IHME Project Conversation 2018

The 2018 IHME Project artist Henrik Håkansson discussed THE BEETLE film with Professor at the University of Southampton Jussi Parikka, a Lecturer in Experimental Film at Kingston University, London, Filipa Ramos, and Professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin Jörg Heiser. The discussion was part of the IHME Contemporary Art Festival’s programme of talks and films held at Korjaamo Culture Factory on 25 May 2018. The audience also joined in. This is an edited version of the discussion.

Jussi Parikka: It is really a pleasure that I’ve seen the film! I hope you’ve seen it, and if you haven’t seen it by the end of tomorrow, it will be on Yle Areena for about a year. Before we start the conversation, a big thank you goes to the whole IHME team for both bringing me and you here. But also for a great programme again, that deals with a lot of issues that are both interesting artistically, and in ways that are essential for an understanding of contemporary culture. It is really my pleasure to be in the discussion today, so thank you for also suggesting me…

Henrik Håkansson: Thanks for coming and accepting the invitation.

JP: I’ve always dreamed of a situation where my academic career leads to an invite to a discussion on stage that includes a beetle, a media theorist and an artist, and also art writers as well. What we’re going to do is about 20 minutes of the two of us in a dialogue. I’ll give a couple of words at the beginning and we’ll have a conversation. We’ll invite Filipa (Ramos) after that and do the same, and after that we’ll invite Jörg (Heiser). We’ll have plenty of time to continue and to engage with audience questions as well. I wrote a book called Insect Media, which is probably the reason I got invited. I wrote a book that you shouldn’t write as a media studies scholar. You are supposed to write books about mass media and digital culture, and if you veer into the world of animals as media you are going to be looked upon oddly. But it also leads to wonderful invites and possibilities to talk about insects, technology, the anthropocene, nature, art – all the themes that are visible in this film as well. We will talk about the work itself, but also about soundscapes and swarms. It will be very interesting to engage in what was your process in putting it all together as well. I don’t want to do interpretations of an artist’s works, but I will do an impression as a sort of warm up before we are doing the dialogue. Is that ok?

HH: Totally OK with me.

JP: ……I want to share an impression briefly about how one gets entangled in the sounds and cinema of forest and Hylochares cruentata. Not just one, the multiple, the thousands, millions of them. I was struck by how the film alternates between the forest and its narrated scenes of calm beauty, accompanied by birds and other subtle noises. The rays of sun as the original medium of light and vision, and then the other sets, the scenes, experimentally slowed down, focussed on the beetle itself. Something that is reminiscent of early scientific films where moving images were also scientific measurement tools. To dissect the animal motion into discrete images that reveal and read the world that is so close, but rarely seen by human eyes because it is too fast. And these images are surrounded by this utterly amazing swarm of industrial sounds by Mika Vainio. It is this contrast of images, of these scenes of natural green and the laboratory-like environment of slowing down, slowing down of the analytical gaze, that structures these two sets of the film. Analytical and almost romantic, poetic, the personal perhaps, and then indeed the impersonal, the technological and the great outdoors of ecological life. And these two are inherently entangled, even if they are presented as these two sets. And this is something I’ve been fascinated by and I find them beautifully condensed in [this film], these images and sounds. There is a long history of artificial intelligence – if you want to use the term – that does not start with technologies. It starts with this weird world of sensation and perception of insects and animals, of movement not by two feet, but by six legs, of vision and sensation, not by two eyes, but compound vision, and this alien presence that is constantly so close to us as well. Again a theme that clearly is not new to your work, but is persistently in different ways part of it, in the cinematic focus, but also thematically. I believe that if you had made this film about 100 years ago, it would have been perhaps a scientific film. Not so much an artist’s film, but a scientific film demonstrating slowing down, what is almost like peeping into an animal world and, sort of, it already pushes it outside of the usual contemporary art thematics as well. What if Henrik Håkansson had lived in the early 20th century and had made films then, and had made scientific films – in a way you already do that… Am I completely wrong: as an artist you dip into themes that are almost analytical?

Filipa Ramos, Jörg Heiser, Henrik Håkansson and Jussi Parikka.

Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

HH: Yes, I think, I do. But with a more reflective eye, like an observer. Maybe not the analytical. It is an analysis, but maybe not in the beginning of the thinking. It is more like observation of that certain moment, of a certain species, of a certain environment where we are looking at, or the moment of capture… and at what speed and what motion that behaviour is taking place. This maybe in the interest of behavioural studies. The idea of what is behind that movement. The movement, of moving one leg or of taking off in flight.

