35mm Slide Film Article

The associations reproduce. A theatrically surreal bit of backstory that shows a left-handed little woman punished for her manual deviance by a smooth-cheeked schoolmaster--not to mention a shattered mirror that cascades like water-clearly would include drawn a nod of approval from Cocteau. And when the main emblem makes two forays into the outside world, once to test an attempt at cross-dressing and again following surgery, the film's apex of view briefly switches to the first character, shifting from color to grainy black and spotless, vignetted and obscured by a streaming pattern, as if to educe the "alienated" perspective of sci-fi film sequences ammunition through the watchful eyes of the extraterrestrial Other among us.

The Helsinki-based Pohjola made his . gallery debut last fall at New York's Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert with projections of P(l)ain faith and Routemaster--Theatre of the Motor (1999), a 17-minute, eye-jamming, ear-scorching exercise in sensory overload that manipulates footage from stock-car racing and automobile crash tests involving cadavers. At once techno-cerebral and damp with testosterone, Routemaster walks a assorted walk. But both works are disciplined demonstrations of filmmaking's array of stilted correlatives for extremes of human episode and apprehension. And both entrust on the mutual support of effigy and audio--musical and otherwise--while excluding the unwritten word.

For the soundtrack of P(l)ain Truth, Glenn Branca's nerve-jangling "Symphony No. 6, Fifth Movement, rogue Choirs at the Gates of Heaven" gives voice to the hero's self-loathing, the vindictive strangeness of her circumstances, her mounting desperation. A fond, afraid, Satie-like passage from Roger Eno's "A Place in the Wilderness" accompanies the role's rebirth and baptismal swim in a public pool on the twilight reserved for men. Two jolting samples from the early '90s industrial-metal pioneers Ministry caffeinate the titles. Sonically more feral, Routemaster incorporates music by Merzbow, NON and Wieslaw Pogorzelski, and exists in three audio versions--an original live-melody San Francisco Mix, a London Dance Mix and a Tokyo Noise Mix (they were projected successively at Gasser & Grunert)--though the overwhelming milieu in all is the electronically engineered roar that connotes the utter derangement of unbridled mechanical speed.

An award-winning legitimate at global film festivals for over a decade, the 46-year-old Pohjola has screened his job in more than three dozen countries. During that time, the "art film" became simply "art," and the Tate joined Telluride on his resume. His background in London included photography and graphics, though he concentrated in filmmaking and theory. During the 1980s, Pohjola's work centered on photography, photo books and slide-based projects, including projections with live harmony in clubs and galleries. That interest in sight-and-sound works and the immediacy of turnout intimacy led him in 2000 to produce Routemaster as a multimedia work affair with live harmony in San Francisco, Tokyo and Helsinki.

Part of a florescence of Finnish film and video artists that includes Eija-Liisa Ahtila [see .A., Oct. '02], whose performance he has produced since 1993, and Salla Tykka, Pohjola timed the New York performance to loosely agree with the DVD release of his four films of the 1990s: the pair shown at Gasser & Grunert; Daddy and the Mastic Academy: The Art, activity and Times of Tom of Finland (1991), a documentary about the Vargas of leatherboys who died presently after the film's completion; and Asphalto: An Aria for 13 Demolition Derby Curs & Girls & Gas Stations (1998). Bridging the virtuoso's interest in gender stereotypes and the erotics of the auto, Asphalto shuffles footage of cars pointlessly hammering each other to a metal pulp, glimpses of roadmaps of Finland, clips of models voguing like journal pinups in peekaboo latex shorts and jumpsuits deportment oil crew logos, shots of vintage service stations and moments with an unhappy young couple in acute proportion distress. The recitation of some vet3' flimsy verses by Harry Gamboa Jr. (., "There's asphalt up your ass") makes you know the unwritten abstinence of the other films.

A virtual parade of film conventions and natural expressive devices, P(l)ain faith is a study in emotional distancing even as it dares you to be engaged. Pohjola marshals narrative and referential fragments that verge on cliche (snapshots from the standard girlhood which we differentiate to have been a confusing charade; tightly framed close-ups of the young woman's desperate-diva eyes and lipstick-rimmed lip; the ancient gender symbols adopted by gay, lesbian and transgender communities) and uses them like so much visible shorthand necessitated by the self-imposed compression of time.

