Flirt 调情

Directed by Liisa Lounila

5 min

2001

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Flirt stages ambiguous scenes of hostility in which people either fight or embrace each other in pairs. The combinations change so that one actor from the previous scene always remains in the next scene. The film is set in a pitch-black space and the action is suspended in time. The camera seems to circle around the protagonists, accompanied by an eerie soundtrack that produces a feeling of impending drama or joy.  Flirt as many of Lounila´s video works, shares the time-slice camera technique, where 528 pictures are shot simultaneously using a home-made pinhole camera. Lounila’s use of temporal suspension and atmospheric sound is clearly intended to heighten the emotional charge, which brings it close to the language of television commercials and movie trailers. The bullet-time effect converts the films’ scenes into slices of a larger narrative. Once combined, these techniques give rise to expectations of a totality that nevertheless remain undefined.