JP: It makes complete sense. Observing is better than being analytical…

HH: The analytic faces more at the viewer. I would like to put that into the reading of the piece, in that sense. But, of course, it’s analytic, but I am not putting that as my first attention.JP: Studies of animal life in slow motion…

HH: Studies of my own life in that motion.

JP: There is something about that theme where the two are entangled, aren’t they? THE BEETLE starts with the feeling of something very personal and, at the same time, it moves back and forward with the narration that seems to be hinting at something personal and yet…

HH: In this film there are references to my personal lived history. And when I’m mentioning myself, I mean myself as a representative of one of the animal species.

JP: But you are. Literally. Biologically we are.

HH: Exactly. And from that perspective I try to stay within that wider sense, that actually I’m considering myself as not post-animal, I am part of this group of mammals that are observing things with two eyes, the humans.

THE BEETLE billboard in Myyrmäki, Vantaa.

Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

JP: Not only mammals, it is kind of ecological theme that runs through.. I think it relates to alienness. I think we should return to that later, there is a lot of contemporary debates in ethics, both in art and humanities and the post-human, relating to that question in terms of empathy, relationality, and how do we deal with radically non-human animals that are not resembling us in any kind of morphological way and hence the sort of alienness of it is at the centre of how we think about life that is radically non-human and beyond the anthropocentric perspective, which you sort of are trying to deal with all the time as well. Let’s go back a couple of moments and return to that. I just want to go through the key things. Returning to the idea of scientific cinema, but also your way of working, the collaboration with the entomologist Professor Jyrki Muona was very central. Do you want to share a couple of things about what it meant for the project?

HH: First of all, for this specific project I was not extremely sure what the project will be in the end. When you start a project you start with an open mind. In the search for this project I was hoping to find an endemic species or a relation that was specific to Finland, in the close region of Helsinki. At a very early stage, I met with Jyrki at The Natural History Museum, and we discussed different possibilities. I was not at all sure to find something that was clearly endemic or something clearly so specific, so local. But Hylochares cruentatus came up quite soon in our discussion, that this is something that does exist like in between the centre of Helsinki and the airport in Vantaa, and maybe nowhere else. And from that moment, the discussion, the thinking, the research… I was like on the surface, whereas Jyrki has worked for decades on this species. So I am surfacing that research, researching it from another side.

JP: Isabelle Stengers, the philosopher, talks often about the ecology of practices, and in many ways a lot of work we do is entering the multiple ecologies where we need to dip into the sort of long-term work others are doing, to be able to share some of these practices, continuing in different ways. A scientist would rarely approach these topics through films.

HH: The basic set for this film would never happen without the introduction from Jyrki. This is clearly an observation of that research.

JP: Another key collaborator, who is visibly and audibly present is, of course, Mika Vainio, and it is a really striking feature of the whole film, it is obvious to say that. It is a rather striking way of introducing swarms into the work by way of its industrial nature as well, not just recording of the nature, which itself is the key media-historical theme, right? That we are able by way of technical media to record, not just write down, but record natural sounds, and the other side of it is Mika’s wonderful sound worlds and soundscapes. But did it start with something else? Was that the original plan, can you elaborate a bit more about that work where Mika is so well present in a stunning way?

HH: It started in an earlier state of the discussion of which project is actually going to happen, and I had some other ideas where I would like to include Mika’s music, and actually have him write specific work for another project. In the debate the project vanished, and also Mika passed away during that discussion, and so it was not going to happen, obviously. And then after shooting the material and while the film was in edit, we were still searching for the music. I had an idea of adding music, but this was not clear. This film for me has two parts that are quite new – the adding of the human voice that I never included in my work before, and also to include music in that perspective that you see in the film THE END – the film that was shown here was the first work of mine that included this tailor-made music. So for this film we were looking for the same. I was searching and listening, and I stepped on this concert that is actually now in the film – a live performance from Sonár in Barcelona 2015 – and it was the editor, Bobby (Good), who put it right away on the film, and basically used the music as it is. No edits. He just fitted it to the length of the images we had. When we saw the result of what was starting to happen – the frequencies, the rhythm, everything that was just created was developing like a second language. This may be emotional, but it is also something I want to tribute. For me I saw it as an homage to Mika’s music. After that moment, it was very hard to realise that there could be another piece of music that could actually work with what I just saw. Also in relation between the beetle and Mika being from Finland.

