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Contents
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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4 - Professionals
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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Summary
In his fiftieth birthday interviews in 1940, T. J. Särkkä announced himself as ‘first errand boy of the company [Suomen Filmiteollisuus]’, whose job was to ‘do everything that is involved in a film studio: writing scripts, directing movies, overseeing the office etc. etc.’. There is a touch of truth in what Särkkä said: indeed, besides overseeing the office, he was the most prolific director and screenwriter of Suomen Filmiteollisuus. However, the obvious goal of the statement was to emphasise the cosy and family-like atmosphere at the company, as if ‘we are all in the same boat’. Compared with a Hollywood factory, Suomen Filmiteollisuus may, indeed, have looked like a cottage industry workshop, but it was still a biggish enterprise with hundreds of employees, a hierarchical structure and a considerable pay gap between different jobs as well as between genders.
This chapter focuses on the contribution and position of various work groups from the actors, directors, screenwriters and cinematographers to the carpenters, electricians, make-up artists and dressmakers. What was the division of labour like in the major film companies? How did one end up with a career in cinema? What was everyday work at a film studio like?
Division of labour at the studios
In terms of labour, the majors operated basically like small-scale studios in Hollywood or the big European film production countries. The mode of production was producer-led, hierarchical and divided into specialised departments: the majors labelled themselves ‘full-service houses’, implying that the whole process of filmmaking from scriptwriting to post-production could be handled by their regular staff.
The size of these ‘full-service houses’, of course, varied throughout the studio years, with a modest start and a descending end. Exact figures and lists of the personnel are hard to find, as most surviving company papers are incomplete. However, Suomi-Filmi’s archive, as well as Kari Uusitalo’s company history of Suomi-Filmi, gives us a good picture of the scale of a major company from the 1920s to the 1960s. While knowledge about Suomen Filmiteollisuus and Fennada is much more sparse and fragmented, based mostly on articles in newspapers and film journals, these studios can be assessed and compared with what we know about Suomi-Filmi with more certainty.
7 - Film politics and censorship
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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Summary
In April 1943, at a moment when the ongoing World War II and the Finnish–Soviet Continuation War were having a massive effect on both filmmaking and the film trade, Ensio Hiitonen wrote an article for the social democratic newspaper Kansan Lehti called ‘Film as an Economic, Political and Cultural Factor’. Hiitonen, a representative of the Finnish Film Chamber and one of the crucial actors in Finnish film politics during and after World War II, surveyed the relationship between state and cinema, outlining four more or less interconnected perspectives. First, film was a business, an economic factor that from the state point of view had meant that it was primarily a target for taxation. Second, by favouring domestic production over imported films the state had a possibility of implementing national cultural politics. A radical means of regulating the proportion of domestic films to imported ones was to impose import restrictions. Third, film was a powerful weapon for various forms of propaganda. This, of course, was especially evident at the time the article was written. And fourth, film was an object of censorship, not only during the exceptional circumstances of the war years, but also during peacetime.
This chapter will discuss the relations of the state authorities and cinema from the four perspectives raised in Hiitonen’s newspaper article: film as the object of taxation, film as an object of censorship, film as propaganda, and film as a means of doing national and international politics. Some of these perspectives concern the film studios directly, and some indirectly, either as active agents or as objects of the state’s politics, or both. Yet, each of these factors crucially affected the preconditions and circumstances the studios operated in.
Film and taxation
A common complaint among film critics and professionals during the studio years was that, from the state’s perspective, film was seen primarily as a source of income and only secondarily as a cultural factor. Typical is the director Ilmari Unho’s bitter criticism from 1945:
As film has achieved a growingly significant position as a cultural factor, as true folk art, as a force shaping the views and ideals of – especially young – people, and as it has, at the same time, developed into a substantial national economic factor, the relation between film and the state has become ever more crucial.
References
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8 - Epilogue
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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Summary
What happened to the Finnish film studios and the studio system? A sense of crisis had manifested itself from time to time long before the 1960s. As we have seen in this book, the film industry was hit by various kinds of crises through the decades, some of which were internal, some external and some both. The early 1930s crisis can clearly be characterised as having both external factors including the general recession and the coming of recorded sound and internal ones such as the power struggle within Suomi-Filmi. The difficulties encountered by the film industry during and immediately after World War II were also varied in nature. In addition to the obvious obstacles caused by the state of war (difficulties in international trade, the scarcity of raw film stock and other materials), the film industry created its own internal crisis over its stance towards American films.
