In The Still of The Night

Elena Näsänen’s video film Night starts at night in a yard of a lonesome house and its veranda. Having entered the veranda a woman stops for a moment, and then proceeds slowly across the lawn without looking to either side, approaching the woods. The camera follows her to the woods closing around her.

In the woods she walks on; lit by the lighting equipment her environment changes into a kind of a stage. Having crossed the woods she stops to watch a road from the shadows. The lights of a halting car illuminate her as if knowing she is there. The sound of the car and the lights create a link with Näsänen’s previous film Drive, whose main character, a female driver, could be considered a sister or even a different side of the main character in Night.

According to Näsänen the starting point of the work was how a familiar environment seen through a window at night may seem unreal and unrecognizable. She has been preoccupied by the idea of stepping into such an unreal environment “which is not the same as the real one”. It would be a space that is like “a non-existent world that is not a dream and yet not imagination either”. *).
Näsänen’s work could refer to images produced by the mind, and the experience of the outside, the night, mentioned by the French writer Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot has described sleeping as a way through which we seek to escape the nighttime with the images of the day, thus erasing the limitless depth of the night. “Night, when men transform it into pure sleep, is not a nocturnal affirmation,” writes Blanchot. **)

There are different theories where dreams are considered as wish fulfillments based on preceding daytime events, or predictions of future danger. Following Blanchot’s train of thought, we can say that sleeping and having dreams make darkness recede from your mind and bringing forth images and actions from the time of light, or their fantastic versions. In the artificial light projected on the backdrop of the night various negotiations and trials are conducted, aiming at strengthening the dayside.

In Night, wood and night represent subject’s internal and external strengths. The hideaway in the last shot is lit by the lights of a car, like the break of day, leading towards the following event, the rising of the sun – yet by no means unambiguously, one event following the other, according to the logic of cause and effect.

Who is the driver in the car? Is it someone whose arrival she anticipated and wanted to hide from? Or was she there herself, her own dayside observed by her nightside from the safety of the woods? In which case the walk in the woods and the hiding there is a meeting, or a ritual that reminds us of the night, the outside of the day and the limited experience of the lifelong journey of the subject. It is a moment of the wisdom of the night in “the madness of the day”.

Kari Yli-Annala

Translation Sari Monni

*) Email 9.02.2007
**) Maurice Blanchot The Space of Literature translated by Ann Smock ; University of Nebraska Press, 1982, page 264. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst, accessed 22.2.2007.