Salla Tykka

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvoLE7B7v4Y

The films of Salla Tykka, another Finnish artist also have a certain air of cinematic auteurism. While these are usually single screen projections they share the same non-traditional form of narrative. In the same way Akerman and Ahtilas installations seem form a continuous loop, Tykka’s films give the viewer the opportunity to enter at anytime and still evoke a similar feeling.


Common to many of Tykkä’s short films is the moment of emotional and physical metamorphosis experienced by young women in a combination of natural and constructed settings. The situations are intentionally ambiguous, highly charged emotionally and sexually, and utilize cinematic devices in order to heighten tension.


This building of tension is particularly relevant to her recent exhibition Cave and Zoo, which spent three months at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in 2007. Cave is a trilogy consisting of Lasso (2000), Thriller (2001) and Cave (2003). All of which work with ideas of contemplation and vigilance building to a climax of revelation or confrontation. Lasso was seen as part of the Venice Biennale in 2001 and is set to Ennio Morricone’s score for Western classic ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. It begins with a young Finnish girl in track pants coming to a window of a suburban house to watch unnoticed, a young man performing an intricate lasso routine inside the lounge. Tykka also plays with the notion of hyper-reality, exposing a moment in a young woman's life in which ‘one's inability to face the other - or oneself, even - is squeezed into a powerful sensation somewhere on the edge of the unreal.’[1] The significance of spectatorship is also evoked in Lasso, we the voyeur, are seeing in the Girl a reflection of ourselves, this is even more pronounced when the camera reveals the Girl’s own reflection on the window she is looking through.


This idea is also explored in her more recent 2006 piece, Zoo which follows a stylish female protagonist who explores the animal enclosures at a zoo with a camera in hand. Here the relationship between subject and object is teased out and complicated. Tykka uses the camera angles and the musical score to suggest that while the woman observes the animals, she herself is being preyed upon. The film is punctuated by scenes of an underwater rugby game, ‘creating moments of frenzied, violent activity.’[2]Twelve minutes after we meet the main character she commits suicide, the many missing rungs on the ladder towards her end are what make the film so thought provoking. Like Akerman, Tykka employs an almost unconscious detached symbolism to form the narrative, using props laden with meaning (such as the Canon camera) and the zoo’s inhabitants (an owl and a tiger) as crucial supporting roles. It is not until the end we discover the true meaning to the camera, we watch as it scouts the location unaware of its search for the perfect death scene. Over and over again the female character played by Finnish actress Terhi Suorlahti, holds the viewfinder to her eye, but never releases the shutter. We get the sense that she is not there to view the animals. Often compared to the auteurism of Hitchcock, Tykka also uses a staccato score to build the tension, this coupled with the use of camera angles and cuts to underwater rugby make the trajectory towards self-harm less obvious.


When Suorlahti finally hurries towards her pond and steadies her camera on the rocks above to make the first and last picture, which seem to mirror the opening scenes of the film, where we see from the tank’s floor one of the male figures at the surface of the pond mocking a dead man’s floating body.


Here Zoo shares the same deconstruction of narrative seen in Akerman and Ahtila’s films, the filmic compositions exist in varied time and space, while still retaining certain grains of the original "theme," as a sort of fluctuating loop. Akerman along with her Finnish contemporaries use the qualities of cinema to set up material clashes with idealized versions of reality. They all seem to share an underlying vision of a ‘truer-cinema’, one created by displaying the everyday as the extraordinary, and the extraordinary as the everyday.


They all seem to follow the post-Godardian need to deal differently with the referent. There work poses direct questions to the audience about cinematic language and the presence of the spectator.