In the 1970s, when I was starting with Super 8 films, I was infuriated by the general attitude reflected by my fellow amateur filmmakers and Super 8 textbooks when they claimed that this technique was at its best when documenting life-sized subjects and that you shouldn’t try to bite off more than you can chew, at least if you’re a beginner making your first film. Everyone seemed to despise fiction and people pretending to be something that they weren’t. (Twenty years later I was constantly reading that my works were appraisals of home videos and the family.)

Friends and relatives with new cameras may joke about becoming film stars, but only a few would have the discipline to accomplish a concrete film script. Naturally, I had subjects and characters queueing to be used. Both Tytti Tyttelin and Pamela Nikolajeva had already appeared in my scripts and theatrical forays (for which I had difficulty finding actors). It was self-evident that I should play leading roles – I just hadn’t thought that someone would be needed for the filming itself. During the first few years the technical crew included, among others, a so called lamp holder, a person responsible for holding a Super 8 light at the interior shoots. When the first tripod appeared in my household, I used it mainly as a stand for the light, not the camera.

“Tytti Tyttelin’s Christmas Land” was completed in a record time of three months (in hindsight it’s difficult to see what took it so long). ”Slava KPSS”, a film that was principally set in a single day, had three shoots in 1976 and further shoots in 1978. Galina’s parts and animations are from the 80′s and the film’s early scene of Pamela being walked home by her student was shot as late as 1995 – the last scene to be shot. When you added time for doing the sounds, some of which were recorded with the original actors and others with new ones, the film was finally completed in 1999.

By then, those who were familiar with my videos had already got to know Pamela’s circle of friends in almost real-time in “Pursuit of Happiness” (1990), a video that depicts the Gorbachev era with cheerful irony, and its sequel, ”Diana te quiero” (1992), set under the threat of a coup in Russia. “Katinka’s Daughter” (1994) returned to a more private subject matter, the ice hockey hobby of a girl, Pamela’s granddaughter. I will continue to show the past and present of this fictional group of friends also in my future works. “Pursuit of Happiness”, like “Order” completed three years later, contain many fictional and real-life idols. Its protagonist, Claudia, is in a common-law marriage with a heavy metal star from Moscow, but she dreams of an American television star Michael Kitt whose unattainable object of desire is, in turn, Raisa Gorbachyova.

The production process of “Pursuit of Happiness” may have been too hard for me at the time: for the American version, “Close Encounters of Highest Kind” (1993), I reduced the length from 28 minutes to 90 seconds and included only two characters and one phone conversation. In the video, Hillary Clinton calls the Finnish-born film director Renny Harlin – I had wanted to add these two to my universe already for a long time. I was particularly proud of the American accent of my voice actor but the accent proved to be the biggest stumbling block: none of my viewers understood the words “Harlin residence”. When I saw, later on, the real Renny Harlin discuss his film “Cliffhanger” with the presenter Timo T.A. Mikkonen on Finnish television, I made an intriguing observation: Mikkonen pronounced the name of the film’s actor Sylvester Stallone like it should be in English, whilst Renny kept pronouncing it like it was a Finnish name.

In “Pursuit of Happiness” and “Close Encounters of Highest Kind”, men who themselves are objects of their fans, pursue women who are above them in hierarchy. I wanted to show (or at least to believe myself) that even famous people become disorientated when they meet a celebrity who is on a different level of publicity. This might have been why I felt sympathy towards Jeff Koons in his attempts at wooing Cicciolina for an artistic collaboration and even for a romantic relationship with him – I didn’t believe it would ever become a reality. Art critics talked about “sublimation of porn” but, to my friends, I usually needed to explain who Jeff Koons was in the first place. The divorce of Koons and Cicciolina is “mourned” in the dance and music performance ”Farewell, Jeff Koons” (2000). What was disappointing wasn’t the end of the relationship itself, but the fact that Koons seemed to have been totally incapable of adjusting his views. And maybe Koons hadn’t been, to start with, a teenage boy who became an artist in order to approach his dream woman.