The actual structural crisis that led to the gradual breakdown of the studio system is usually dated to the late 1950s, with a more specific turning point in 1957–8, when the majors started laying off their staff and reducing their feature film production. Discussions about the crisis in domestic filmmaking had, however, been going on for nearly a decade. Although the actual term ‘crisis’ was often used both in the early and the late 1950s, the meaning, or at least the emphasis, of the word was different. Generally, while in the early 1950 critics and other commentators from outside or on the outskirts of the film industry perceived the crisis in terms of quality, film producers laid stress on taxation and other economic factors. The most comprehensive and talked-about debate on the crisis was organised by the left-wing newspaper Vapaa Sana in early 1952. The introduction to the first part of the debate read:
Of all domestic arts, cinema is the one that has lately been the focus of attention. This is because complaints about a crisis of domestic film have risen from two directions. Whereas film critics as well as the more enlightened sectors of the audience confirm the unsound artistic quality of film production time after time, the film producers complain that financial difficulties, the rise of production costs, taxation and competition from foreign popular films, will become a death trap for domestic cinema, and that it is only a matter of time before it is revealed whether it will be able to exist at all.
2 - Majors
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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Summary
Finnish feature film production during the studio era was dominated first by one, then by two and finally by three companies. The first was Suomi-Filmi (founded in 1919), the second, Suomen Filmiteollisuus (founded in 1933), and the third, Fennada-Filmi (founded in 1950). While there was always competition not just among but also beyond these three, and while there was sometimes a thin line between the majors and other production companies, in the long run these three stand out as the most powerful and long-lasting. In terms of feature film production, their share was almost 70 per cent of the whole output of films between 1920 and 1963. Of the 619 feature films made during these years, Suomen Filmiteollisuus produced 237, Suomi-Filmi 142 and Fennada 53. This leaves a total of 187 films to the dozens of other, smaller and usually short-lived companies.
Unlike in Hollywood, the vertical integration of production, distribution and exhibition was not an absolute necessity for a major company. Of the three majors, Suomi-Filmi and Fennada-Filmi were fully integrated, whereas Suomen Filmiteollisuus concentrated mainly on producing and distributing its own films. This, however, proved to be the weak point for Suomen Filmiteollisuus, when the profitability of feature film production decreased in the late 1950s.
During the heyday of the studio era, however, the majors had other means to secure their oligarchy besides integrating vertically. For example, the majors controlled many of the trade organisations, such as the Finnish Film Producers Union, for which Suomen Filmiteollisuus’s CEO, T. J. Särkkä, acted as the chair from 1945 to 1963, with Suomi-Filmi’s Risto Orko as the vice chair and Fennada’s Mauno Mäkelä as his successor. Most other powerful film organisations, like the Finnish Film Chamber and the Finnish Cinema Owners’ Association had representatives from the majors, too. This means that, even if competition between the majors was harsh and the relations between the chief executives, especially between Orko and the other two, distant at best, it was in their common interest to pull together when necessary.
Vertical integration was thus an important if not entirely necessary means of achieving and maintaining power in film production. Generally, it was useful for a company to spread its tentacles everywhere, be it in production, distribution and exhibition, or laboratory services, film organisations, importing film equipment and making short films. Overall, one can say that the majors were majors simply because they were.
Index
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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3 - Minors and independents
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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Summary
Effective as it was, the dominance of the major studios was never total. Despite the difficulties in working outside the big companies, some of the minors and independents managed to achieve a relatively considerable output, and, in fact, some of the established classics of the studio era were made outside of the big studios (for example Juha, 1937, The White Reindeer, 1952, as well as all the films by Teuvo Tulio). While some of the competing minor and independent companies were established specifically for producing feature films, others were distributors or short-film producers, who tried their luck in feature film with varying success. Still others, like Teuvo Tulio, were independent producer-directors.
