Pekka Sassi

Some of Pekka Sassi's works take the form of scripted stories that range from dystopian horror films to small comic impressions of the everyday.[13]

”Sassi does not actually describe the world but reconstitutes fragmented images into basic narratives accompanied by his commentary – serious and sometimes even fervent, however, often laced with irony.”[11]

“Pekka Sassi’s films show viewers ordinary surroundings that open up into self-contained universes which exist within and parallel to the real world. His subtly humorous stories often deal with the relationship between an individual and his surroundings.”[8]

For example, the “Kolya saga”, screened at the AAVE festival (Alternative AudioVisual Event) of 2016 in Helsinki, Finland, consists of loosely connected experimental films that address deep themes with a surreal twist.[14] “Kolya and I” (2006) is a black comedy about the relationship between human and God. In “Bad News from Heaven” (2007), the “metaphysical hooligans” Kolya and Yuri are faced with the concept of heaven. “The Suburb Within” (2009) is, according to the filmmaker, about “communication, narration and presence”. It is also a horror film where escalating anguish is created through the soundtrack while the abstract image has a supporting role.[15]

The fourth film of the series, “After Everything” (2014) emphasises visual narrative and is exceptionally long (28 minutes) compared with Sassi's usually very short videos. The film was produced with support from the Finnish Film Foundation[16] and premiered at the Tampere film festival of 2014. “After Everything” shows a dystopian world where brutality and inhumanity are part of everyday routine. The atmosphere of doom is emphasised by the combination of black and white footage, harsh settings and industrial noise music.[17]

Sassi taps into the conventions and phenomena of contemporary media culture and moves beyond. “Sassi’s moving images work like modern poetry or jazz; flirting with existing, recognizable structures and genres – and simultaneously constructing something new in an intuitive way.”[10]

The approach is explicit in ”The Dead House” (2003), a horror film constructed following the clichés of the genre but shot in a dollhouse. According to Sassi, “The Dead House” is a “make-believe movie.”[18] In another piece of work, ”It’s All Around Us Now, Frank” (2006), a Western created in the spirit of Twin Peaks and emphasising narrative through sound, two male characters are forced to face the unknown and their own fears.[8][10]

A parallel strand in Sassi's work combines optical, kinetic and constructivist art with the tradition of abstract experimental film.[10][13] For example, in “A Friend” (2016) characterised as kinetic and constructivist by Sassi, the moving image is composed of black and white lines and grids. Another recent work, “Colours” (2016), characterised as minimalist/constructivist, is a video installation where large colour surfaces are projected in succession on three walls in a 20-minute loop. The immersive work can be seen both as a painting and as moving image.[19] Sassi explains: “I explored what happens when the element of time is integrated into the examination of an abstract painting by cropping and synchronising images by means of moving image.”[20]

“Pekka Sassi builds in a meaningful way a bridge between experimental modernism and contemporary art. In a certain manner, he is a formalist whose roots go back to the early days of experimental film in the beginning of the last century, but at the same time he is a filmmaker who reacts to the present and its themes and who puts together his material out of the congestion on offer.”[11]

Sassi's works are characterised by creative integration of simple, and sometimes random, audial and visual elements detected in the surrounding world.[9] In a series of experimental films called “Domestic Studies in Cosmology” a new planet is discovered at the bottom of a paper coffee cup (“Void”, 2004), a seagull circling around a pier creates a new galaxy (“Bird”, 2004) and a black hole is found pulsating in a kitchen sink (“Schwarzschild Radius”, 2004).[10]