On Waiting and Fulfilment - Serlachius

Tomi Moisio, Curator of the exhibitionHow can the fear of death be captured – in images, in words, in music? How are we to come to terms with the inexorability of time’s passage – capricious time, racing ahead one moment, stalling the next? How do we prevent history from repeating itself? And when we are gone, what remains of us – if anything at all?

Milja Viita’s film installation People on Sunday poses difficult, open-ended questions. It presents ten film portraits that unfold through an interplay of natural processes and human creativity. Rather than offering clear-cut answers, the camera abstracts these questions, inviting viewers to engage through their own memories and associations. Viita is neither a storyteller nor a preacher, but an artist who creates space for reflection. In her work, beauty emerges as something both intrinsically valuable and inherently fleeting.

The title is borrowed from the 1930 German film Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a silent film created by Robert and Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Billy Wilder. Set over a single summer weekend in late 1920s Berlin, it features mostly first-time performers – or, as the opening credits put it, “a film without actors.” Often interpreted as a portrait of a fleeting moment, the film captures one last carefree summer before the rise of Nazism. The light-heartedness of pre-war Berlin gradually gives way to haunting melancholy, as viewers confront the historical weight the film now carries: within fifteen years, Berlin would lie in ruins, some of these lives lost, and the youth of others devoured by war.

Beyond the weight of history, the film shifts its focus to the tension between the rhythms of everyday life and fleeting moments of joy – the ephemeral nature of happiness. “And then on Monday… four… million… wait for… the next Sunday,” the film pronounces at its close. Its themes stretch beyond the brevity of youth to meditate on the transience of life itself. We spend much of our lives waiting, and when those long-anticipated moments finally arrive, they vanish almost instantly. One character spends her entire Sunday in bed. On the table beside her lies a newspaper advertising Carl Bulcke’s new novel, Und so verbringst du deine kurzen Tage – loosely translated as So this is how you spend your limited days.

What is Actually Happening?

Milja Viita responds to the themes of Menschen am Sonntag in her own distinct way, choosing a less expected point of departure for her interpretation. Midway through the original film, a photographer takes portraits of various people, young and old. Some subjects appear uneasy under the camera’s gaze, while others pose with confidence. Each responds to being photographed in their own unique way.

This moment serves as the inspiration for Viita’s People on Sunday, which consists of ten filmed portraits. As in the original, her subjects are not actors, but people from her own inner circle. Some are engaged in everyday activities – smoking a cigarette, washing themselves – while others simply face the camera, their expressions shifting between defiance, uncertainty, impatience, focus, innocence, and lived experience. One portrait features the artist herself, holding a movie camera.

Topical social issues lend a melancholic undercurrent to Viita’s film, inevitably evoking the ongoing war in Europe and the global rise of far-right ideologies – especially when viewed alongside the historical context of the original Menschen am Sonntag. We are left wondering: will the individuals in Viita’s portraits have the chance to fully experience childhood, youth, and life itself? Or are they destined to face a future as bleak as that of the young people of 1930s Berlin? Less than a century has passed since the Holocaust, yet troubling signs suggest that this horrendous calamity is already beginning to slip from our collective memory.

Subtle references to environmental destruction are woven throughout the film. Natural processes unfold slowly, over epochs, but reckless human intervention has disrupted the planet’s fragile equilibrium. The alternation of nature scenes and character portraits underscores one of the film’s key subtexts: humanity’s increasingly fraught relationship with the natural world. In the end, these diverse narrative threads converge in a quiet meditation on fundamental questions about the nature of existence.

Viita’s character portraits offer subtle cues that hint at unfolding narratives. There isn’t enough time for complete stories to develop, but these fleeting suggestions – and the associations they evoke – invite the viewer to construct a sense of narrative coherence. Our attention must not falter, even for a moment, as the decisive instance of storytelling – if it can even be called that – occurs in the blink of an eye.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of a narrative ‘hook’: a brief gesture that prompts the viewer to reflect not only on the devices and limits of cinematic storytelling, but also on the nature of time itself. Are we capable of fully engaging with a four-minute scene in which nothing ‘happens’? And what does ‘happening’ ultimately mean? How do we define it? What is the smallest possible thing that still qualifies as an ‘event’? Is it an event if a character momentarily averts their gaze from the camera – especially when that gesture is underscored by the soundtrack?