Some of the difficulties encountered by non-majors were obvious. While the majors had permanent studios with permanent, professionally skilled staff and up-to-date technology, the independents often had to rely on old cameras, ad hoc studios, small crews and overall small budgets. Also, just as in Hollywood, distributing and exhibiting films was always more difficult for the independents than it was for the majors, and the deals made with distributors and exhibitors rarely favoured the independent producers. This chapter charts the challenges (lack of money and facilities) as well as the benefits (creative freedom) of working on the outskirts of studio production. Case studies include the production histories of the experimental adventure film The Stolen Death (1938) by Nyrki Tapiovaara, the characteristically excessive melodrama The Way You Wanted Me (1944) by Teuvo Tulio, the poetic fantasy film The White Reindeer (1952) by Erik Blomberg and the modernist ‘walking film’ The Glass Heart (1959) by Matti Kassila.
Major, minor, independent, amateur
There was often a thin line between major, minor and independent studios. As we have seen in the previous chapter, vertical integration was not always a necessary requirement for a major company. Of the three majors, Suomi-Filmi and Fennada-Filmi were fully integrated with production, distribution and exhibition branches, whereas Suomen Filmiteollisuus concentrated mainly on producing and distributing its own films. However, the long-term contract with Adams-Filmi ensured that high-quality venues were always available for Suomen Filmiteollisuus, too.
The majors had other means to secure their oligarchy besides integrating vertically. In addition to dominating many of the trade organisations, the majors also either owned or at least controlled the most modern and best-equipped film laboratories.
Finnish Film Studios
- Kimmo Laine
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Finnish Film Studios provides a thorough examination of Finnish film industry through the core decades of the studio era, from the early 1920s to the early 1960s. Laine analyses the contributions of fully integrated major companies, Suomi-Filmi, Suomen Filmiteollisuus and Fennada-Filmi, in addition to minor companies and independent producers that were responsible for some of the canonized work of the studio era, including the films of Teuvo Tulio and Nyrki Tapiovaara.This study approaches Finnish studio cinema as both typical and particular: it is a typical European small nation cinema with its industrial structures, reliance on hierarchical organisation of labour and love-hate relationship with Hollywood; yet, it is particular, not only in its genres, cycles and hugely popular domestic stars, but also because films were made in the constant presence of geopolitical realities, at times under the influence of Germany and the Soviet Union.
Frontmatter
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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Acknowledgements
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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Select filmography
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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List of figures
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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1 - Introduction
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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Summary
Finnish cinema is a typical European small-nation cinema. According to the twelve-volume Finnish National Filmography, 1,128 feature films were produced between 1907 and 2000. In addition to feature films, thousands of short films were made, partly due to the demand for newsreels, actualities and other topical material and partly because of a tax reduction system (1933–64) that made it economically lucrative for cinema owners to include a domestic short film as part of a screening.
Production of feature films has been relatively steady over the decades, with a few low points and a few high points. Among the low points were the years between 1916 and 1919, when first a filming prohibition imposed by the Russian authorities and then, after Finnish independence in 1917, the fierce civil war of 1918 caused a break in film production; the early 1930s, when worldwide recession, the coming of recorded sound and the internal crisis within the leading production company, Suomi-Filmi, temporarily decreased production volume; and the early 1970s, when film attendances radically dropped while the film subsidy system was still at a rather modest level. The major high points have been the mid-1950s, when studio-based production overheated just before collapsing, and the 2000s, when domestic cinema saw a new rise in popularity. With the exception of these anomalies, a typical yearly production volume has varied roughly between ten and twenty feature films.
As a small-nation cinema, Finnish film culture is in many ways comparable to that of other Nordic countries, despite some apparent differences. Unlike Denmark in the 1910s and Sweden in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Finnish cinema has never experienced an internationally acknowledged ‘golden age’. No international film stars in the league of Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman have come from Finland, nor has the country produced internationally recognised auteurs like Carl Theodor Dreyer or Ingmar Bergman, at least not before Aki Kaurismäki’s festival and art house success in the late 1900s and 2000s. Yet the similarities between Nordic countries are significant. Despite periods of international success, most Nordic films have been produced mainly for domestic markets. The mutual closeness of the Scandinavian languages has made it easier to distribute Swedish, Danish and Norwegian films to neighbouring countries than Finnish ones, since the Finnish language is totally incomprehensible to other Nordic peoples.
