Imitating Elina Brotherus

Our assignment was to imitate a photograph; first analyze it, then reproduce it. This is my imitation of Elina Brotherus’ photo called “I Hate Sex”. Took me three photoshoots to get it this close…

Sini

I had a chance to visit an exhibition in the Finnish Museum of Photography. There were video installations by Sini Pelkki, a Finnish London-educated artist who mostly works with photography and video. She also happens to be my very first friend – we’ve known each other from practically babyhood.

I’m really not good at visiting exhibitions. If the mood is not right, I cannot concentrate and especially miss out on all the video / interactive thingies. Anyhow, I loved the mood of Sini’s work, but I had the feeling that I did not quite understand it.

Akiresu to kame

Takeshi Kitano’s Akiresu to kame (Achilles and the tortoise) is a film about a struggling artist who only wants to make a name for himself but ends up in disaster. He listens to the art dealers, the critics and the teachers, and loses track on what he himself wants to do. The situation escalates in a typical Kitano way and he goes more and more overboard. This is a drama and a farce at the same time, making fun of the fine art establishment and the art education, but at the same time ironizing Kitano himself – the art in the film is really his.

I would recommend this to any budding artists.

Elina Brotherus

Lately I’ve been looking at Elina Brotherus’ work. I knew of her of course even before my photographic studies; she is one of the famous young Finnish photographers much lauded in the arts world now. I had not really looked at her work properly before, though.

This is called This is the first day. What it reminds me of is the small apartment I had in Kallio after I left my first fiance. I only took with me my mattress, which was on the floor, and my books. The place looks so similar I had to do a double take when I saw this photo. But maybe it’s also the mood. I don’t remember my first day in my apartment, but the mood of my first year there was .. well, what you see there.

I find Brotherus’ background interesting. She was a student of chemistry when she got started with photography and later finished her scientific studies and got an arts degree. I feel a kinship; I also come from a theoritical, even technical background, and have had to change my thinking and my way of observing after moving into the arts. Brotherus says,

“When I began studying photographic art in 1995, I was still in the middle of my university science studies. I was strongly resistant to investigating my own emotional life. When I finally finished my master’s dissertation in chemistry, I guess I was able to give up the scientific-analytical thinking required by that type of work and to concentrate on intuition and looking. This brought about a tremendous burst of creativity in me, especially since I suddenly had some free time, and it is that period that the first works that ended up in exhibitions come from. A lot of old issues came to the surface and I began digging into my own head, my own history.”

I‘ve also experienced what she is writing about – the strong resistance to investigating my own emotional life, and the need to stay detached – and have only lately gotten the feeling that I’ve moved forward from those standpoints and towards an ability to bring omething from inside myself into my work.

Brotherus’ series Suites francaises also reminds me of my early times in Holland. A new country, a new life, and a new language I do not understand. Her photographs show yellow post-it notes with French words tacked to everyday objects and herself somewhere in the picture, with a note or not..

Kore-eda Hirokazu: Still Walking

Kore-eda Hirokazu’s new film Still Walking was the film I was most curious about during this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival. Of course, there was the Kitano Takeshi film and you never know what he is up to, but Kore-eda is someone who always manages to surprise me, and always in a good way. The first film I saw by him (during the Helsinki Film Festival of 1999) was Afterlife, a strange little film about what goes on after death – apparently, you rehearse your most favourite memory and recreate it to live with it for eternity – and I loved it. The following Kore-eda films moved me as well, in different ways. This writer-director never repeats himself.

Still Walking is a family drama which takes place in the home of an elderly couple during just one summer’s day. The couple’s two living children have arrived with their families; the eldest son, a victim of an accident 10 years past, is mentioned often. The emotions and the small struggles of family come into play and soon we find out all kinds of details about the family we are watching; some significant, some small. Nothing dramatic happens. But the small things that happen are so real that one cannot help but feel them with the characters.

I complained a couple of days ago after seeing Non-ko that Japanese filmmakers rarely have believable female characters. Kore-eda’s masterful writing and directing cancels my complaint. He has based the main female person in the film, the old mother, on his own mother, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more – well, alive – film character in a Japanese movie. The other ones are completely believable as well, as are the relationships between them. Kore-eda’s quiet style and beautiful yet simple imagery underline the simple yet so complicated storyline. He has managed to catch a day of life, normal life. If this is the only good film I see this year, it is enough – it is wonderful enough to stay in my mind for years.