Filmstill from the Henrik Håkansson's film THE BEETLE, details, courtesy of IHME Contemporary Art Festival.

Filmstill from the Henrik Håkansson's film THE BEETLE, details, courtesy of IHME Contemporary Art Festival.

Filmstill from the Henrik Håkansson's film THE BEETLE, details, courtesy of IHME Contemporary Art Festival.

Filmstill from the Henrik Håkansson's film THE BEETLE, details, courtesy of IHME Contemporary Art Festival.

JP: I think it works really well. We know this already, but it reminds us of the fact that we don’t listen with our ears, we listen with the whole body and there is much more to it. Mika’s music happens somewhere around this area (shows his torso), which led me to scribble that it’s music for exoskeletons. It is soundscapes for insects, it is art for insects not just for humans. And this is a kind of a theme that we could tease out perhaps more as well. I am just thinking that we should probably at this point invite Filipa Ramos on stage as well, because we need more voices in this forest of thoughts. Welcome Filipa. Let’s give warm applause as well. It’s all yours!

Filipa Ramos: Good afternoon everyone. I just wanted to thank you for having me here. This was a very timely moment to bring me in because, while watching the film today my ongoing questions were: What are we looking at? What are we seeing? What is this film about? And my first answer to this question was that actually we are not looking in as much as listening to this film. It is interesting that you were talking about music, because I kept thinking of the film more in terms of sound than of music. But what are these sounds that we are listening to – the sounds of the forest and the voiceover – in particular when we are facing this gigantic beetle, who was projected in front of us and who has our size. More than only looking at the beetle, we are listening to it, and its sound is determining the perception that we have of this creature. The sound is also rendering its bodily movement. Rendering in the sense of providing the texture for its vibrations, for its existence in this space. And we perceive the movements, the existence of this creature exactly through hearing. At the same time, it is a sound that is weaving together memory and absence. Because it is not only this abrasive (I don’t know how to describe it better, it is always difficult to describe sound), this abrasive soundscape of the disappearing insect. The insect, gradually through the film, is fading. But it is also a tribute to the disappearance of Mika Vainio, who made the sound that we listen to in the film, and who left a fundamental contribution for our contemporary musical scene. And once more, it is a brilliant pairing between the human and nonpost-human aspects of sound. Earlier, you were mentioning the industrial aspect, this roughness that emerges throughout Vainio’s work and I was thinking how we’ve been hearing the sound of a vanished composer while looking at a vanishing insect, and in doing so, we’re almost turning it into a machine. This led me to think that we’re also looking at the apparatus: an animal that is being rendered by a film camera, hence an electric animal whose strangeness is highlighted by the alienating environment where the beetle finds itself. The animal is placed in this sharp, textureless environment, which puts in evidence how humans device exhibitionary systems – the lab, the exhibition, the film set, the constitution of these abstract environments becomes clear through the environment that surrounds the beetle in the film. In it, there is a voice that says that there is this insect inside the box; for me that description is also describing the insect inside of the box (the beetle being framed by the camera and projected onto this screen, itself also a kind of a box) that we see here. Therefore, what we see here is exactly how there is a whole infrastructure that generates these images, which also potentiate or expand our human senses: the film allows us to see and to hear more that our natural human senses do. It is highly unlikely that we’d ever able to see this insect in real life -- we’ll never see its unbelievably red legs,-- and there is a machine that is allowing us to see more, to see better. Also, because it slows down the speed of images so we can see a movement that otherwise we wouldn’t be able to perceive. The relation that exists between us (our human eyes and ears) and the beetle can only be reconstructed by the filming machine, by the camera practice. But it’s not only that this is an electric animal – what we are looking at is not an animal but an image of an animal. It may not be a coincidence that this word imago signifies both for a winged insect, which in its final moments of development is called an ‘imago’, and the mental memory of something that we are able of making. The film also summons the imaginary that literature produces, namely Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, recalling us that radical transformations are always possible, even when mediated by our human experiences of them. And this leads me to my last comment, which is that this human rendering of an animal experience is based on this perceived distance that exists between the animal and the human. We could go on and thank the tradition of humanism for establishing so well this anthropomorphist tendency in our modern minds, this capacity to establish the difference between “us” and “them”, but this also may explain why we can watch this insect capsized, struggling to regain another position, to regain its walking position. While watching the film, I was wondering how I could be assisting to the discomfort of this animal without feeling utterly disconcerted – I don’t know if it is suffering or not but the insect is clearly struggling to get back to a walking position. I think it is exactly because of this gap between the perception of my humanity and the perception of an alienness as we were mentioning before – of a creature that is so other that I could never imagine what it is like to be a beetle, and therefore I fail to imagine what it is like to be a beetle trying to change position.

