Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Cinematic Works

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent cinema, breathtaking art
Review: Eija Liisa Ahtila's DVD collection The Cinematic Works is an amazing release--her challenging and poetic short-format works focus on the instability of reality in the face of losing love, innocence, or one's own mind, and plays this disjuncture against the heightened or altered reality one faces when losing one's self in the cinema (which in and of itself is akin to a disassociative disorder). These works have heretofore been available for viewing only in the context of museums and galleries, and this boxed set provides wider audiences access to one of the great emerging contemporary artists and film-making talents.

The book accompanying the DVD (which provides only a transcript of the shooting scripts for each film on the disc) is not as essential as the Fantasized Persons and Taped Conversations text, which gives Eija-Liisa's oeuvre a more thorough going-over.

A word of caution: the DVD in this set is in PAL format, which is not viewable on standard American DVD players.