Liisa Lounila

Lounila makes images at the threshold between photography and cinematography. Her claim to fame is a series or films shot with a homemade device that creates bullet-time effect, giving the impression of a camera moving through a space frozen in time. Some of these films were shown in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Lounila's recent exhibition at the Marabou Park Annex [September 15—October 29, 2006] included two text-based works, two of the bullet-time films—Flirt, 2001, and Play>>, 2003—and Roma, 2003, a series of lenticular prints. Mounted with a special technique, these photographs give a vague impression of movement and spatiality as you look at them from different angles, similar to the postcards that miraculously show different things when you manipulate them.

Lounila's use of temporal suspension and atmospheric sound is clearly intended to heighten the emotional charge. The bullet-time effect converts the films' scenes into slices of a larger narrative. The sound produces a feeling of impending drama or joy. Combined, these techniques give rise to expectations of totality that nevertheless remains undefined. Lounila does experiment with or even question the most traditional of narrative structures. She just renders storytelling elliptic. In fact, the films' cinematic language and logic are both close to those of television commercials and movie trailers. The only difference is that Lounila's work does not have any actual products or movies to sell.

This could also be said of her lo-fi appropriation of the bullet-time effect. The production of complex special effects with a homemade pinhole camera is, undoubtedly, an impressive technical feat.

Lounila's interest in a single moment and bringing it to life is connected to another dimension in her way of working: performativity, understood as the process approach to making art.

Susan Sontag has noted that photography doesn't simply reproduce reality but also recycles it. By presenting photos in new contexts they can say different things and serve very different purposes.

Lounila tells about the shooting technique for POPCORN, a technique she developed together with her colleague Henri Tani: "I used a camera I built myself from cardboard. It was 18 m long and surrounds the subject that I film. It simultaneously exposes 528 frames on 35mm film. The technique is also known under the names time-slice, temps mort, virtual camera, timetrack and multicam. The camera functions by picturing the subject simultaneously from all directions with many separate cameras. When these pictures, each taken from a slightly different angle, are joined together as a film, it creates the illusion of movement around an unmoving subject. The effect the technique creates is familiar to us from music videos of recent years and from movies. The material from one take can bring you about 35 seconds of moving image."



Wiki
BULLET TIME
\Bullet Time refers to a digitally enhanced simulation of variable speed (i.e. slow motion, time-lapse...) photography used in films, broadcast advertisements and computer games. It is characterized both by its extreme permutation of time (slow enough to show normally imperceptible and un-filmable events, such as flying bullets) and space (by way of the ability of the camera angle--the audience's point-of-view--to move around the scene at a normal speed while events are slowed). The first movie to use the Bullet Time technique was Blade in 1998, where bullets were computer-generated and digitally implemented. However, the actual term Bullet Time is a registered trademark of Warner Bros., the distributor of The Matrix.[1] It was formerly a trademark of 3D Realms, producer of the Max Payne games.[citation needed]

This is almost impossible with conventional slow-motion, as the physical camera would have to move impossibly fast; the concept implies that only a "virtual camera," often illustrated within the confines of a computer-generated environment such as a game or virtual reality, would be capable of "filming" bullet-time types of moments. Technical and historical variations of this effect have been referred to as time slicing, view morphing, slow-mo, temps mort and virtual cinematography.

Jeff Wall's Milk, 1984


Milk is another depiction of a socially charged subject. 'Suffering and dispossession remain at the centre of social experience', Wall has commented. The explosive burst of liquid is emblematic of the man's frame of mind, but what might have provoked such extreme emotion is not revealed, a state of ambiguity that ensures the work cannot be understood as moral commentary. The process of reconstructing an event allows Wall the freedom to reinvent the composition. He often relocates the action to a different setting, a place chosen for its formal or pictorial qualities, as the case here. The grid-like order of the brick wall background, and strong vertical bands that stripe the left side of the image contrast sharply with the tension in the man's arms and the uncontrolled arc of milk.