JP: Do you want to pick up on that? Are there particular things that you want to pick up from this?

HH: I am just listening to the beautiful analysis of this film… I was thinking that, with the music and with the sound, the use of winds, everything that we seem to experience as natural… And then we have this sound, the music, is also sort of natural but manmade. But also we don’t know the exact language of a beetle. Like pheromones and chemical reactions. We know, but we don’t really know if there is actually any other kind of reactions. We know, for example, wasps or bees, when they fly, also I think beetles – when an insect takes off using the wings or movement they do produce electricity. And maybe these signals actually do communicate. But it is just speculation. I think in my perspective, looking at these things, I found interesting that we are always dealing with something unknown. In the film it is also a little bit of a play with (Ludwig) Wittgenstein’s idea of the beetle in the box, that you actually don’t really know what you thought – it is very simplified, but it is like one take of the box. As you saw, the Metamorphosis of Kafka was another take that simplified. But it’s just a relation that you don’t know that other side.

Filmstill from the Henrik Håkansson film THE BEETLE, detail, courtesy of IHME Contemporary Art Festival.

JP: What if it all happens anyway outside the box? In other words what if the ways in which we usually think about things like intelligence or even affect, emotions and various things is, instead of the interior-exterior model, we start thinking already of the ways in which it is life in various forms, bootstrapped by its outsides. I am thinking here of an example that might be quite central to this as well. I think it sort of fits into some of the themes in the film. Herbert Simon, the cybernetician, in the 1960s, spoke about the ant and ants’ intelligence, not obviously incorporated into the brain inside, but actually the ways in which it is constantly able to move with its intelligence of the outside. As we know, ants are very smart in that. So it is this constant, continuous way it builds its own life, and even intelligence, in relation to its world. So there is something about that. There are a lot of things, at the same time, when we are thinking what happens inside the box, whether the box is usually something else, whether it is the box already. Especially the green scene (in the film) is about that to me. It is a sort of constant wildness, of the amount of sun and birds and noises, that is the richness of it, no?

HH: Yes, very much so, but then the outside of the box, what’s at the end of that box?

JP: There is no outside of the box in that sense. We are all in the box then.

HH: Exactly. At the end of the atmosphere… But we do reach outside of that, we don’t know the end of the black hole, but that maybe is a wider discussion.

JP: There is an old Bertrand Russell joke about the turtles – turtles all the way down, it’s boxes all the way down. Filipa?

FR: When you were talking about intelligence, I was thinking that there is a curious element in the film – which is the fact that we often see one individual, one, which is maybe why we keep thinking about it in relation to the box. And then we see… the individual here the bottom of the territory. And then we see the territory and there’s someone telling us about what the females do, what males do, what the larva do. And there’s this constant relationship between the particular and the single, of this specific insect – I kept thinking what happened to it. And then the individual as a collective that can think and can act collectively. I mean, when we often think about insects, we tend to think about these creatures as a collective entity, as with ants, they think together, they move together…

HH: I think we very much think about insects in swarms. Like here we are looking at a single individual enlarged from the tiny size, and I think in this film it also relates to the fact that for me this specific species of Hylochares cruentatus is still a mythical, mystic figure, because I don’t know him or her that well yet. Also the fact it’s related to, that I never met this actor or protagonist in his own environment. I have been presented with this species in an artificial room, a studio where we have filmed the scenes. I’ve been on site, of course, and we’ve looked for it, and that’s what we are doing in the film. The movement through the environment is also a search of something that’s unknown. What I learned about the behaviour of this specific species… the males, for example, are actually quite active, they stay around their territories, on the log, they stay there and wait for the female, and then move around quite hectically. So far, I was never so lucky as to experience this yet, because we are still looking at the very rareness of something that is not there as a given. But I think that’s why I choose to focus on the singularity.