6 - House styles
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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From the early 1930s on, when the relative dominance of Suomi-Filmi gave way to first two (Suomi-Filmi and Suomen Filmiteollisuus) and then three (Fennada) major production companies, an idiosyncratic house style became a necessary precondition for the success of a studio. Certainly, Suomi-Filmi had already determinedly constructed a company image in the 1920s, but with little competition there was not much need to differentiate its films from those of the rivals. More important was to stand out as a domestic company and create a distinctive style for domestic productions. This aspiration continued through the studio years and was shared with other Finnish production companies; after all, even in the most productive times, the domestic output remained only a small fraction of the whole supply of films. Yet, with other equally strong domestic rivals, the distinction strategy became a double strategy: on the one hand, it was a common interest of all domestic films to stand out as recognisably Finnish films with identifiable national characteristics; on the other hand, all studios attempted to do this in their own distinctive way and stand out not only among the foreign but also among the domestic competitors.
The differentiation process is already evident in the names of the production companies. In August 1940, the editorial of Suomi-Filmi’s journal Uutisaitta warned against the potential overproduction of domestic films should the importation of foreign productions become difficult because of the ongoing war:
If such false market conditions lead to the release of substandard films, there is a danger of the concept of the domestic film as such being condemned. Despite repeated efforts, the public has not yet learned to tell company logos apart. They are still randomly mixed up with one another, and are usually credited to Suomi-Filmi. This is because almost all domestic film producers have chosen names that resemble Suomi-Filmi as much as possible.
There is obvious bitterness in these words towards Suomi-Filmi’s main competitor, Suomen Filmiteollisuus. Indeed, when Erkki Karu, after his forced departure from Suomi-Filmi, launched his new company in 1933, he deliberately chose a name that resembled that of his old company. Suomen Filmiteollisuus (Finnish Film Industry) echoed Suomi-Filmi (Finland-Film), while it also alluded to the major Swedish production company Svensk Filmindustri (Swedish Film Industry).
5 - Genres, cycles and series
- Kimmo Laine, University of Turku, Finland
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While the output of Finnish film industry was so limited that it hardly makes sense to speak of genuinely domestic genres, indigenous interpretations of such transnational genres as crime films, musicals, screwball comedies or melodramas were common. In general, however, I would suggest that Finnish studio cinema did not rely heavily on fixed genres, but rather invested in more limited and short-lived groupings of films that can be characterised as cycles, sequels and series. This chapter explores the strategies employed by Finnish film studios to plan their output, be it in the long run (production levels or genres), the short run (sequels) or somewhere in between (cycles or series). Special attention is paid to the lumberjack film, which is arguably the only domestic film genre, the cycles of historical dramas, problem films and Schlager films, and three long-lasting series: Family Suominen (1941–59), Pekka Puupää (1953–60) and Inspector Palmu (1960–9).
Classifying films
One of the frequently discussed topics in Finnish film journals during the studio years was film criticism itself. Who was qualified to write reviews? Should domestic films be approached according to the same principles as international films? What were the general criteria of a good film?
The first question divided reviewers, other journalists and filmmakers sharply. While reviewers obviously defended their profession – explaining the undeniably varied quality of reviews by the lack of schooling – high-brow journalists often attacked the reviewers openly. A telling nickname for a newspaper review was a ‘cognac critique’, referring to the practice of the studios giving lavishly serviced press screenings: the implication was that the film producers provided the reviewers with delicious foods and drinks in order to get favourable reviews. Filmmakers, too, seemed to have a less than a flattering opinion of reviewers, albeit for different reasons. The nickname ‘errand boy critique’ implied that the filmmakers and producers assumed that film reviewing was held in such low esteem in newspapers that a review could be written by anyone who was available. This insinuation was even captured in a film. The comedy Am I in a Harem? (SF 1938) features a self-reflexive scene in an editorial office in which an errand boy is sent to a cinema. A conversation ensues between a newspaperman and the errand boy:
The status of domestic films among the film offerings varied considerably during the studio years.
