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    World Film Locations: Helsinki
    World Film Locations: Helsinki
    World Film Locations: Helsinki
    Ebook191 pages1 hour

    World Film Locations: Helsinki

    By Intellect Books Ltd

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    About this ebook

    The creation of World Film Locations Helsinki draws inspiration from the pathbreaking efforts of Peter von Bagh, Minna Santakari and Outi Heiskanen whose work with the cinematic city has et the bar high for future explorations. In providing a visual and textual guide for international readers, the editors at Intellect have provided constant support for the project. Especially of note are the efforts of Gabriel Solomons, the editor heading the World Film Locations lineup. In constructing a book on a topic simultaneously as marginal and central to film studies as the history of Helsinki, all the contributors have provided intriguing and invigorating perspectives to the city that continue the existing legacy and expand it in significant ways.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIntellect Books Ltd
    Release dateApr 29, 2013
    ISBN9781841507453
    World Film Locations: Helsinki

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      Book preview

      World Film Locations - Intellect Books Ltd

      Edited by Pietari Kääpä and Silja Laine

      First Published in the UK in 2013 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

      First Published in the USA in 2013 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

      Copyright ©2013 Intellect Ltd

      Cover photo:

      The Man Without A Past © 2002

      Sputnik Oy / The Kobal Collection

      Copy Editor: Emma Rhys

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written consent.

      A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      World Film Locations Series

      ISSN: 2045-9009

      eISSN: 2045-9017

      World Film Locations Helsinki

      ISBN: 978-1-84150-722-4

      eISBN: 978-1-84150-745-3

      Printed and bound by

      Bell & Bain Limited, Glasgow

      CONTENTS

      Maps/Scenes

      Scenes 1-7

      1927 - 1952

      Scenes 8-14

      1952 - 1962

      Scenes 15-20

      1965 - 1978

      Scenes 21-26

      1979 - 1988

      Scenes 27-32

      1997 - 2005

      Scenes 33-38

      2005 - 2011

      Essays

      Helsinki:

      City of the Imagination

      Pietari Kääpä

      Reality Bites:

      Documenting Helsinki’s Changing Landscapes

      Pietari Kääpä

      Designer City:

      Architects in Helsinki Films

      Silja Laine

      Creative Geography:

      Helsinki as Body Double (Part 1)

      Susanna Paasonen

      The Same But Different:

      Helsinki as Body Double (Part 2)

      Susanna Paasonen

      From Hämeentie:

      The Local Logic of Aki Kaurismäki’s Helsinki

      Sanna Peden

      Comic Spaces:

      Helsinki’s Social Districts in Film Comedies

      Kimmo Laine

      Backpages

      Resources

      Contributor Bios

      Filmography

      INTRODUCTION

      World Film Locations Helsinki

      IN HIS BEAUTIFULLY CONCEIVED documentary Helsinki ikuisesti/Helsinki Forever (2008), director and film historian Peter Von Bagh suggests that in watching films about Helsinki it is most important to focus on the actors' movements. The plot of the film does not matter as much as seeing how the human body relates to the environment of the city. It is these contact points and the reciprocal responses that emerge in them which reveal to us the film’s unique perspective on the state of society.

      This is a great starting point for thinking about the history of representations of Helsinki as it is this sort of elastic reciprocity that is key to understanding humanity’s relationship with the cinematic city. Far from an unresponsive material environment, the city is best conceptualized as an organic entity, where humanity, the city, and the surrounding natural environment correspond to one another in interactive ways. And it is the material traces of correspondence - cinematic images - that function as the primary material for constructing a book such as this.

      When looking at representations of Helsinki throughout the history of Finnish cinema, we can find constant indications of this elasticity. When Uuno Turhapuro, a comic anti-hero, walks through the city centre, we see an entirely different version of it from an Aki Kaurismäki film. While the fundamental building blocks of the city remain the same in the mise-en-scène, the cinematic capture unavoidably responds to the sort of life philosophy the character embodies and, accordingly, morphs in front of our eyes.

      The cinematic city is thus a collective work where individual pieces construct a whole that is ultimately shaped by the knowledge each spectator brings to the cinematic canon. Each film provides a set of particular insights into the constantly in-construction archive that is the cinematic city, which we, as viewers, then shape according to our perspectives. This collection provides an instance of precisely such an archive as a collective effort to understand Finnish culture and its part in the world.

      As we will see, cinematic Helsinki consists of a range of different interpretations. Thus, we include works of golden age directors such as Valentin Vaala to recent internationally acclaimed work by Aki Kaurismäki. Our historical scope extends from Finland as a part of the Russian empire, to the networked information society of contemporary times. Ideologically, Helsinki acts as the source of nationalist pride and domestic ideological division, geopolitical friction and a space of cosmopolitanism. But for the people living in the city, newcomers or natives, it is also a home.

      Pietari Kääpä and Silja Laine, Editors

      IN DISCUSSING THE cinematic imagining of Helsinki on screen, one faces the ironically appropriate fact that one of the most well known feature films to include 'Helsinki' as part of its title does not actually feature Helsinki on screen. The title of the film - Mika Kaurismäki’s Berlinset Helsinki Napoli: All Night Long (1987) - tells us all we need to know. This is the internationally prevalent image of Helsinki as the northernmost European capital. It is a periphery, as different from the rest of Europe as the southern Naples is. The film’s exploration of West Berlin as a Cold War-era city of two zones evokes another crucial geo-imaginary frequently associated with Helsinki, that of a borderline between the East and the West, with Finns keen to emphasize the 'Westness' of Helsinki, as Kaurismäki arguably does in the film’s title.

      International perceptions of Helsinki often align with these geocultural coordinates - north, east - or they evoke a version of the city seen in the films of Aki Kaurismäki, a space of lonely, sad individuals in films such as Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö/Match Factory Girl (1990). Helsinki is not only a 'kaurismäkicity' but has also featured as the pinnacle of modernism in early documentary and fiction films. The city has been used as a way to support Finnish self-conceptions of cosmopolitanism (or 'worldliness'), displaying a range of design styles and architectural wonders. But in the Finnish imagination, one of its main functions has been to embody the divergence between the city and the countryside, a theme of lingering persistence in Finnish cinema.

      Migration from the rural areas to Helsinki became a concrete social problem as alienation and the changes in lifestyles were captured by the 'New Wave' films of the 1960s and the 1970s. Taking their cue from the rebellious aesthetic and thematic work of the nouvelle vague, the films of Risto Jarva, Mikko Niskanen, and others took a sociorealist approach to imagining the city. Some of the films explored the alienation of women in modern suburban life (Jaakko Pakkasvirta’s Vihreä leski/Green Widow [1968]). Others provided chronicles of the unpredictable economic circumstances of the internal immigrants (Risto Jarva’s

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