How It Was Made: Black River, Bleeding Heart

Behind small things there often are long stories... I was six in 1960 when my family moved north to Kemi, a little town by the northern shore of Gulf of Bothnia. My father, a B.Sc engineer,  was working as a process developing manager in the pulp factory. A year later I started school and we moved to the island where the factory was, Veitsiluoto. My school was on another island, Rytikari, where there were also shops and a library.

There I for the first time came to know different homes, different social classes and saw poverty and bitterness while visiting my classmates in their homes: poor farmers with a few cows, small houses with no central heating and toilet, workers lodgings - many small apartments in big buildings with no privacy. In the school we had latrines outside in long buildings by the beach - one side for girls and another for boys. And there were rats... But as I was a child I felt no prejudice or disgust or fear, just wonderful curiosity! And a kind of envy... because even though the families were poor and lived in lousy conditions there was warmth and a feeling of closeness that for me was completely strange. We had always had big houses and fine toilets and a car and everything, but no closeness.

Then came the time when some of my friends in school 'disappeared' and later came letters from Sweden with pictures of them wearing gorgeous dresses and earrings! Maybe the earrings were the greatest mark of the gap dividing us then: no-one in Rytikari or Veitsiluoto had earrings! I had ballet classes in Kemi and never dared to tell anyone. My mother went to draw naked models and once she told me that a brother of my best school friend was modeling there, a really beautiful boy. I never mentioned it to my friend.

There were also different areas, where the workers had their tenement houses - Petsamo, and we our big wooden villas, Aunus. Sometimes we had to run while passing Petsamo, because the bigger boys liked to beat us rich kids. There was hate and bitterness, even violence... but that is another story. The important was the poverty, people leaving for Sweden after better bread and the abandoned houses with sad dark windows.

Then 2004 I think it was - I had a funeral in Vaala, east of Kemi but fairly north too. I drove there on a summer morning and did not pay attention to the scenery because of my hurry. And then I drove back late in the night and as it was summer the sun remained near horizon and it was beautifully light. I stopped by the lake Oulunjärvi, wide like a sea, and the continued slowly south. Along the narrow and winding road there were small fields, endless marshes and bogs and those farmhouses with empty dark window. Big beautiful houses by little black and winding rivers... I felt the hairs raise in my back and a deep agony squeeze my heart. The memory came back like a flood! Many times I stopped the car and looked those houses and yards left long ago, houses that still stood with hanging windowsills and broken roofs...

In september I drove back with a former student and friend Eero, and we found the place I had kind of marked that night. There were three houses by the road, two on the other side and one on the other, all empty, and we chose one to take photographs of. The house was in fairly good condition, and it seemed that people had left like suddenly, leaving everything, furniture and lamps, everything, and no-one ever looked back. Of course I had spun a story of a boy who comes from Stockholm to see the home of his great grand parents, him being a third generation immigrant. Maybe dreaming of a forge there in the old house and a new life...  Well, that never became anything.

Then I did some screen tests with another friend, Hanna, on a very hot summer day. And again time passed... Then one day I felt a need to do something, anything and this idea of still pictures mixed with moving sequences came to my mind. And I did built a timeline in final cut of those photos and the test shoots. With yellow tulips... I tried to make it look like they were gazing each other through time and space maybe seeing something, maybe missing the other.  In this case it is the boy that wants to change things and the girl who wants to be tidy and static. The boy wants to wander to new realms and build his life there. The girl is in the grip of the moment and can't get scope. So she gets depressed and drowns herself. And the boy goes on.

So the timeline was ready - but I had no sound. Then I met some other former students of mine and they told they had a band and had made some pieces of music. Jari, the composer, played them to me and this one was exactly the same length as my picture line. Somehow it seemed like meant and when even the words seemed to fit I just placed the bit of music beneath the pictures and that was it!

The single pictures with faded surface in the beginning are another story: they are prints on silk paper glued to old planks with cellulose lack...

So I give you:

Black River, Bleeding Heart