Your Silent Face (Fucking Finland Series)

 

 

fotoSeamus Harahan
Irland / Großbritannien / Finnland 2015
6 Min – HD – Engl. OV

DoP+E+SD+P+V: Seamus Harahan

           


 

Part of the ongoing work, FUCKING FINLAND SERIES, exploring unintended cultural chinks and links in the old Iron Curtain, YOUR SILENT FACE follows the dockers of Rostock at rest, as a Baltic ferry leaves port for Hanko in Finland. FUCKING FINLAND, and with it, YOUR SILENT FACE makes direct reference to the time when Finland kept a relative neutral policy between the capitalist and communist blocks, trying to keep an amiable relationship with the Soviet Union. These efforts were labeled negatively by western media, which considered the Finnish policy as a way of pacifying the soviets. That ferry that unites Germany and Finland becomes, in Seamus Harahan’s work, a sort of melancholic pop metaphor of the old Iron Curtain era, creating audacious, maybe even insolent links between these two blocks that were different and opposite worlds not that long ago.

monday 12 oct 10.30 pm werkstattkino

Seamus Harahan (born London, 1968, lives in Belfast) uses his video camera - a relatively accessible and moderately affordable technology - to take hand-held, seemingly amateur footage, the contents of this footage locating Harahan through found activity occurring around him. The main subject is the urban environment, its incidental detail and fugitive nature. The light is often unfiltered and the image over-exposed, implying a mode of filmmaking that prioritises recording before thought, the absent-minded gaze.

Films (selection) Holylands 2004 – Samurai 2006 – Free as a bird 2006 – Turpin Hero 2007 – AwingBigCell 2008 (mit Miriam de Burca) – Cold Open 2013