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Mox Mäkelä is a multi-talented Finnish conceptual artist. Since 1978 she has mounted exhibitions, collages, installations, actions and performances. She has pioneered new approaches in moving images and video projections for environment art. She also creates movies, radioplays and short stories. Two years ago Mox Mäkelä released her first feature film Vieras / Strange with the subtitle "Kuunnelmaelokuva" / "Long audio play movie". It is enjoying a distinguished international run.
Andjust is another long audio play movie, driven by a narrator's voice. In Strange, there were several voices; in this movie, only one: Frank Boyle in the English edition, and Martti Suosalo in the Finnish one. It is a stream of consciousness full of allusions, associations and references.
The visual approach is the opposite of minimalism. Andjust is a work of imagist excess based on collage, bricolage and a collector mania of objets trouvés. It is a Dadaist visual poem based on superimpositions, installations, collisions, animations, reflections and negative images. From sober observations it switches to low angles and majestic landscape views. Mox Mäkelä's cinema is original. There may be fleeting associations to films like Harry E. Smith's occultist Heaven and Earth Magic, but in the approach to animation only.
The wide open sky is a dominant motif. The skyline is low, and a recurrent image is the wind turbine.
The wabi-sabi aesthetics is another hallmark: the attraction to objects with a patina of time.
The vision of the collector mania is seemingly the opposite of Marie Kondo's Konmari discipline, but the overflow of useless things brings us to a parallel parodical viewpoint of the consumer society. The collector mania focuses on objects that have lost their usefulness. The theme expands to the extremes of dilapidated houses, mold-ridden conserves and lichen-covered objects.
Like in Vieras / Strange, Mox Mäkelä offers a point of observation outside everything. This time the protagonist is not a creature from outer space. Andjust is a war invalid, hit by a bullet in the head. A piece of metal has stuck in the brain, and Andjust has become an eternal outsider. A village idiot if we want to call him so. The movie is a reflection of his delirium and a catalogue of his obsessions including paranoia and a fear of radioactivity. In him we can look at our reflection in a twisted mirror.
A recurrent parallel figure is the pauper statue, a presence in Nordic Lutheran churches from the age of Queen Christina to the 19th century. They were also often reminders of war invalids.
The musical collage has been created with loving care. The Narva March is Finland's revered military funeral march that refers to the Great Northern War over 300 years ago. A rich mix of classical music ranges from the Baroque (Couperin, Lully) to Romanticism (Saint-Saëns) and Impressionism (Debussy). There are old hymns and evergreens. The music's wabi-sabi flavour is also essential in Mox Mäkelä's time machine.
Andjust is a barrage of sounds and images. Caught in a time warp, the protagonist, lost in his own world, makes us see otherwise.
Like Vieras, Andjust is an independent production. Again the result is a rich, rewarding, ambitious, assured and professional achievement of contemporary art.
Antti Alanen
film programmer
National Audiovisual Institute, Finland
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