In recent years transnational issues have emerged as one of the key issues in film studies. Much of this discussion has focused on diasporic cinemas, concerning films made for expatriate audiences dispersed around the globe, as well as on other forms of producing films outside Hollywood specifically targeted for the global market. A relatively new branch of this line of exploration is the study of the transnational nature of small nation cinemas. These produce films in languages that are not widely spoken or understood round the globe and thus their main audiences tend to be restricted to their own countries or countries with which they share the same language. The size of that audience is a crucial factor in determining how self-sufficient and continuous the production possibly can be at any given phase of film history. It also means that maintaining a thriving film culture is correspondingly dependent on transnational factors.
Technology has for the most part been developed and standards of style and quality set at the major centres of the film industry, but interesting and important developments have also taken place at minor centres and even in the periphery. While there has always been considerable pressure to gain access to the latest technology and meet cutting-edge industrial standards, small nation cinemas have above all seen it as their mission to create distinctly national film cultures. At times this might have taken place through appropriating stylistic means developed in the major centres of the film industry; at times it has found its inspiration from trends emerging closer to the periphery. 1 The latter has sometimes entailed going against the grain of what has been identified as the global mainstream. For Finnish cinema, Sweden has often provided both models of style and models of operation in its attempt to create a national cinematic art and industry. The production and distribution structures that had already evolved during and immediately after the First World War made these pursuits quite arduous, leading to the creation of a studio system roughly on the lines of Hollywood, but adapted to the limitations of a small nation still at a fairly early stage of industrialization. The universal demise of studio systems towards the end of the 1950s eventually necessitated the development of systems of state subsidy to protect national film industries. The present study will focus on how the Finnish film business throughout its history, even while determined to express its national culture by offering a Finnish alternative to the international mainstream and trying to keep at least a fairly significant part of this important trade in Finnish hands, has in various interrelated ways always been tied both to global trends and to other national film cultures.
Films as Transnational Art
Until the coming of television, cinema was the most transnational of all arts. There were several innovators of the moving image, but cinema truly began in 1896 when the Lumière brothers started sending their projectionists-cum-cameramen to all corners of the globe, reaching Helsinki in June of that year. French producers, together with a number of other European entrepreneurs, remained major players in the world film market right up to the First World War. During the war the American film industry—which eventually was to be commonly referred to as Hollywood, even when talking about films that have not actually been produced there—was able to build an unprecedented financial and technical infrastructure, develop what came to be known as the classical Hollywood style and consolidate its already almost complete control of its large domestic market. Meanwhile, because of the war most of the briefly flourishing European film industries lost a significant part of their international markets and were thus not able to continue investing in production infrastructure in the way Hollywood studios were doing. As Gerben Bakker has argued, the main reason why Hollywood succeeded in gaining a major advantage after the war was that the European film industry was not able to compete effectively in the escalation of quality. 2 Hollywood continued consistently to develop the classical style, thus setting new standards for narratively tight and emotionally involving filmic narration through effective camerawork and editing. According to Bakker’s statistics, for example at the American Film Manufacturing Company, ‘the number of different shots per film increased from 14 in 1911 to over 400 by 1918, while the number of set-ups increased from 7 to 230, and number of inter-titles from 5 to 177’. 3 As this development went together with increased investment in production values, the production costs multiplied. 4 It also became increasingly evident that in order to make films exportable, a certain minimum expenditure had to be invested to enhance quality. 5
A key structural element that enabled this development was the economies of scale. The size of the US domestic market allowed for an economic stability that translated into a large output, with a great number of films being offered for foreign distributors and exhibitors more efficiently than what could be produced in those countries. 6 European film industries simply did not have the finances or the facilities to follow suit. This imbalance has structured the relationship between American and European film economies ever since: European companies are at a permanent disadvantage because of the smallness of their home markets and their negligible ability to penetrate into the American market. 7
Recent research has suggested that before the 1970s the dominance Hollywood achieved in terms of titles screened did not necessarily translate into correspondingly big overall box-office success. 8 This opened at least a small window of opportunity for European small nation film industries. Yet exhibitors could not afford to promote only domestic output. Ian Jarvie points out:
