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IS THERE SOMETHING FUN ON?

Datsun plays leading part

A small Datsun 100A, completely covered in snow, rides through a desolate rock quarry. The little car avoids colliding with a big rock and evades a couple of explosions. At a gas station it circles around at great speed and finally gets thrown into a lovely green wood. There the Datsun continues its crazy ride, while losing more and more parts. Very daring, to cast a car as the leading figure. But never be surprised with Finnish director Maarit Suomi-Väänänen. She has been in the Paradocs programme before with an equally absurd short film on felling a tree near a Finnish lake. A metaphor for the documentary, which broadens our view of the world.

Up And About Again can be explained in various ways. It can be the ironic version of the plot of an average Hollywood film, where the main character has to conquer a series of obstacles. Or human life in short: after various setbacks one accomplishes heavenly rest. Worn out and shaken, be as it may. Unbearable? Not in the least. Suomi-Väänänen brings the film with typical Finnish humour: very dry and with a sharp bite. Thus she makes you smile.

Niels Bakker, Idfa Daily - DagKrant 26.11.2009, translation: Katja Kuper

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Randolp Jordan, offscreen.com, Volume 13, Issue 12

http://www.offscreen.com/biblio/pages/essays/festival_nouveau_cinema_2009/

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On the horizon, a sweet graceless creature appears, a Datsun 100A, propelled by a cloud of dust. The world grows broader, the journey continues bouncing and striving forward in an insanely rugged, rocky world. Maarit Suomi-Väänänen’s (b.1966) three-part short film, Up And About Again (2009) is a many-layered coming-of-age story. Although there’s a biographical structure to the film, related both to the life of an individual and to the battlefield of society and global politics, it leaves ideological disputes aside. The message is rather that precisely at a time of individual and shared fear, it is the person and the person’s heart that should be put forward. This melancholic short film is a narrative whose ending doesn’t really matter. If it did, it would be ordinary, simple, and flatten the meanings: I grew up, endured, left, began a life of my own...

The first part of the film, entitled Rock Field, emphasizes loneliness, perhaps also through sympathy with the sweet, graceless little blind car. The main character’s appearance in the film calls out: Look at me, look at me! This creature, covered in snow and struggling sightlessly forward, is at once beginning a life, and one who has seen it all. In the Rock Field section, the being hovers a moment as death and rebellion play on the threshold. One can feel suspense in the air, like after a moment in which death may have been just one word or one wrong step away. A hard and merciless journey lies behind. Yet we survive, and go on rebelling to forget the moments when we have to live horribly close to death.

As in a bad dream, the changes often come in a rush and full of contradictions, awakening you to rebellion. In the second part, Service Station, the being leaps ahead at full speed, powered by the punk song Kohu-63: Wake Up. Anger propels it even faster across the asphalt lot of the gas station, asking who paved over paradise? But what this being resisted, he had to resist even within himself, because resistance is about the struggle for one’s identity, both as a personal strategy and as a social attitude. According to the cultural anthropologist James C. Scott, resistance is a fight against hegemony; a fight over who gets to control the symbolic production of a society.

After the rebellion comes silence. It is contrasted by a moss-covered tennis court and the brightness of a fragrant forest. Birds are cawing in the background, a cloud of smoke vibrating in air. With the brightness, there is a sense of threat. At dawn, the being glides slowly towards a world broken up by strangeness and fear... The journey goes on. It is clear that the world is not perfect, but it is ours, in all its unpredictability.

According to the artist Maarit Suomi-Väänänen, ”Up And About Again is an abstract description of inner feelings, narrated through special effects, pyrotechnics and high-speed images. The dramatic suspense is in the visual and logical contradiction; a snowy car speeds in slow motion through a summer landscape. The impression is also one of absurdity: the car is at once pitiful and courageous, fast and slow, a survivor and a loser, so should you cry or laugh?” The artist’s choice to shoot the movie on 16mm film, for example, makes possible certain changes of light: the variations in contras t create an interesting atmosphere throughout the film. Slow motion images and the slowness of emotional reactions are the most important artistic devices used in making the work. Manipulation of time has been put to skillful use as an effect. Already before the shooting, based on the artist´s photo sketches, the composer Tapani Rinne composed the music, where the melancholic tones of the clarinet, kantele, accordion and drums accompany and intensify the changing atmosphere of the scenes. The dialogue flows smoothly between the different parts, both in terms of structure, and of sound and content.
 
curator Marita Muukkonen, FRAME Finnish Fund For Art Exchange
translation Saara Hannula and Alan Prohm