Short Sighted

Eija-Liisa Ahtila's Love Is a Treasure

Words: Holly Willis

Like Fassbinder or Sirk -- filtered through a female Finnish lens -- the celebrated video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila finds her subject matter in the twisted and tortured perplexities of domestic despair. However, where her predecessors dug deep into melodrama, Ahtila glides along the slippery contours of its surface, combining blithe humor with genuine empathy, which is not an easy mix in ironic times. The artist's earliest shorts include almost anecdotal pieces such as "Me/We; Okay; Gray," as well as multi-screen projection pieces that flirt with temporal and spatial dislocation. More recently, Ahtilla has made the 55-minute film Love Is a Treasure, a five-part collection of shorter tales which tell the stories of five women who harbor individual psychoses. While each episode borrows from case studies, Ahtila mixes reality and fantasy to create worlds that exemplify her characters' particular fixations. In "Wind," a woman's anger takes form as blustery gusts that blow like a hurricane through her apartment. At one point, she drags her mattress across the cluttered room and lays it across a toppled bookcase. An ensuing shot, showing her curled up on her makeshift bed in a room of total chaos, perfectly captures a state of resigned rage. In "Ground Control," a teenager interprets certain sights and sounds as signs from extraterrestrials, while in "Underworld," a woman hides under her bed, fearful of possible murderers. Ahtila's subtle brilliance with this film is to honor the fears and anxieties of her characters and indeed, to let us experience their everyday realities, as strange as they may be.