JP: It’s true. It pertains to a lot of popular culture and non-scientific writing about insects as well. Either was focused on an almost romanticizing notion of the single insect through which we have told the story. And sort of like all the cultural history of the fear of swarms, because they seemed to be exactly threatening the usual notions of individuality that are such a basis for our politics and sense of the self and such. Hence the amount of swarms and insects in horror movies. It is really in that sense a radical form of embodiment that does not obey the logic of the one, at least a single of one, in typical ways. Which makes it such a great figure for literature and cinema as well.

HH: It is a portrait in that sense.

JP: A portrait that works a bit differently than portraiture as a form of art history that is usually about two eyes; in this case it’s about compound eyes. I think this is a good time to ask on stage another smart person. Let’s give a warm applause to Jörg Heiser as well.

Jörg Heiser: Thanks for inviting me to IHME, Henrik, and everyone involved. When I saw this work in the cinema today, I thought: well, this is really a key work of yours. The anecdote in the beginning. I remember you telling me that about 10 or 15 years ago: about finding the beetle in the block of ice, putting it into the refrigerator, and then suddenly seeing it gone, and seeing it crawling around on the kitchen floor a year later…

HH: Yes, a year later…JH: Which is something that sounds like a real childhood epiphany…HH: Ground-breaking probably…

JH: It basically created a continuous desire to get a grip on the conditions of possibility, of observing animals and environments. And I’m talking about “conditions of possibility” because it’s not just that you show something, but you show us showing it. The obvious thing here is that there’s a mirror here, it creates a Rorschach-type doubling of the image of the beetle. It creates an alienation on top of an alienation, and turns the animal into a pattern, an entity. But I want to connect that aspect of the work to another that I find really important, because you just mentioned that this particular species only exists in a pretty small habitat and it’s an endangered species. And another impressive key moment that you mentioned to me was when you got hold of this book by David Quammen The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction from 1996. And it’s a book, like the title says, about the extinction of species. The Dodo, the famous bird endemic to the island of Mauritius, that became extinct in the 17th century, and the discipline which this book explores, or makes accessible to a broader audience, is a biogeography – dealing with the connection between habitats, the territories that make it possible for a species to exist, and how these habitats are fragmented by mostly human intervention. Quammen gives this one image in the book: he compares what happens to habitats due to human intervention to a huge beautiful Persian carpet being cut up into 36 pieces and the threads all coming loose. You can still see the beauty of it, you see the patterns, but they are also dissolving in front of your eyes. And that for me is also a subtext of the film. You’ve mentioned empathy, and I was trying to get my head around what kind of empathy I can have with a beetle. And I think the empathy I can have is the admittance of the impossibility of empathy. It sounds a bit absurd, but I think it makes sense if you admit that this creature is not something you can treat like a human, but that does not mean it should be treated like some object that you can just get rid of. And this is maybe the sort of altruistic version of empathy, a version of empathy that is not obsessed with its own narcissistic investment. To explain what I mean by that, let me give you an example from Germany right now. There was a case, a very horrific story. A woman and her son were killed by her pit-bull dog, and the judge decided that the dog should be put down. And then there were huge demonstrations for the pit-bull to stay alive. So you see here that a lot of people seem to reserve their empathy for that kind of case, based on the special human-dog relationship, rather than caring about a tiny beetle that eats trees. And it is your film where these two things – the intimate experience of yours with that beetle frozen in ice, and this very structural question of biogeography, of what habitats do, where there is no empathy in that sense involved, but a structural analysis – come together.

JP: Do you want to pick up on that?

HH: I think this is the interesting aspect that I almost tend to forget myself, biogeography. I mentioned in the text, the fragment, the forest. It’s sort of like we are disconnecting all kind of different environments from each other, and creating small islands or small fragments that without connections will come apart, but with a tiny connection the system will still be in some kind of function. It has been coming so far that these fragments are separated and I think that what you just said that this is something that is important for the whole basic idea of my thinking when doing this work and others.

JP: I think there is a really great theme there in general that you mentioned: the empathy and relation to others. Both in relation to themes having to do with animal ethics, but also in political terms. I am sure that we are all thinking about the same things already by now as well, the ways in which the form of thinking and aesthetics often taken in relation to themes such as the anthropocene. I call it a kind of apocalypse cool – the ways we can constantly imagine worlds without humans. But this privileged imaginary risks forgetting how many other humans and animals are already in this apocalypse – perhaps we can’t afford to think of the worlds that are apocalyptic as they are for some already. So it is like again putting it into a sort of radical otherness in ways in which you start to unfold these positions where you are thinking from. Both in relation to entanglement of very different kinds of animals and very different kinds of humans.

