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Biography
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Eino RUUTSALO
Born 1921 in Tuitinen, Kymi province, Finland. Died 2001 in Helsinki.
Eino Ruutsalo's biography includes a small item that he was a fighter pilot during the war. Perhaps this episode in the young man's, as well as the entire nation's life, imbued in him an insuppressible fear that made him perform various manoeuvres in the field of art propelling him from one movement to the next, as he tackled his material in a manner rare indeed in the Finnish art world. Ruutsalo was an experimentalist, an exceptional figure in Finnish art. As a painter, he was just one of many, as a filmmaker, one of the very few.
Biography
Eino Ruutsalo matriculated after the war in 1946. The unrest of the times gave him itchy feet and he travelled to Sweden, where he got a job in an advertising agency and lived as a self-taught commercial artist. Having set off down the road of art, he studied, contrary to the mainstream trend, drawing and painting at the Parson School of Design in New York in 1949–50. After returning to Finland, Ruutsalo continued his education by studying printmaking from 1952–54 at the school of the Fine Arts Academy of Finland under special dispensation.
Ruutsalo shot and directed his first short film "New York – usvainen kaupunki" (NY – The Foggy City) in 1952. From 1955–1961, he also directed a series of advertising features, in which he employed experimental techniques. Ruutsalo made his own short films in the 1960s, but switched to documentaries in the 1970s. He also directed a few so-called feature films, which have never been highly regarded in Finnish filmographies, however. In his documentaries, Ruutsalo concentrated on artistic themes and architecture.
As a painter, Ruutsalo was one of the early Finnish abstract expressionists. He stopped painting in 1961, when the "tools dried up in my hands." In 1968, a major exhibition was held in the Amos Anderson Art Museum, in which Ruutsalo presented a compendium of his artistic themes and styles. Entitled Valoa ja liikettä (Light and Movement), the exhibition featured lettrisms, kinetic installations, films, sound tapes as well as photographs and live performances. Before his death, Ruutsalo participated in the preparation of a comprehensive retrospective of his work at Helsinki Kunsthalle in spring 2001. His kinetic installations can be seen at the Helsinki City Hall and Kerava Library.
Article
Experimental Pilot in Contemporary Art
It may be no accident that it was Ruutsalo who introduced experimental cinema in Finnish art. After all, in the late 1950s he had studied in the United States, where "avant-garde film" or "experimental cinema" were not as dazzlingly unfamiliar concepts as they were in Finland. One thing that is certain is that Ruutsalo, for this very reason, will for ever be a beacon in the history of Finnish art, a pioneer whose name will be remembered and whose work will be a chapter in all courses of Finnish art history.
More Movement, More Expression, More Everything
Eino Ruutsalo's story is actually fairly ordinary: a man in whose hands all material started to live a charmed life. Ruutsalo recounts how he found it necessary to break the two-dimensional surface: "That period of painting actually ended in autumn 1961, when I had to size a stretched canvas, but didn't have the patience to do it 'properly'. Instead of an even coat of size, I applied it here and there over the cloth, and instead of making a proper painting on a prepared canvas, I just sketched my visual rhythms on the cloth with the primer. Then I ran against these paintings with a stick in my hand to punch holes in them. The cloth was tough, it tore only in places. And all this because I wanted more dimension in my paintings, more depth. I had to get ahead somehow. Somehow I had to get more into my paintings. More movement. More expression. More everything. And that's where my efforts in painting ended for a long time."
Ruutsalo's short experimental films were born out of a very similar process. He treated the film by scratching, drawing, and painting. The purpose of it all was to achieve a rapid, layered transformation of space articulated through a collage of motion and light.
Ruutsalo could be considered a cross-disciplinary artist. But such a description was not enough for him, he wanted to expand on it. Ruutsalo himself spoke of "cross-art, inter-art, multi-art, or total art".
Ruutsalo has given a vivid account of the work process: "I didn't want to just feel the film, I wanted to have a direct, palpable contact with it. This would bring me into contact with the actual material of film, the emulsion. At this point, I didn't have a camera: so I just had to make films without one. I studied the opportunities offered by the film frame by looking at it as lights, colours, and reactions. One frame at a time, I was able to study the compositions and calculate the rhythms. I could bring into play all my knowledge about materials to increase the colour intensity of the frame by treating the film, not in a copy machine, but by hand. I worked on unexposed and under- or over-exposed negative stock, and various positive stocks, too. I painted on transparent film or scratched or etched it. I handled frames by many different methods and exposed them together. I waxed the emulsion with beeswax and wrote on it with a typewriter. After such treatment, I had the stock etched and processed by the same methods they used to etch subtitles on foreign films. I treated black-and-white stock with different colours to make tinted surfaces. I also made colour film from black-and-white stock by exposing it through coloured filters in the copy stage. I started to shoot, on purpose, different backgrounds, which I then manipulated by drawing and painting. This creates new functions, new events, new depths and levels on the exposed negative. It was now only a question of the artistic liveliness of the film frame: a combination of image and painting."
There is no such thing as a history of Finnish experimental cinema, because the few points that have been marked on the map do not allow a continuum or complete idea to be established. Experimental cinema, like experimental art, is not widely known nor taught in film schools. The field of Finnish visual arts has, because of its scope, been narrow and intolerant of differences. Experimental cinema and video art, which still clings in part to the same roots, only got going in Finland some 20 years after the rest of Europe. Neither does Ruutsalo in his texts ever make a connection between his own activities and the tradition and authors of experimental cinema.
Ruutsalo's method, the integration of the experimental movement in cinema with abstraction in painting, was of course nothing new in the sphere of cinematic art. The Futurists had already painted film in the 1910s. They were seeking to establish an independent artform, and wrote in their manifesto "The Futurist Cinema" (1916) about a theatre without words, and declared that cinema is essentially a visual form that must terminate the development of painting, detach itself from its realism and even from photography, and renounce all attempts at pleasantness and solemnity.
Own Language
“This film presents an experiment IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION of visible events WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES (a film without intertitles), WITHOUT THE AID OF A SCENARIO (A film without a scenario), WITHOUT THE AID OF THEATRE, (A film without sets, actors, etc.). This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theatre and literature.”
This minor manifesto by the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, which incidentally is written directly on film, goes to the heart of the matter. Cinema was searching for itself throughout the entire 19th century, and at the turn of the century it arrived at a crossroads, where one of two main avenues had to be chosen. One of them led, along with literature and the theatre, to the highway of Hollywood entertainment, the other branched off to innumerable paths and backyards. Looking at the early history of cinema now, a hundred years later, it seems incredibly clear how all these options were, from the very beginning, in the hands of filmmakers, whether we are talking about silent action films, such as Edvin Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903), George Méliès' scifi fantasies, or the Lumière brothers' documentaries at the turn of the century, or the first so-called experimental films in the 1920s. It was not until after World War II, and a series of experimental phases that preceded it, that the actual cultural sphere of cinema developed as well as its authors, who did not make cinematic experiments just for the sake of experiment, but established an independent art form with a history and a present. Although Ruutsalo in Finland might seem a lonely figure, he is firmly rooted in the rhizome of existing avant-garde.
Perttu Rastas