time play with it. I was interested to experiment with the possible simultaneous presence of the actor and the character, or the narrator being a classical one outside the story itself in the beginning but later on becoming more and more interwoven in the story world. Also I wanted to experiment with developing the story from emotion to emotion - that’s the reason the work is shown as a linear piece - meaning that the people are let in only when the work starts.

What sort of audience do you have in mind when you are working?

That’s a difficult question. When I do something, I’m quite sure that I’m doing it for a small audience, a small group of people, but that’s all I know. I don’t know who the people are who like my work and it’s always a surprise.

One of the reasons why I enjoy working with moving images is because the process is so long and it has so many different phases. Also you can be alone when you write and then with people during the shooting period. I really like the process when the work starts to come together and then there is so much to go through before you eventually give the work out. When people finally see it, it happened a long time ago for me and I don’t have the same kind of relationship with it that I did during the making. So I don’t find it at all difficult that the work speaks differently to different people. You have such a long time with the work and, when people see it, it’s already gone into the distance and I’m working on new things.

How do you see your work developing in the future?

I am often asked this. Mainly the film people think I’m going through a phase and that I will start making longer films as usually happens. That’s not really how I see it. I always believe that the length of the work has to do with the topic. Every story has it’s own needs. A 90-second work can reach you as strongly as a two-hour one. At the moment I’m working on something based on someone’s life and that sets up certain requirements. Later I would like to do more of the shorts for TV. I really would like to do at least one new series.



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