Viita composed most of the soundtrack herself, using analogue synthesizers, various instruments, and recorded natural sounds, which she then layered and mixed. Additional music – such as a Bach prelude and improvised drumming by Latvian musician Rūdolfs Dankfelds – was produced and recorded specifically for the film. Through music, Viita creates a kind of inner consciousness for each subject, while sound effects and ambient elements from nature jolt the viewer into a state of heightened attention. The sound allows the viewer to drift in and out of cinematic reality, while also engaging with the film’s meta-narrative – particularly in scenes where the filmmaker herself appears on screen.

The fifth portrait in the film invites reflection on cinema as an art form – its relationship to, and distinction from other arts, such as painting. The camerawork has a strikingly painterly quality, and any romantic fool can easily recognise the golden evening sun of March glowing on the delicate-hued green wall, without necessarily knowing the exact time of filming. In other scenes, blossoming horse chestnut and apple trees cast their own enchantment, prompting us to wonder: can fleeting moments ever truly be preserved for posterity? What, in the end, is the relationship between memory and experience?

The final character portrait is filmed amidst nature at the height of its bloom. Blossoming apple trees underscore the season’s lush abundance, yet a brooding sense of transience lingers – even in this fleeting paradise. While some plants are in full flower, others are already past their peak, as poignantly suggested by wilting dandelions. Their bright yellow heads have faded into pale, translucent puffs – seeds ready to drift elsewhere and begin again.

Horror and Ecstasy

Beauty is as fleeting as vanishing moments of happiness – time and experience can never be captured exactly as they are, no matter how desperately one cranks the camera’s handle. And yet, beauty remains the artist’s way of striving for immortality, whether through words, images, or music. This idea is echoed in the film’s opening and closing sequences, which feature Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in E minor (BWV 938). Originally composed as a teaching piece for his son, Bach’s prelude speaks to a deep human urge: to pass on knowledge, skill, and lived experience before it slips away. In the final years of his life, Bach increasingly turned to life’s fundamental questions – his fear of death has often been seen as a driving force behind many of his later compositions.

Creative work marks an attempt to make time visible. Viita’s film explores not only the relentless passage of time, but also the deep-seated human urge to leave a trace of one’s existence. Creativity, in this sense, becomes an effort to defy mortality. Yet today, the climate emergency casts new light on the age-old idea of ars longa, vita brevis. Even if an artist succeeds in leaving a lasting mark on the history of music, film, visual art, or literature, there is no certainty that this legacy will endure. Still, the very act of creation remains meaningful in itself, offering solace in the midst of today’s social and geopolitical turbulence. John Eliot Gardiner’s reading of Bach captures this idea poignantly with the following reflection:

Intrinsic to this is the sense of certainty we recognise in Bach: his belief that somewhere there exists a path leading to a life of harmonious existence, if not in this world then in the next, one that overrides the endemic stupidity of men and women and all the hypocritical and self-seeking behaviour that blights quotidian social intercourse.

Bach was known to be occasionally rebellious in his role as cantor. His defiance, one suspects, arose from aspirations loftier than those of church authorities or municipal officials. Chief among them was the pursuit of universal harmony – an enduringly noble aim, even if, in the end, it proves to be little more than a mirage.

Of all writers in history, Leo Tolstoy seems to have been particularly haunted by an awareness of his approaching death, even from a young age. Mikhail Shishkin reflects on Tolstoy’s fear: “The only way to defeat death was to accept it.” Yet, Tolstoy’s acceptance led to a troubling consequence – his rejection of art and, ultimately, everything precious and meaningful in life. “When you accept death, life and all things become meaningless.” But isn’t this precisely why people fear death – it is ultimately the dread of life losing its meaning? Shishkin’s musings intensify as he discusses Hadji Murat, one of Tolstoy’s later works: “One must fight for the right to live until the very end, without fixating on the secrets of creation or the deepest connections between things; without endlessly pondering ‘why’ or ‘for what purpose’; without constantly searching for meaning“.

