Subcutaneous Melodrama: The Work of Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Abstract

�� innish filmmaker and visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila is one of the most prominent practitioners of the vibrant Nordic art scene to emerge in the 1990s. Trained in art and film in her native Helsinki, as well as in London and Los Angeles, and currently completing her doctorate in fine arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Ahtila makes work that is smart in theory and practice. Smart, emotionally arresting, engaging, affective. A self-described “teller of human dramas,” she approaches narrative equipped with a rigorous arsenal of postmodern strategies ranging in scope from critiques of the global communications network and post-structuralist investigations of volatile subjectivity to feminist and postfeminist concerns with subject construction. One of her most potent tools, however, is a two-centuries-old dramatic genre of proven emotional reach and punch, melodrama. Historically disdained as “low” art and more recently, and exhaustively, interrogated by film theorists as a site and vehicle of feminine erasure, in terms of both representation and spectatorship, melodrama is a provocative and savvy narrative device for a contemporary (female) artist telling stories in the language of the cinema. Evolving as a byproduct of the French Revolution, melodrama is a hybrid genre combining speech with the traditional mute boulevard entertainments of mime, music, and spectacle. Banned from popular stages by a ruling aristocracy deservedly wary of the insurgent potential of an uncensored people’s theatre, spoken texts became the exclusive privilege of officially sanctioned, upper-class theatres, and conformed in style to the neo-classicism favored by the well-educated elite. With the new democracy, common people found political voice, and reclaimed it for the theatre as well. Melodrama’s first audiences included active players and firsthand witnesses of the Revolution’s real life-and-death dramas, its bloody warfare and grisly public executions. They were unlikely to find neo-classicism’s highly refined, static, literary artifice satisfying. A new dramatic form for spoken theatre was required, one exhilarating enough to captivate a highly charged, post-revolutionary society in dire need of direction in its newly democratized life. Emotionally vivid, visually stunning, easily accessible, morally mindful—these fundamental attributes of melodrama, forged in the revolution marking the advent of the modern age, prevail