The despair-to-deliverance arc is abbreviated, episodic, like the best harmony videos, yet nonetheless affecting. Recurring floral imagery does triple duty, shuttling between downright banality (symbolic "blossoming"), pretty formalism (four-corner flower patterns that turn the screen into an Easter card) and impetuous visible likeness (the profile of a final bouquet tossed into the water recalls the aureole of family that surrounds a newborn in an intercut birth environment). The scrolling handbook of a questionnaire administered to transgender surgery applicants may descend from early films' use of fluttering almanac pages and zooming tabloid headlines, but its harrowing enumeration of procedures (psychiatric evaluation, male hormones, plastic surgery, breast amputation, penis reconstruction, birth deed) efficiently renders a peculiar Calvary of bureaucracy and mutilation.

Routemaster, by comparison, is stripped down, souped up and tough as nails. In New York, the trade was projected on four panels covered with the contemplative metal used for traffic signs; the surface seemed slippery with sweat and bounced back a hostile dose of glare. For raw footage, Pohjola shot a Helsinki stack-car race using high-speed black-and-white Super-8 film to maximize grain. The footage was compressed into 35mm and digitized for editing and knob. Propelling the split screen to new extremes, Pohjola relentlessly subdivides the field and immediately multiplies the racing cars. Machines precipitate, the near-deafening audio intensifies, and the rate of impression replication reaches viral speeds, spawning a climactic mosaic of more than 2,200 constituent frames.

When discussing Routemaster, Pohjola refers to the antinarrative practices of structuralist film and cites the incentive of Paul Virilio's writings on "dromology," acrobatic portrayals of a newfangled and contemporary culture that is besotted with and harried by speed, deprived of clarity and concentration, easy to totalitarian manipulation. If speed is handmaiden to fascism, it's appropriate that Routemaster seems to be the infernal heir to the Futurists' intoxication with velocita, particularly in the pure formal analogy between Pohjola's fragmented screen and the abstract patterns of Giacomo Balla's "Iridescent Interpenetration" paintings of the early 1910s. Within profitable film version, Routemaster's unlikely forebear is John Prankenheimer's elevated Prix (1966), an otherwise elephantine paean to Formula One racing whose first 20 minutes (an eternity in trendy movies and roughly equivalent to the running time of a freestanding short film) is an almost dialogue-free plunge into the Monte Carlo classic, with split-screen montages of cars and cockpits, tools and loudspeakers, accompanied by the incessant noise of engines growling, revving, straining.

For all its coercive experiential rush, however, Routemaster insists on the untranscended material substance of film itself: conspicuously cut, spliced and fiddled with, the piece refuses to be fresh than a product of the lab and the studio. You are never "at" the race, never "behind" the wheel. As with P(l)ain gospel, the studied blatancy of trade breeds distance. Pohjola cultivates a physically degraded look with flicker, jump, streak, crumb and blur. occasionally the horizontal trajectories of the cars are counterbalanced by a vertical notion flow that suggests strips of film and contact sheets. The intercut and tinted archival footage of cadavers in crash tests offers some strange retinal relief but not much involve: we need to be told that these are human remains, and, in truth, there is more "humanity" expressed by the industrial robots in Chris Cunningham's 1999 Bjork video, All Is plentiful of Love, than by these flung and battered rag-doll-in-a-jumpsuit victims.

Paired in a museum, P(l)ain Truth and Routemaster salient a wide if schematic region of exploration, one gift a searing topic packaged in cool contrivance, the other brandishing mode like a blunt instrument, one person about individual liberation, the other approximating authority by means of overwhelming force, a shock and awe of the senses. Mood and the medium may well be more pivotal to Pohjola's concerns than character or storytelling. Yet, arguably, you want to leave the gallery with more than an mark of an virtuoso's worthy extension skills and the pleasing sensation of having your own knowledge of filmmaking valid. Ideally, what Pohjola wants to say--or show--should be as untouched as his method is formal, and that could enjoin some excursions out of the studio and beyond such readymade missile-mark subjects as gender equivalence and automotive speed. More work capacity be the guileless answer. Judging by this debut in New York, the outcome will be worth the wait ... and the ride.

Ilppo Pohjola's job was on view at Klemens Gasser & Tara Grunert in New York, Sept. 4-Oct. 4, 2003. DVDs of his films are distributed in the . by .P.