HH: It is not that long ago we even had the word biodiversity and, we were discussing the anthropocene at the same time, but it is like just generating the whole thing of thinking of the importance of the diversity of different biological elements. It’s not so old. It actually came out from scientists related to research on ants, Edward O. Wilson. It was more to become, from being a core science related to species, he came to see the bigger wideness of the function within the ants, and it became like this. And from that moment on, I think that is why we are having this discussion. Otherwise we were just… going into that apocalyptic moment.

JH: I was wondering in regard to the editing of the film – obviously there are long shots – and, of course, there is a tradition of that kind of cinema with long shots – I am thinking of artists like James Benning, Sharon Lockhart or Tacita Dean, but also the earlier generation, such as Michael Snow or Morgan Fisher. Maybe – I don’t know if you agree – the 1960s-70s generation was largely concerned with examining the materiality and the possibility of film observing itself. Whereas artists like Sharon Lockhart or Tacita Dean, from the 1990s on, sort of charged that approach with a certain neo-romantic approach, in a sense. If, say, Tacita Dean’s 16mm film portrait of Mario Merz (2002) rests on his face for minutes on end, then it is literally about empathy. It is trying to understand this artist by simply looking at him, right? Whereas here we are trying to understand the beetle by just looking at him – and we seriously do not understand it and we cannot. There is no direct access. And it feels to me those cold aspects of examining the conditions of observing and the neo-romantic recharging of observing come together here in a tension.

HH: I like the idea of the cinematic approach, I like the idea of the camera – like this image that’s framed by this machine, and the vision that you can create, the wideness you can build from the small thing. And when it comes to the screen it explodes in its own largeness, like this beetle that is less than one centimetre. I am not so inspired of these artistic moments, I am always referring to Stanley Kubrick and I was always looking into that direction; we even shot this film with the same lenses that Kubrick used. So I was thinking in that matter of these specific takes here, and kind of what you see in films of artificial intelligence. It is like going back to earlier films – the first film George Lucas was famous for THX 1138. But things like building this environment – one environment here was like what you see behind us (points to the still image from THE BEETLE), that room, like the mirror, generating those two images in one or even wider. And then you have the other one, which was only long shot in the environment, also intentionally – I was actually hoping to make the film with only one shot. Which was not possible because there was always a branch or something. If you want to create that motion that you don’t want to be disturbed. You can be disturbed by the content of the image, but you don’t want to be hit by something that will rock your imagination. And in that sense I always see all of my works as being a part of a film. Maybe this is one of the films that actually became a film, like you said a key work in that sense, because it is very different from many of the other works. But it does contain the same elements and discusses the same elements through the voice-over and through the script, and I hope, also through the content of the images.

FR: It’s curious that you say that! For a large part of the film, until the moment in which the camera in the scene starts following the insect, the camera has no movement – and the forest, the movement of the camera is not a directly human-controlled movement. There is a machine, steady, sturdy, it’s not moving. I kept thinking about that relationship between the lack of a human pace and tactility in the film, and the fact that there is a voice that is telling me what to see or how to see it. And which was curious as you already mentioned. It’s something new in your work, having this voice…

HH: One new aspect I would say is actually in that voice – having maybe not a question, but a direction, like you say – there is untold, but told direction, a suggestion what you are, or what this is, that I never was playing with before, in that sense.

JH: But isn’t it also playing quite ironically on the trope of the paternal animal film voice, like the BBC’s Sir Richard Attenborough, or on German television it would have been Bernhard Grzimek – and I am sure there is a Finnish equivalent. The paternal voice offers a kind of proxy empathy, that will introduce us, like children, to this little tiger or those cute chimpanzees, or even a dangerous animal, or an endangered or fleeing animal – but still always in this guidance by the voice. But here the voice goes into a void. There is no animal to see, while we are hearing it. There is just its habitat, so even at the point where we think we get closer to actually seeing the animal in its habitat, the only thing we actually get – which I think is a great punchline – is the sound of a beetle munching, which is maybe the closest we get to a kind of anthropomorphic empathy in the entire film. A moment like, yeah, I might sound like that if I eat a cookie. But that’s pretty much it. To put it as a question: Was this paternal voice-over tradition something on your mind when you made a decision to have this voice over?