of film culture has given rise have not been merely financial. In some ways even more significantly, Hollywood cinema has had a dominant position in the sense that for better or worse, it has been able to catch people’s imagination and even define notions about what cinema really is. Gian Piero Brunetta has observed that in Italy Hollywood ‘was a reality with a radiance of its own, an almost pentecostal light with the spiritual potential to bring to life desires, dreams and hopes, and to help the average man or woman, the home-owner and the petit bourgeois, to imagine his or her own future’. 10 Many European cultural critics in the 1920s were more critical and saw Hollywood films as harbingers of Americanization and, as such, as a threat to European civilization. The historian and cultural critic Johan Huizinga grudgingly accepted film as an art form, but thought it could only widen people’s view of society through flattening of the social and cultural landscape. 11 Another Dutchman, the socialist intellectual L.J. Jordan, wrote about the struggle against ‘“Americanism”—against the senseless and mindless transplant of the insipid, childish mentality and the overflowing energy of a young, and newly-marketed culture onto our old, experienced and weary state of mind’. 12 Both cultural critics and filmmakers had good reason to worry. A memorandum of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) in 1928 stated that movies were ‘demonstrably the greatest single factor in the Americanization of the world and as such may be called the most important and significant of America’s exported products’. 13It is true that in some head-to-head comparisons indigenous films outgrossed Hollywood movies. It does not follow that, had foreign screens been filled with indigenous films, revenues would have held up … The sheer quantity of Hollywood product, its reliable delivery of ‘entertainment value’, its professional gloss, its deployment of the tried and true, meant to the foreign exhibitor that if American films were played, week in week out, healthy annual profits would result. The option of replacing all American movies with local films was nowhere realistic because the quantities did not exist, and making them would not have been financeable anyway. 9
Inasmuch as cinema was not equated with Hollywood and set against ‘real’ arts, there was a call for European cinema that would be expressive of the values for which Europe was seen as standing. Films were expected to participate in maintaining and even constructing cultural heritage, including notions about the way of life peculiar to the nation. As Anthony Smith puts it: ‘In the eyes of its devotees, the nation posses a unique power, pathos and epic grandeur, qualities which film perhaps even more than painting or sculpture, can vividly convey.’ 14 Thus, even in the small nations that had emerged as ancient European empires were shattered in the First World War, there were determined efforts to create and maintain national film production and to develop domestic knowhow and talent. Yet hardly ever were even the fairly big European national film industries able to succeed in this alone, and so they had to create international networks and incorporate global trends into their own film cultures.
The so-called Film Europe movement sought to develop ‘international co-productions, the use of international production teams and cast for otherwise nationally based productions and the exploitation of international settings, themes and storylines in such films’. Naturally, this also entailed ‘reciprocal distribution arrangements between renters in different nation-states, and other efforts to rationalise distribution on a pan-European basis, in order to secure long-term collective market share by establishing all Europe as their domestic market’. 15 The idea was that European film companies would create a European film market sufficiently large to rival that of the USA. This might have entailed overcoming notions about nations altogether. One of the leading figures of this movement, Erich Pommer, stated: ‘It is necessary to create “European films,” which will no longer be French, British, Italian, or German films; entirely “continental” films, expanding out into all Europe and amortising their enormous costs, can be produced easily.’ 16 However, European film culture was in fact far too diverse for these efforts to amount to a sufficiently concentrated effort. According to Bakker’s analysis:
Yet another reason for the failure was the difficulty of keeping talented and successful people working in Europe. Hollywood, just like other major players in the global film market, has always been eager to recruit talent and appropriate narratives, narrative formulas, styles and techniques whenever such people or developments have turned out to be successful. As Bakker puts it: ‘Artistic and technical talent … who initially developed in European markets, would at a certain point outgrow their markets and want to maximise the rent they could capture from their popularity or their talent, which often meant going to Hollywood.’ The Europeans did in turn recruit Hollywood luminaries, but ‘could only afford to buy away the stars that were already past their peak of popularity in the US’. 18 Will Hays, President of the MPPDA, saw this development as a benign process of ‘drawing into the American art industry the ta...The idea was that European companies should increase the size of their domestic market to be able to compete internationally, by way of mergers, joint ventures, co-productions and distribution deals. The ideal was that a film producer anywhere in Europe would have access to the whole European market. … Nevertheless, the ‘Film Europe’ movement failed, probably because it concerned mostly ad hoc co-productions and not mergers or a deliberate strategy. 17