3 - Biography of an Outsider
- Henry Bacon, University of Helsinki, Kimmo Laine, University of Oulu, Finland
- Edited by Jaakko Seppälä, University of Helsinki
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Summary
Teuvo Tulio was born in 1912 as Theodor Tugai. His family roots were internationally entangled and extended as far as Turkey. His maternal grandmother appears to have come from Poland. His mother Helena married three times, and Theodor was the son of her first husband, Aleksander Tugai. Soon Theodor's surname changed to that of Helene's second husband, Peter Derodzinsky, who, Tulio emphasises, did not have a drop of blue blood in his veins, despite such speculations in Finland at the time when Tulio began to make a career in the budding film industry.
Tulio assumed that his parents’ marriage was one of convention. It did not last long, and Theodor, their only child, was born on a train heading for St Petersburg. At that point Helena was eighteen years old and dreamed of becoming a ballerina. As she tried to pursue a career in St Petersburg, Theodor returned to live with his grandparents in a farmhouse in Latvia. For a long time, Helena remained a remote figure for him, and he never saw her second husband, who died quite soon after the marriage. As Helena entered her third marriage with the Finn Alarik Rönnqvist, she moved to Helsinki. Theodor joined them, but he did not assume his stepfather's surname and resorted instead to his original surname, Tugai. For a long time, he remained at heart a country boy, as he spent his summers at his grandfather's farm as its prospective heir. His main interest there were the horses, and his experience with them was to be significant in his film career.
Moving to Helsinki at the age of ten meant adapting, not only to an urban environment, but also to a different language. Theodor could speak Latvian, German, English, Russian and a bit of Yiddish. Now he had to learn Finnish and Swedish. He entered the German secondary school, where he faced the further task of having to learn to write as well as speak German. Nevertheless, he enjoyed the international atmosphere of the school and the company of children from all over the world, ‘except Africa’. Getting along with the rough boys on the streets required a different kind of effort. Not only did he not have a full command of the local languages, he looked different and was called a Kirgizian, Chinaman or a Mongol.
8 - Tulio’s Legacy
- Henry Bacon, University of Helsinki, Kimmo Laine, University of Oulu, Finland
- Edited by Jaakko Seppälä, University of Helsinki
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As we have seen in this book, Teuvo Tulio's reputation as a filmmaker declined steadily through his active career. While his critical status, starting with his early collaboration with Valentin Vaala, was never unequivocal, it can be generalised that until the mid-1940s he was regarded as a welcome innovator within Finnish cinema, a filmic-oriented alternative for the literary- and theatrically-minded majority of studio filmmakers. The sensationalism present in almost all of Tulio's works guaranteed that controversy and disputes often accompanied his premieres, often provoked by the director himself, but early on in his career, he usually managed to turn this to his advantage. From the late 1940s on, critics more and more often regarded Tulio's sensationalism as an objective in its own right, based on a repetitive repertoire of cheap thrills. However, after hitting a low point in the 1960s and 1970s, Tulio's critical reputation started gradually to rise again: his films achieved a kind of a cult status, as critics and enthusiasts raised after the studio era began to see them as intriguing anomalies from, rather than conventionally representative of, the period.
THREE FELLOW FILMMAKERS
In an interesting way, Tulio's critical reputation partly parallels and partly contrasts with that of two of his coeval filmmakers, Valentin Vaala and Nyrki Tapiovaara (Vaala was born in 1909, Tapiovaara in 1911 and Tulio in 1912). All three were, at least at some point in their careers, among the most respected filmmakers of the studio era, and all three now have an established position in Finnish film history. They are, for example, among the rather few filmmakers with a monograph devoted to their careers: a book on Tapiovaara by Sakari Toiviainen came out in 1986, a collection of essays on Tulio, edited by Toiviainen, in 2002, and a collection of essays on Vaala, edited by Kimmo Laine, Matti Lukkarila and Juha Seitajärvi, in 2004. However, the respective roads of these three filmmakers to the canon of Finnish cinema differ considerably. These differences shed light on the excessive idiosyncrasy of Tulio's style, as well as on the uneasy cultural position of melodrama as a genre.
