Why do we watch films?

Onerva Helne

The author is a playwright, dramaturg and one of the founders of the Karhupuisto Film Festival

It is impossible to answer the question – I could just as easily ask why there is art or dreams. However, I will try to focus for a moment on the experience of watching a film.

A film transports us to another landscape: to Paris, to a strange galaxy through a wormhole, to Berlin, Istanbul and the Kallio of the past decade. Like from a train window seat, a passenger watches the images passing before their eyes on the cinema screen. In the audience, they travel the same journey as the film for a while, and for a moment observe through a differently focused gaze.

Perhaps the passenger recognizes themself in films in which the characters are somewhere other than home. Just like anyone who has ever wandered around with an Interrail ticket, the passenger finds themself in films again, slightly lost at the train station of an unknown city, strolling through a park or along a river. The state of being in transit offers them the freedom of anonymity and transience.

Of all the city films, the traveler perhaps remembers best the Before trilogy, in the first part of which Jesse and Céline, who met each other by chance – or as fate dictated – on a train, travel through nighttime Vienna as if they were characters in each other’s dreams. The traveler listens to how the film’s main characters reflect on the nature of travel in their sprawling conversations. According to one of them, staring out the train window week after week can actually be quite wonderful. This gives rise to ideas that would not normally arise. For example, an idea for a series, each episode of which would follow a different person for one day in different cities, describing their ordinary lives. Another of the characters recalls a trip she made to Warsaw as a teenager. The city seemed gloomy and gray, there was nothing to buy, no advertisements. She had time to walk around, think, and write. As her brain rested, she felt calm and no longer felt the need to be anywhere else. After a couple of weeks, she noticed that she was getting new ideas.

However, all journeys come to an end. The train leaves the station at half past nine in the morning, or the flight at half past seven in the evening, and the journey is inevitably over. Before the inevitable end credits roll, the traveler encounters others, also passing through the cities, who have a little time before the prospect of returning home. Finally, when leaving the cinema, the traveler wakes up to their everyday reality and the responsibility for the choices they have made so far. Perhaps the journey has made them look at their own life from a distance.

After stepping out of the cinema, the visible light refracts familiar images onto the traveller's retinas: the church tower reflected in the balcony windows as the sun sets, the words ’Kirjasto Bibliotek’ in gold-tone calligraphy, a maple tree blooming in early summer in front of them, the drain cover at the corner of the bakery humming quietly under their feet, the birds spending the summer in Eläintarhanlahti, the poplars at the end of the Pitkänsilta bridge and the graffiti on the stone plinth of their house. The light shows them the homes of their friends from Miina Sillanpää Street to Linjat, Flemari and Torkkelinpuistikko all the way to Kinaporinkatu. As the landscape passes by, new ideas bubble up.

Illustrations: Taru Liikanen