At the Risk of Showing Up Empty-Handed

When visiting a city specifically to attend a film festival, you’re bound to walk the same streets over and over again, which poses the question of whether you can actually claim to have been in this city at all, or whether you’ve just become intimately (if that) familiar with a single route: from hotel to venue, from venue to restaurant, restaurant to hotel.

One of the few streets I walked most of this time around gently descends past a bakery and a chapel. At the apex of the street’s curve stood a statue of a top-hatted man standing on a small stool, ostentatiously lifting a lantern above his head with his one hand while making a gesture of refinement with the other. I imagined him in the town square, smugly hollering at the passersby to gather around for lo and behold: he himself had invented the very light his lantern emitted. Across from this statue, hidden in plain sight, is Meduza Gallery. For a month, the exhibition Trickster’s Wake was on show there as part of Vilnius Short Film Festival, showing four films by Swedish artist-filmmaker Susanna Wallin, curated by Mantė Valiūnaitė.

A few days before visiting the exhibition, I attended a masterclass by Wallin. “I have jetlag… so I might suddenly start laughing.” She’s sitting in a chair with her elbows resting on her knees. There’s gum in her mouth, but she chews on it so intermittently that for a while I doubt whether it’s actually there at all. Her sentences behave the same way, lingering on thoughts and allowing for lapses of silence, her eyes peering upward as if to try and scrape the thought from the mind’s ceiling, allowing the thought to flutter down into the room with us.

The festival has programmed several of her films as part of a retrospective titled Time Without Measure. There have been no screenings at the time of the masterclass, which compromises the dialogic form Wallin had in mind for the session: the term ‘masterclass’ irks her; are there masters in filmmaking? What does that even mean? Reluctant to transpose the content of her film to explanation, she recites poems that she wrote to go with the film, some written at the time of production and some way after the fact. After each poem, she attentively looks up into the room: what did we hear, what did we see? Despite there being no wrong answers, the audience stays rather quiet, maybe because, again, the transposition of meaning seems futile. Are some things better off left as they are?

For Susanna, the process of making a film is one of following her nose; to ask questions without expecting to find an answer. It’s the poetics of openness that do not stay confined to her artistic practice, but are apparent in her approach to the masterclass and eventually made surprisingly concrete in her response to the question of how she finds Vilnius: “I have walked around and can only say that I don’t know, because I haven’t figured out how to look at it yet.”

Lizzy (Susanna Wallin, 2024)

Curiously, alarmingly, impressively, the gallery smells of reptiles. It’s a humid scent. I know it from zoos and the houses of eclectic acquaintances, its weight and warmth starkly contrast the crispy cold air of January in Vilnius. All films were made within a three-year timespan and are set in and around Tampa, Florida, where Susanna Wallin currently lives and works. Four films are divided across three spaces, projected on the walls of white cubes littered with leaves, curated around the common denominator of time, christened ‘Trickster Time’ in the brochure, whose text invites the audience to “new, unforeseen encounters, overcoming the limitations of time and distance.”

The inexplicable reptile smell turns out to be emitted by an arrangement of objects placed throughout the gallery. All of them are related to the films and imported from Florida, their swampy odour trailing back home like breadcrumbs dropped by kids adrift. Time is housed in these objects, a history, a chronology that now allows for an encounter in Vilnius, a fate already present in the materials they were crafted from. Most notably, a small electric organ is standing in the corner between two rooms. The instrument was bequeathed to Wallin without a word of explanation by Lizzy, a neighbour who passed away during production of a film about two local men cutting down a tree. While often present at the shoot, Lizzy herself was never filmed.

Eponymously, Lizzy (2024) is a search for its absent protagonist. In the white house where she lived her entire life, ceramic cats are left doused with dust, crosswords unfinished, the fences contouring the plot overrun with plants that don’t concern themselves with property lines. Rooms filled with non-belongings are lit up and darkened as the sun dips behind drifting clouds. The interior becomes part of a similar cycle as the deceased; decomposed by the caring hands of two leathery-skinned men rummaging through cabinets and taking on the responsibility of passing on the remnants. Particles floating in a beam of light conjure a sense of presence in the absence; spectral silence fills the space between the chirping of critters in the wetlands outside.