4 - Outsider as an Independent Filmmaker
- Henry Bacon, University of Helsinki, Kimmo Laine, University of Oulu, Finland
- Edited by Jaakko Seppälä, University of Helsinki
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Throughout his career, both as an actor and a director, Teuvo Tulio worked outside of the big studios. Production-wise, this was a decisive factor that affected everything from the choice of subjects, actors and music to editing, distributing and marketing his films. Operating on the fringes of the film industry was, indeed, an essential part of Tulio's status as an outsider.
Finnish film production was, from the 1920s to the 1960s, dominated by a handful of companies, some of which concentrated on producing feature films, while others were fully integrated along the lines of the Hollywood majors. Three of the largest companies, Suomi-Filmi, Suomen Filmiteollisuus and Fennada-Filmi, produced almost 70 per cent of the whole output of domestic feature films between 1920 and 1963. The balance of power of this oligarchy changed during the studio era, but whether the field was dominated by one, two or all three companies at any one time, operating outside the majors was always challenging.
This chapter focuses on Tulio's life and career as an independent filmmaker, by first outlining the general structures of the Finnish studio system, against which Tulio's survival strategies are then discussed. Special attention is paid to the transnational dimensions of Tulio's cinema, especially his dual strategy of addressing national audiences on the one hand, and regional, Nordic markets on the other.
THE FINNISH STUDIO SYSTEM
Tulio is generally characterised as an independent filmmaker. Just what that meant varied from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, and these changes related closely to the general trends in Finnish feature-film production. Therefore, in order to understand the circumstances in which Tulio made his films, it is essential to contextualise them in relation to the ways the major production companies operated during these decades.
When Vaala and Tugai made their first films in the late 1920s, Finnish film production was all but dominated by one diversified company, Suomi-Filmi. There had been a three-year break in feature-film production between 1916 and 1919, first due to the prohibition of filming enacted by the authorities during the last years of the Russian rule, and then, after Finland had gained independence in 1917, due to the economically and politically unstable conditions during and after the harsh civil war of 1918. But by 1919 several new entrepreneurs advertised that they would soon be starting film production, typically on openly nationalistic lines through adaptations of established Finnish literature.
7 - Art of Repetition
- Henry Bacon, University of Helsinki, Kimmo Laine, University of Oulu, Finland
- Edited by Jaakko Seppälä, University of Helsinki
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Summary
‘Here I am, just the way you wanted me’, the prostitute named Gazelle remarks with a hefty dose of cynicism in her voice to the man who once loved and then abandoned her. The film in question is The Song of the Scarlet Flower, which Teuvo Tulio directed in 1938. The film is based on a novel of the same name by Johannes Linnankoski, but the quoted line does not appear in the book. Six years later, a film titled The Way You Wanted Me (1944) premiered. It, too, tells the story of an innocent woman who succumbs to prostitution. She is Maija, a young woman grown up in a small island community. Her lover abandons her after she becomes pregnant, which leads her to look for customers in a port tavern. One night in the tavern she meets her former lover and with bitter irony repeats Gazelle's line from the earlier film, which now also serves as the title of this film. Tulio used the phrase once more in his last film, Sensuela, which premiered in 1973. Over thirty years had passed, but Sensuela tells the same old story: a young and innocent woman, this time from the Sami community, falls in love, is abandoned and has to prostitute herself to make ends meet. Encountering her former lover in the Reeperbahn district in Hamburg, she too says to him contemptuously, ‘Here I am, just the way you wanted me.’ Throughout his career Tulio depicted men who fall in love with virgins and, without thinking about the consequences of their desire-driven romancing, turn them into prostitutes. The repeated line is a key topos in Tulio's oeuvre; it is a feminist admonition aimed at eliciting self-disgust in the men.
Repetition was a fundamental component of Tulio's authorship. A degree of repetition is ‘a common and multiform phenomenon in cinema and in art in general’. In classical cinema, ‘the principle of repetition and regulated difference […] is the basis of narrative progression and expansion’. It serves that purpose in Tulio's cinema as well, but as the above example indicates, one rather unique aspect of his art is repetition in an excessive and conspicuous form.