Points of View

A teenage girl with short blonde hair is throwing a ball against a wall. A man is sobbing heavily in a bedroom nearby; suddenly he screams out in agony. A girl's voice explains: 'Today my dad's crying. Late last night a car drove over his dad who died instantly.' These ominous opening words set the tone in Eija-Liisa Ahtila's video Today (1997), a three-part work that presents the same tragic event as seen through the eyes of three different characters: a young girl, a grown-up man and an elderly women. Their fragmented, strangely poetic reports touch upon the accident, but simultaneously weave a dense web of questions concerning family relationships, sexuality and death. The setting is sombre, but the multi-layered flow of words, sounds, and images make this work an unusually appealing cinematic experience.

In her films and installations, Ahtila plays elegantly with well-established genres, documentary as well as commercial. There is nothing ironic or smart about these projects; rather, she appropriates established formal means in order to imbue them with new significance. At a time when even TV commercials, such as Diesel's recent meta-porn ad, are using clever meta-narratives, art has had to move on from irony, and in this respect Ahtila's formally complex projects come as a relief. Here quotations to existing genres are made in order to create entirely new forms of experience.

The three parts of Today refer to each other in subtle ways. The girl with the ball returns in the man's ruminations on parenthood: 'I have a daughter. She throws a ball and asks me to watch. And those throws look like the anger I have swallowed.' Although the film is only ten minutes long, the many cross-references and elusive narrative structure are hard to fathom after only one viewing, and questions remain after several. Towards the end, for instance, the girl seems to leave everything open: 'Maybe it's not my dad's who's crying, but someone else's dad. Sanna's dad, Mia's dad, Marko's dad, Pasi's dad - or Vera's dad. I'm in an armchair. I have a boyfriend. I have something on my lap. I'm 66 years old.' Whether this is a fantasy or an unexpected look into the distant future we will never know.

For those of us who do not speak Finnish, the language sounds radically foreign. It's not as if one even catches a word here and there; it's all incomprehensible and beautiful. For non-Finnish audiences this adds to the experience of these films: one reads the English subtitles while listening to the impenetrable voices, at once strangely rough and lyrical. It is hard to generalise about national characteristics, but an alliance of severe directness - even brutality - and tender poetics is something I tend to consider typical of a number of Finnish artists, from photographer Esko Männikkö and filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki to Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

This combination is clearly part of the magic of If 6 was 9 (1995), described by the artist as a 'a split screen video installation about teenage girls and sex'. The work consists of three screens that present the sexual fantasies, everyday actions, and dreams of a number of adolescent girls in Helsinki. It has a documentary feel, but is really a piece of complex fiction. Anyone dispirited by Laura Mulvey's account of visual pleasure and the objectifying phallic gaze in traditional cinema should consider this anarchic and melodious account of the metamorphosis of children into sexual creatures. These girls have the 'softest organs for taking and grasping'. They are certainly not reducible to objects of a male gaze. On the contrary, they intend to ingest the world around them in big bites. As Ahtila puts it, the young females want to 'have the world and touch it with their feet, cheeks, tits and arse'. The tender lyricism of day dreams and soft piano music clash with the straightforwardness of their accounts. However, the directness of their stories does not exclude a sense of wonder and mystery: 'It was equally amazing to see in a porn magazine that men have no hole behind the testicles. I thought that it had not always been like that.'

Most of Ahtila's projects exist both as films and as installations. In fact, it's not so clear which genre these works belong to; perhaps one could even claim that they invent their own. They borrow from established forms such as documentary or music video, but they do it in a way that dodges traditional classification. My favourites are her three 90-second films Me/We, Okay, and Gray (1993-95). In these compact and enigmatic works, the natural link between human subject and voice has been loosened - or entirely eliminated. Here, many voices speak through the same mouth, or the same voice through many mouths. In the humorous Me/We, all the members of a family move their lips, but strangely enough it's the self-absorbed father who analyses his deteriorating family. In Okay a woman walks back and forth in her room, like a nervous animal in a cage, spitting out information about a violent sexual relationship: 'If I could, I would transform myself into a dog and I would bark and bite everything that moves. Woof, woof!' The story is told in the first person, but many voices - male as well as female - force themselves upon us. Gray, finally, is the real masterpiece. Three women travel in an industrial lift and deliver a deeply worrying report about an imminent (or has it already happened?) catastrophe. They speak with incredible speed about chemicals and radiation, creating a weird poetry. These works give us a sense of what Gilles Deleuze may have had in mind when he discussed the potential of film not just to represent a subject's position, but to create entirely new forms of life.