These contrasts set the stage for the search in Lizzy, a search to make sense of the mysterious inheritance, of what it means when an item changes ownership, of the memory of objects; of what remains. With a gentle and solemn step, Susanna Wallin moves along the membrane that separates that which is and that which is no more, all the while showing in many ways that there is endlessness to be found in transformation. In the organ, something has been conserved, something that is untraceably present among what is seen and what is heard, surfaced by Wallin’s montage as if a tuning fork is hit on every cut to summon the film from within itself. As the house is being demolished and less and less of what used to be a home is recognisable in the debris-filled skeleton, the serenity of duckweed on a pond cuts to leisurely lurking alligators, the stillness of climbing vines to the disruption of an angle grinder. In all this, this strange and touching ritual of grief and destruction, Wallin’s position is tangibly that of an outsider looking for a way in to ask her questions; maybe not being sure how to look, but finding that if she witnesses and waits, it will reveal itself through the slits in between.

Witnessing and waiting seem to be what Susanna Wallin herself alluded to when she stated that she hadn’t yet found a way to look at the city of Vilnius. A question, freed from needing an answer, runs throughout Lizzy; Wallin appeals to observation and puts her faith in her role as a mediator between that which cannot be grasped and that which can only be seen or heard.

This mediation is at the crux of Wallin’s work, and an approach to filmmaking aligns with a belief I’ve held for quite some time. I carry it with me like an object in my pocket that would evaporate when taken out; intimately accustomed to its every crevice through touch, but unable to hold it out into the light. To name it might be to suffocate it; to leave it unnamed might prohibit it from branching out. Perhaps the best illustration is to not name the belief itself but all that surrounds it, to describe it not by its own characteristics but by its consequences. Wallin’s credo of asking questions without expecting to find an answer puts her on equal footing with her subject: she knows not to address the world on a first-name basis, she doesn’t aim to present what she’s seen in accord with her own rules, but in accord with the rules of that which she is trying to show.

Even when looking from above, there is an opportunity for equality. From what appears to be a hotel balcony, Susanna Wallin films the Pacific Ocean and a stretch of Floridian beach: water and earth neatly separated for the time being. Idalia (2023) takes place on August 30th of that same year, when the titular tropical storm swept across the southeastern United States. With the storm coming, the proverbial silence before seems to tap its temples; mind the wind, mind the wind. The palm trees and boulevard are familiar to the European eye, superficially familiar like celebrities, seen on MTV or in video games, think spring break, think red cups, luxury, and success; think untouchable. The weather inhales, puffing up its thunderous chest in anticipation of the force it will soon release; endless and indifferent, moralless and grimly capricious.

Such is the scale of the natural disaster that it almost seems there is nothing to say other than simply sequencing the events. Is there any other language to talk about a tsunami other than stating the water retreated and returned a thousandfold? The camera pans to the left, landwards, slowly, at a tempo that feels undeniably human; aghast, subjected to something that, in scope and terror, outstrips most other things you know. The matter-of-factness with which Wallin captures the events unfolding before her breathes an air of submissive honesty; too overwhelmed by what’s at hand to resort to statements or drama, she documents the coastal city in this slice of time that exists on the brink, in yet another in between. Cars drive up and down the roads, people quotidianly avoid getting wet feet while strolling through the surf; nothing except for the palm leaves swaying in the strong winds seems to foreshadow the impending storm. Guided only by the motion itself, the camera pans back to the ocean and back again, swaying between land and sea as if witnessing two animals poised to oppose each other, frozen in the decision to fight or flee.

The film buffers, faux buffers, an unclosed circle chases its own tail like an unfledged Ouroboros. Time hardly stood still that day, but in the face of the storm, the sense of transience halts temporal perception as if to say its services are no longer required. Across multiple planes, time progresses; the sensation of time freezing and the awareness of this sensation signifying the exact opposite.

In both of these works, amid their internal contradictions, what stands out is the maker’s unwavering commitment to the search for what arises when the waypoint does not take the form of an end but of a process. Through this process, and in placing herself among her subjects instead of above them, the works become masterless and attain a quality of independence, existing in their own right and rooted firmly in the fact that they are the result of translation rather than construction. Instead of building a maquette of the world as she has come to understand it—offering something small and expecting it to express something large—she opts to open a window into what she does not understand, refusing to get used to what she sees, for getting used to something is a form of wearing out.

After exiting the gallery, I walk past the statue of the lantern-wielding man for what will turn out to be the last time. A fresh coat of snow covers his top hat and the bridge of his nose. Maybe I just hadn’t figured out how to look at him yet, and what I missed in all these passings was that he might be free of the pretense of having invented this light and climbs on the stool not to show off, but to share a light that he has not invented but is simply admiring himself, witnessing, waiting.