Leena Virtanen: ON THE WAY TO STARS. The men in Veli Granö's documentaries 
long to escape this world. In: Helsingin Sanomat, October 14, 1999.


All of Veli Granö's documentaries seem to share a plot, a common idea. He 
has directed three documentaries, all of them portraits of his characters. 
The first of his documentaries told the story of Matias Keskinen who made 
gigantic statues of Kekkonen, Finland's former president (The Imaginary 
Life of Mafias Keskinen, 1991). In his film A Strange Message From Another 
Star the main character is Paavo Rahkonen, an American Finnish spacecraft 
designer. A man who has always had the need to get to another star.


A third part of the series is An Attempt to Raise Hell (1994), a 20-minute 
film portraying Dennis Oppenheim, an American conceptual artist.
Granö is also a photographer and he is famous for his photographic works A 
Trip to Paradise and Tangible Cosmologies. A Trip to Paradise pictured 
self-made artists, and in that group of people Granö found Matias Keskinen. 
Tangible Cosmologies is both a book and a cd rom and its subject is 
collectors. According to Granö, people collect things in an attempt to make 
a scattering world a whole one. "Even for a moment."
Like people who collect things, Matias Keskinen and Paavo Rahkonen - even 
Oppenheim - have created "small systems" of their lives that have become 
new worlds for them. In the same manner Veli Granö makes his films and 
photographic works into "imaginary" worlds.

Faith in documentary film remains strong
Granö has also made an installation of A Strange Message From Another Star 
where Paavo's reality - his own room -collides with the director's material 
and tools, i.e. his reality. The final question of the director is: how far 
has he drifted from the reality with his stories?
It is quite interesting to see that documentary film still has some value 
as evidence." Granö adds.
"Before, documentaries had great social mission, and it did work in the 
beginning. But when the world and people's idea of reality changed, 
documentary film lost its credibility."
"I myself have never thought that a picture would portray the reality. In a 
film everything is just using the means of film. Only the character is real 
anything else is not." Granö explains.

"But people still want to believe in documentaries. It is strange, maybe 
even scary; because you'll always find people who want to make others 
believe something. In this sense, TV is an extremely politicized medium. It 
feeds people its violent and threatening reality"
Granö talks about the surprising comeback of utopia of reality. It is a 
regression from the postmodem discussion and experiments of the early 
1990s.
"The discussion of false documentaries that we have heard lately is sign of 
the media trying to protect its own credibility." Granö says.


Art is commitment
According to the traditional view, a documentary film should also be able 
to maintain in an illusion of the invisible camera, otherwise the audience 
will feel embarrassed and acward. Granö believes that this is one of the 
reasons why Virpi Suutari's and Susanna Helke's Sin provoked so many. It 
neither hid the presence ofthe camera nor the joy of voyeurism that is 
always found in documentary film. "It aroused feelings of guilt in the 
viewers"
"Documentary film is not supposed to shatter the old and humanistic idea 
that people's basic and fundamental nature is good and benevolent. The 
modernistic view of man still remains very strong."
Granö says that the story Paavo Rahkonen's life, with all its details, was 
so bizarre that the director actually had to polish it a bit to preserve 
its "credibility". In spite of this, after seeing the film, people still 
ask if the story is true.
Rahkonen's father left Finland and moved to the United States to recover 
from trauma inflicted by the Finnish civil war and the battle of Tampere. 
The trauma,
however, followed him to the new continent and passed on to his son Paavo 
who already as a child started dreaming about space.
Rahkonen's father was possessed by the desire to escape the wickedness 
ofthe world. His son has also experienced the same. The documentary film 
tells about the reasons, a long chain of events.
Granö says that A Strange Message From Another Star also tells what it is 
like to be an artist. "Creating art is also based on commitment