It is rare enough that one has the chance to say the following sentence: «A film such as this one has never been made before in the history of cinema». You can, and you must, finally say this again when watching Mika Taanila’s and Harry Salmenniemi’s Mannerlaatta. The film has a simple story: A man sits in his hotel room after a long-distance flight from Japan to Finland, and he thinks about the events of the past hours. The nameless person suffers from a fear of flying. Memories, nightmares and visions constantly merge in his stream of thoughts. These thoughts are conveyed in the form of a poem in blank verse, which Salmenniemi wrote especially for this film and which takes into account the film’s artistic conditions. You can read this throughout the film, in different badges resembling a sequence of epigrams and observations.
You can see it throughout the film in abstract images, collages that Taanila (a guest at last year’s edition of Bildrausch) has collected during his air travels; there are the details of safety checks, patterns of boarding passes, fragments of pictures collected from onboard purchasing catalogues etc. Electronica master Mika Vainio (Pansonic) connects Salmenniemi’s wonderfully spartan text modules and Taanila’s elegantly spectral arrangements with an immensely sensual and vivid sound composition. Mannerlaatta is a cinematic journey that is unequaled.
