Mika Taanila

Tectonic Plate is a cameraless film about fear of flying, security checks and time zones.

After returning from a lengthy business trip to Tokyo, the  nameless protagonist is inexplicably stuck at a hotel nearby the Helsinki airport. The events are fixed to the character’s life-style of constant jet lag and multitasking.  The use of various technical devices, such as phones, computers and heart rate monitors, slivers his time-management and modifies the consciousness.

The episodes of on-screen texts and of moving image alternate in the narration of this dualistic work.

The techniques used for the moving images are photocopying documents related to air-travel directly onto clear 35mm film and darkroom exposure of objects placed on 35mm reversal film (photograms).

”In the ’camera-less’ experiment Tectonic Plate, visual-artist Mika Taanila’s photograms and poet Harry Salmenniemi’s stark intertitles simulate the jet-laggy anxiety of international air travel. Pages from security pamphlets are distorted into rough particles of grain; a five-minute zoom-out transforms words into geometric patterns. These shifts between legibility and abstraction often literally force the viewer’s eyes to refocus, dislocating both cognitive and sensory perception; the resulting dissociative panic produces a very bodily feeling of free fall. The physically droughts photograms, which alternatively evoke encephalographs or airport x-rays of carry-on items, anchor the out-of-body paranoia in an unshakable tactility.”

– Chloe Lizotte, Film Comment

 

Distributed by Arsenal (Berlin) and AV-arkki (Helsinki).

VOD rent or buy here:

link to trailer

buy Blu-ray Box Set at Lux Shop (London)

Selected screenings:

• Zwei Tage Strom, Filmpodium Zürich, Switzerland, 2024
• Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 2023
• Damage/Control, Padiglione dell’Esprit Nouveau, Bologna, Italy, 2020
• Novaja stsena Aleksandrinsko teatra, St. Petersburg, 2019
• Kino Junost, Moscow, Russia 2019
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK 2017
• Cinéma Spoutnik, Genève, Switzerland 2016
• Milano Film Festival, Italy 2016
• Edinburgh Film Festival, UK 2016
• Bildrausch Film Fest, Basel, Switzerland 2016
• “Seeing in the Dark”, Brussels Cinematek, Belgium 2016
• Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, 2016
• Berlinale Forum Expanded, Germany 2016

•