HH: The first decision was to have the absence of almost everything, except for a bird flying or insects flying by, but absolute absence of the human, absence of focus. The voice came when we were shooting, that kind of idea that this is something told. We shot the film in three and a half days completely, which is quite a fast process, but the voice was always there. But what took the longest time in the process of making the film was to actually get that down to the paper, to get that story with the words that was not questioning, but… I probably see it as a poem. Like it’s a kind of poetic reflection. It is an abstraction of that observation that we tried to do.

JP: I really enjoyed that because it’s sort of a way of responding to what you said about abstractions. But I think it is even more about this, sort of, how you engage with something invisible, but at the same time it takes place and becomes an event. Almost like these rays of sunlight, that sound in which the thing inhabits itself, in which we are also becoming part of this and that, here and now… It sort of marks these spots, you sort of then weave in relation to what we see, what we hear. And even if it is not just an object that we see, it paints this sort of events in which it takes place. I think it is really poetic. Abstraction becomes this and that, in a most concrete sense. It’s beautiful.

HH: Thank you!

JP: I think we can also extend to audience questions. These three smart people here would be happy to respond to a lot of themes that we already raised, and to direct questions about the film, but also to the new themes that we already mentioned briefly. So give us human or post-human, give us anthropocene or holocene, give us film or painting, we will give you the answers.

Jyrki Muona: Sorry, but I probably won’t ask you anything, I will just tell you my views. First of all, the beetle in the film is a lady – she… One thing that struck me and I understand that it comes from the fact I‘ve been, not first collecting and studying beetles for scores of years, but then actually becoming a person who does not want to kill them anymore, and actually observes them. And this particular beetle I observed for what it is doing without interfering it, for like at least 20 or 30 hours in my life, during five or six years. And I must tell you that, however anthropocentric it is – following the life from when they come out and the males fight for the female and the female makes her choice and does not care about the other males at all, and then within a week the males die away, and then comes the high summer and you only have single females going along, very slowly and nicely laying eggs and spending time there, you start seeing them just as cute as any other mammal you’ve ever seen in the world. And I think one of the problems with insects and men is that people never have the time or the equipment to actually watch these animals, because then they would realise there is something tremendously holy about them. They are very, very old creatures, they are very successful creatures and they have a very complex life and a lot of communication by the way. They listen. Many insects are able to hit the surface, and from the sound figure out there is something I can parasitize. So they certainly do have hearing. But I want to tell hear publicly to Henrik Håkansson that this film – oh I get emotional – is a really great tribute to this insect. And I think your choice of having this Mika Vainio’s music sort of makes it truly great. And I thank you for that.

A Filmstill from the Henrik Håkansson film THE BEETLE, detail, courtesy of IHME Contemporary Art Festival.

HH: Oh, thank you!

JP: That’s a really great comment, thank you! Do you want to pick up on any of the themes? Any thoughts there?

HH: In my thinking the insect is quite superior to ourselves. The story in the beginning of the film, which actually maybe generated my whole interest in looking at insects specifically. I mean I look at other creatures as well, but insects have been following me for my whole life so far. And it also came out with the introduction of Hylochares cruentatus – this is what Jyrki at the early stage suggested that this species may be related to the breaking of the ice. About five thousand years ago, the end of the ice age. It’s where I found the reason to pick up on my own story of the beetle being frozen, conserved in this cold, and then after a year – and maybe it could have been longer – it actually started to live again. We have our own theories that we will do that. Actually Walt Disney 48 is frozen, right? We don’t know if he is ever going to wake up, but maybe at the end, if this beetle is frozen for 20 years or more, maybe it still survives.

JP: I think the imaginary and, of course, the real reference to ice is one key reference to time as well. Rather an obvious thing to say, but the ways in which it is sort of escorting into frozen pasts and durations that are much longer than we usually think and perhaps in that sense, to kind of futures to come again, in a subtle way in terms of the context of the ecological discussions we are having – or the ecological disaster, if you want to put it as it is – and ways in which we use radical notions of time that are ecological. So in a way historians have done OK in terms of giving us a sense of natural history, but these are also ways of trying to think beyond the usual coordinates of time that are necessary because of the scale of it as well. I might be over-reading into it. But I think there is something very central about ice and time.