Can death truly be conquered by accepting it and abandoning ‘trivial’ reflections and the pursuit of meaning – the very struggle to make the world a better place? If death ultimately claims us all, might we not die with our metaphorical boots on, garbed in a cloak of curiosity, ever-thirsty for knowledge, chasing secrets and meaning to the very end – even if paralysed by fear? As Charles Baudelaire observed in his posthumously published notes, “Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.” The will to live can be expressed in many ways, from Tolstoy’s call to “live according to the real laws of survival” to the quiet contemplation of horse chestnut blossoms.

“As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life,” Baudelaire reflects. This tension between joy and despair speaks to the paradox at the heart of human existence. A related insight comes from Juhani Rekola, a Stockholm-based chaplain to a hard-drinking band of homeless Finnish immigrants known as the ‘Slussen shadowrunners’:

We behold what is broken, yearning to restore it to wholeness. To wait is, in a sense, to resist the present moment – its conditions, its reality, our mortality. And yet, life is not simply divided into waiting and fulfilment. Waiting itself is a form of hope – an active anticipation of a hope yet to be fulfilled. Waiting is not merely the prelude to something sacred; it is already sacred in itself. The same holds true for fear. One may fear death so profoundly that one seeks to escape it by ending life itself. Waiting, too, contains within it the essence of fulfilment, just as fear anticipates the experience of what is most dreaded.

Waiting for the future gives colour and shape to the present. The more we register the future, the more vividly we perceive the now. And yet we never fully understand the present, because the future remains incomplete. Still, it is in the shadow of uncertainty that we must build toward the future, within the present.

It is up to the reader to decide whether Rekola’s words offer solace or cast a bleaker shadow. After all, one needn’t befriend the fear of death in order to cherish the beauty of life.

The thrill of life is something beyond words – it lies in the entanglement of the present and the future. Life is wondrous because it offers a singular, unrepeatable opportunity. Yet much also weighs upon that wonder. Nothing is perfect, and yet every imperfection gestures toward perfection. Everything becomes symbolic. Without hope, we see only what is broken. With hope, brokenness itself becomes a promise of repair.

No religious conviction is needed to perceive and feel hope in the world around us, or to accept our own limitations and flaws. While humanity may well hasten its own demise through its rash actions, the Earth will continue to turn – at least until the Sun itself fades. Beauty will endure, even if humans sometimes fail to recognise it. Beauty, God, Hope. As Rekola writes, “Everything becomes symbolic.”

These symbols are pursued relentlessly – not only by artists, but by all of us. This idea is beautifully embodied in a striking moment from the third of Viita’s film portraits: a child, mesmerised by the flickering magic of a campfire. Are even the marks we believe to be permanent nothing more than gestures drawn in firelight? Smoke gets in our eyes. Miraculous fire.

Milja Viita’s film installation People on Sunday on show at Serlachius Manor from 13 September 2025 to 3 May 2026.

Literature:
Charles Baudelaire, Välähdyksiä. Alaston sydämeni. Suom. Eila Kostamo. Helsinki: Otava, 1972 (1887).
John Eliot Gardiner, Musiikkia taivaan holveissa. Johann Sebastian Bach – muotokuva. Suom. Sampsa Laurinen. Helsinki: Fuga Oy, 2015 (2013).
Juhani Rekola, Beetlehem on kaikkialla. Joensuu: Kirjapaja, 1974.
Mihail Šiškin, ”Taistelu tyhjyyttä vastaan”. Suom. Vappu Orlov. Teoksessa Viha ja kauneus. Kirjoituksia sodasta, taiteesta ja Venäjän ideasta. Helsinki: WSOY, 2024 (2019).

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