Torbjørn Rødland
The excorcism of Mother Teresa
Cast: Bernhard Ramstad, Sanne Frid Berntsen, Ruth Gurholt.
Voice: Michael Labadia.
Editing: Erik Andersson.
Music: Kjetil D. Brandsdal.
Torbjørn Rødland’s film uses the rumored exorcism of Mother Teresa as a point of departure for exploring the notions of fear, darkness, and salvation. Rødland often incorporates a retrogressive romanticism onto the codes of popular photography and film making, injecting his enigmatic images with a Nordic melancholy. The exorcism of Mother Teresa, Rødland’s first film, elucidates the role of the viewer as co-creator. The frame story is provided by a CNN report of 2001, detailing the claim by senior church officials in India that Mother Teresa had an exorcism performed on her in her later years. The details of an exorcism ritual are read aloud. We hear music. And then there is what we see: meticulously composed scenes of Norwegian winter landscapes, reminiscent of Christmas cards, a red-breasted bullfinch among the branches, murderously sharp icicles, intricate detail shots of a cassette player – “treble”, “normal” – a beautiful young woman on a motorcycle with an elderly man in a sidecar, the same old man laboriously wading through the snow towards a log cabin. For the most part there is no direct connection between what we see and what we hear, and no obvious connection between the images either. It is not in the images that things happen. The entire action, if one can call it that, takes place in a region beyond what is seen and heard – inside the viewer’s head. In this sense the film is a textbook illustration of Eisenstein’s montage technique, a technique that has been playfully pushed to absurd extremes by the Norwegian TV comedian Tufte Johansen. But in contrast to the latter’s “cheeky” examples of cross-cutting, Rødland does not spoon-feed us with obvious associations; in his case the pictures do not add up. The viewer is personally required to arrange the pieces in various ways in order to see whether they can form an entirety.