A famous quote by Marilyn Monroe – ”When you get what you want, you don´t want it anymore” – is included, in a way, on the text of ”Farewell, Jeff Koons”. Are human beings at their happiest when pursuing something? I hardly would have subscribed to this idea around the time when I was making the poem-video “In Love with a Rock Star” (1982), a principal work about being a fan. The video consists of poems that a fanzine writer has addressed to a rock star. It’s funny to think that at the time I thought of myself as a different kind of fan because I wrote for magazines and I penned poems – maybe I also imagined that you married a millionaire by writing for the financial pages. At the time people were still seriously discussing whether a man could be an object of love poems, but at least in my poems a rock star had the passive role traditionally reserved for female objects… However, the video tells a story of development: even if there aren’t many external changes, the characters may learn something about their own expectations. In my later videos heroines continued to pursue pop and television stars with mixed success, but whilst doing that, they experienced something that they wouldn’t have experienced had they stayed at home and been “sensible”.

My latest work that deals with the fan culture is the animated music video, “Idoru” (2003). It’s inspired by William Gibson’s novel of the same name, in which an American rock star falls in love with an idoru, a Japanese virtual pop star. The man also has a clever fan who brings the rock star together with the one he loves. My version of “Idoru” contains a song by an animated pop star Tanya Tamagochi. Whilst Gibson’s adventure takes place in the computerised world of virtual reality, the world of Tanya Tamagochi is created by using more traditional animation techniques – but is there much of a difference between them after all?

Naturally, I also ended up making music myself even if one of the immortal phrases that I had said at a music video festival was, “The most difficult thing about making a music video is making the music.” And when, for some reason, I haven’t received commissions from real bands, I’ve had to create all the other things myself as well: the artists, their styles, images and artistic names. ”Farewell, Jeff Koons”, mentioned earlier, features a musical performance by Cicca, who is a combination of Cicciolina and Finnish schlager singer Kikka. The style is particularly vivid in her earlier video, “You Can Pay With Finnish Currency” (1995). A later work, ”I’ll Be Betrayed” (2005), contains a musical line-up, Et Cetera Finlandia, which I already introduced to the world in the interviews that I invented for my SA magazine as a 12-year-old in the early 1970s (though it’s only recently that the band has switched to electronic music). Other musical artists that I’ve created have included Viola Saturnia, Elisabet Kääpä and the world music trio Gaddafi’s Daughter. It’s also important to remember the musical performances found in my longer films.

A distinctive play with personalities is also seen in ”Woman´s Work Never Ends” (although you don’t need this information to understand the message). I got the idea for the piece when I was filming a scene for a longer film with Terhi Penttilä and the character’s task was to clear a table after a meal. Like usual, we shot the scene several times (I used it once in “Katinka’s Daughter”), and even then, the famous slogan about women’s never-ending work popped into my mind. A few years later I finished a new video work called “Mother Russia and the King of Kitsch” (1997) and an exhibition with the same name. When Terhi arrived at the preview, she learnt that she was now an American feminist artist Teresa Peters, whose video performance was part of the wider video work. The inevitable was still awaiting to happen: I started to show “Women’s Work” as a separate video piece – and it has, indeed, been by far the most popular form of the work.

“Laundry” (1992) is also set among house chores. It puts into practice Yoko Ono’s conceptual art idea: entertain your guests by explaining to them each item of your laundry. In the video, the viewers are entertained by my aunt, who is the same age as Yoko Ono. Although we don’t see the guests she addresses, we can imagine that they wouldn’t listen to such a performance for a very long time. Arts audiences, on the other hand, have had fun watching the piece. During its screening history the work has even been used as Swedish-language television entertainment. What I think my aunt would have liked most, was when the work shared a space with paintings of washing women by artists such as Akseli Gallen-Kallela in the “Naked and Masked” exhibition held at the Helsinki City Art Museum.

At that point, references to the art world, not just to popular culture, had started to seep into my work. For example, the quasi-documentary “International Collection of Phone Art” is about a disappearing form of art, doodling whilst on the phone. I returned to ultimate questions in ”Disappearing Dads” (2005). In the video dolls play family and try to agree on who would play dad. The situation is familiar to anyone who has tried to put together a film cast: it can be difficult to find even just one male actor and the other actors don’t seem to be so content with their roles either. Often the sense of community is created only afterwards, but I’d rather have seen it in the end result than just think that at least the filming was fun.

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