Failed Emptiness

Nobody goes into a film called Failed Emptiness expecting an uplifting message of hope. Finnish multimedia artist Mika Taanila expunges all optimistic sentiment from this moody procession of images, music and on-screen text. There is the thinnest filigree of narrative – rituals of domestic life, an individual seeking and losing their identity in the crowd – but the plot deliberately breaks down into a series of abstract impressions. An apocalyptic ambience is transmitted to the viewer. The text, by poet Harry Salmenniemi, appears as conventional intertitles for a while but then takes on a purely graphic form, its accumulated meanings scattered to the chill wind.

On a technical level, the chief novelty of Failed Emptiness is the fact that all its images are photographed with a black-and-white thermal camera – a process that converts degrees of warmth in a body or object into visible shades within the image. Filmmakers including Philippe Grandrieux (La vie nouvelle, IFFR 2003) have experimented with this device, but none so far have taken it as Taanila. The thermal imaging gives a spectral, other-worldly presence to even the most mundane household device or stray object in the street, rendering human presence in a completely unfamiliar way.

– Adrian Martin