I'm currently reading Alex Ross' incredible book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. On the plane ride home from spending the week in Helsinki, Finland as an invited guest of the 2009 DocPoint Documentary Film Festival, I was (serendipitously) reading his chapter on "The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius," the most famous composer Finland ever produced and a man who played both a symbolic and active role in the drive toward Finnish independence, which was finally achieved in 1917, less than a hundred years ago. In this chapter, Ross cites a 1993 essay of novelist Milan Kundera's in his collection Testaments Betrayed, where he anatomizes the more "peripheral" of the European cultures. In talking about his native Czechoslovakia, Kundera could also be speaking about Finland when he says, "The small nations form 'another Europe.' An observer can be fascinated by the often astonishing intensity of their cultural life. This is the advantage of smallness: the wealth in cultural events is on a 'human scale;' everyone can encompass that wealth." The country's government invests quite substantive sums of funding in its orchestras, opera houses, film programs and national arts schools. The annual Finnish expenditure on the arts is roughly two hundred times per capita what the US government spends on our own national "endowment" for the arts.
Like Sibelius, today's Finnish filmmakers and artists forge vital relationships with their native land while simultaneously creating and discovering their individual voices and expressing them in new forms. There is an imposing body of work that comes out of this small country (and the region, in general) that is integral to the overall oeuvre of nonfiction filmmaking, in some sense (and thus, my growing obsession with nascent film festivals in other tiny places, but more on that later).
There is a general feeling of disquiet and disconsolation, of something irrevocably lost that this culture yearns for, something that's vanished or, perhaps, never really existed. There is a sort of malaise couched in a bizarre sense of humor and their way with non-verbal, visually rich storytelling is completely captivating to this viewer from a brash, noisy, show-off culture that talks incessantly until we aren't saying much of anything of interest at all. The Finns also have this weird way of reflexively denigrating themselves while simultaneously expressing great pride. People would always look surprised when I complimented their city, their sensibility, their style, as if flattery were a bit unseemly, but pleasing nonetheless. And as for the time of year in which the festival is held, the darkest, coldest, longest season, well, it makes perfect sense when you realize that a festival of domestic and international cinema brings a true respite from almost constant night (this did, admittedly, take its toll after only one week, so I can't imagine months and months of having no sunshine). The cinemas were full of locals escaping into worlds upon worlds, a lot of them pretty dark, as well. But as was seen in the most popular films, there was much laughter and delight, especially when they got to laugh at themselves. The warm, cozy, pretty cinemas provided the perfect refuge for drifting into the luminous world of film.
The opening night ceremonies were the wackiest I've ever seen. They started early at 6:00 p.m. which was helpful for my jet lag. The Bio Rex theater complex was the main festival headquarters and the largest cinema where most premieres were held. To open the festivities, the 8-minute Now and Now directed by Pekka Uotila was screened, a beautiful collage using the oldest surviving film clips shot in Helsinki interspersed with new images shot by the cinematographer in the same locations, paying homage to both the moving image and the traditional movie camera. After welcoming words from Executive Director, Jari Matala, the opening speech was delivered by new Festival Director, Erkko Lyytinen, where he spoke about his excitement about what our filmmakers (he's one himself) can tell us about the world, and more importantly, with what motive. By inviting filmmaker, Nick Broomfield, to come and teach the Master Class and show a retrospective of his films (a DocPoint tradition), and calling this program "Tell Me the Truth," Lyytinen's objective is to invite audiences to question the "honesty" of both subject(s) and filmmaker in presenting their collaborative true stories.
Then came the wacky part: because the "Opening Ceremony was spiced by Rock the Pole," all the themes of the festival were presented by lithe, young women pole-dancing, interspersed with bouts of sitting on a couch and eating pizza and watching the telly. We went to Italy, India and back home to native Finland all via the pole dance. Impressive. And, um, quite new.
The opening night film was a world premiere called The Living Room of the Nation by Jukka Kärkkäinen which captures the lives of Finns in captivity--the four walls of their homes. They philosophize incessantly, inviting us into their interiors, both structural and emotional. According to the catalog's description, the film combines all the "traditional Finnish virtues: forced silence, enacted humility and artificial modesty." It's hilarious and very, very moving and by the audience's reaction, it touched deep reserves of how they see themselves as a people. An homage to Swedish filmmaker, Roy Andersson, the film, like Andersson's (fictional) Songs from the Second Floor, is a series of scenes portraying a sort of universal decay or social breakdown through the trials and tribulations of the central protagonists (all male). Kärkkäinen uses the same static camera, recording essentially one framed shot per scene, each scene quite long, very stylized and beautifully filmed. In their deadpan detachment, they become quite comical sketches of existential angst and searing loneliness. So lonely, in fact, that one is not quite sure if the director, himself, hasn't stepped away from the rolling camera once in a while and gone for a cup of coffee. But with only the camera's eye silently watching, his subjects allow themselves to give intensely intimate performances. The director actually has known these people for a long time and befriended them over the years he's been shooting; so, in fact, it is a collaborative endeavor and speaks deeper truths than strict vérité ever could. Like using animation to tell sensitive or unspeakable stories, this stylized way of storytelling can be just as deeply truthful, allowing revelations of how we are when we feel we're not being observed by another human being, safe behind the barricades of our most private spaces. I hope to screen this here in New York soon--just looking for a space.
More thoughts and impressions on more films in a bit. . . . Sorry, gotta sleep.
Comments