JH: And about film language. The film forces you to slow down, to really experience nature slowly – which is fine – but I think there is another level where it really engages with its subject matter on the level of film language. We seriously have no understanding of the sense of time, of probably any animal. And especially not of a radically different species. But in terms of film language, distorting the sense of time towards a radical slowing down is something that has a precarious standing in the film world. I remember once seeing a screening of Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break (2008) at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s basically an 83-minute single, super-slow-motion dolly-shot through a shipyard, while the workers have their lunch break. I thought it was amazing, and it felt like a psychedelic drug experience, but when the lights went up, about half of the audience was furious, really upset. They felt they were fooled and scammed by someone expanding one single shot lazily to feature-film length. And this is the precariousness of this kind of film language that I find curious and it attracts me in that sense. But I also think that, in the case of THE BEETLE, it works very well, and it doesn’t feel pretentious to me.

JP: Despite the fact that there are references to images, there are a couple of painting references, nature as a painting. But more radical would be that it says what it does, as cinema.

JH: One thing you ask yourself while watching the film is also simply – what happens next? You watch this beetle and it suddenly pops up. And I was like – what’s going on? To be honest, I was not as familiar as I probably should have been with the particular faculties and capabilities of this animal to suddenly just jump away.

HH: The click.

JH: …Also the flying: when they suddenly rise and you just wonder how is it possible to move this body with just these small wings. Maybe that ties into what Jyrki Muona described as the holiness of these creatures. Maybe a secular holiness, or something. It doesn’t have to be religious, but it has some of the sheer fascination of creatures.

HH: Yes, definitely. This beetle is called false click beetle. It is in the family of false click beetles that relates to beetles who are called click beetles. So it does this click-jump, but I find it quite fascinating by talking about the time, the speed of life. Even the camera is rolling at 5500 frames per second. Even you sitting in front of the screen today do not see that this beetle is actually, as we were filming, was 6 millimetres or something around that. And the equivalent jump that they actually do may be resembles if you would lay down and you would go up 5 metres by moving absolutely nothing visibly. That’s truly fascinating I think. At that time, I was hoping, just in my imagination, that in filming in that speed that we actually are going to see more. But even at that speed it’s just nothing. The jump is so quick in reality.

JP: It is a very different technology, but it still sets in to what we’ve already mentioned – scientific cinema from Étienne-Jules Marey, and trying to figure out what happens when insects and flies flap their wings, the shapes and such, becomes itself a spectacle… which Filipa mentioned today as well. So there is really again this theme of the multiple times of cinema, but also the ways in which it really captures. You use the word “capture” in a rather significant way. Speeds and slower scenes and accelerations as well. There is something besides the vocabulary of cinema about long shots. There is this vocabulary of acceleration and slowing down that happens within those sort of cinematic genres or techniques as well.

A Filmstill from the Henrik Håkansson film THE BEETLE, detail, courtesy of IHME Contemporary Art Festival.

JM: Yes, one thing that I’d like to mention here. It has been measured what is the acceleration in this jump. And it has been measured several times. It varies between 3000g and 7000g, which means… 10g will kill a human I think, or approximately like that. Totally unbelievable things, and their body pays no attention to that at all.

HH: And as is mentioned in the film, it is a suggestion that the speed is in a 1500th of a second that the whole jump is completed. I think in scientific studies with high-speed camera – they started to use that quite early on – this type of studies was often done with, like, glued… you attached the insect to a specific moment. What we are seeing here is an artificial area, but the movement is not controlled, but still we don’t see it.

Pietari Kylmälä: Did it reveal something new, maybe it’s a question for you, Jyrki Muona? Did it function as a scientific measurement or tool?

JM: Well… It did prove the fact that there are two sounds when it jumps. The first sound coming from the fact that the peg hits the metathorax side. That is a very small click and we can’t hear it because it happens so fast, before the one when the body hits the surface. But, of course, we knew it should be there. This is the first time it’s been recorded. One thing that is not exactly new, but is very well seen in the flight scene, is how well and intensely it uses that first pair of hard wings for flying. It used to be like 50 or 60 years ago, people still believed that the beetle’s first wing pair wasn’t used for anything or perhaps gliding. But it very clearly takes off with the help of both wings, so yes, I would say that and, of course, it also shows that it is most definitely is not a false click beetle.

JP: So, panellists, shall we again say a warm thank you to all of the people here. And a film of Henrik, and everybody, thank you very much for a lovely discussion.