On Socially Engaged Cinema
Ossi Nyman
A Helsinki-based writer and activist who considers Finland's labor policy a human rights violation. His favorite movie is Cool Hand Luke (1967).
In 2011, I was 33 years old and had been voluntarily unemployed for about ten years.
I didn't know anyone who had lived a life like mine. I hadn't even heard of people like me being discussed. I loved Aki Kaurismäki's films, but I didn't share the belief of Kaurismäki's characters in the redeeming power of work. Nor would Charles Chaplin, one of Kaurismäki's greatest inspirations and the patron saint of all work-avoiders, have shared it. The only people I felt any connection to were Charles Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski, brilliantly played by Mickey Rourke in Barbet Schroder's Barfly, and Clark Gable's Gay Langland in John Huston's The Misfits.
But unlike me, Chinaski was a charismatic brawler, and Langland
an even more charismatic worn-out cowboy. The only cultural figure who was past his youth, voluntarily unemployed, and unambitious was Uuno Turhapuro. Unemployment was a curse and a shame, and people tried to get rid of it by all means, both individually and nationally. At least officially. No one publicly admitted to being voluntarily unemployed or enjoying idleness. I was ashamed of myself, though at the same time I suspected I was right. Even a life like this could be valuable, at least it felt that way to me.
One evening, sitting in a movie theater, I saw a trailer that affirmed my faith in my lifestyle and its legitimacy. I saw Jussi Nikkilä, Eero Milonoff, and Ylermi Rajamaa sitting idly in front of a kiosk in Kallio, refusing an easy work gig and money offered to them. How delightfully insolent! I immediately recognized myself.
The trailer, of course, was promoting Ville Janker's "Pussikaljaelokuva" (Beer Bottle Film), which I later saw in its entirety at the same movie theater in Lahti.
The experience was profound. I still remember how it felt to get up from the seat after the movie. The shame I had lived with for the past 15 years had, at least for a moment, disappeared. I smiled triumphantly and looked around proudly, perhaps for the first time in my adult life. A movie has been made about me! I felt like shouting. Do you see now that my life also has value? Furthermore, Nikkilä's Marsalkka even had the exact same worn Puma sneakers as I did!
At the time, I didn't fully understand what had happened to me after watching "Pussikaljaelokuva." I only felt that breathing was a little easier after the movie than before.
The intellectual realization came about ten years later when I read Anu Silfverberg's work "Sinut on nähty" (You Have Been Seen). I understood that for me, a work-avoider and useless person, the same thing had happened with "Pussikaljaelokuva" that had increasingly begun to happen to ordinary, imperfect women in the 2000s. I had been seen for the first time with accepting and gentle eyes. So, it was possible to see me, as myself, as a lovable person after all, not just as a parasite, a rat, or a victim of failed
labor policy. It is no coincidence that "Pussikaljaelokuva" received the Ecumenical Jury Award at the Nordic Film Days festival, as the film looked at us, the ideologically or otherwise unemployed, through the eyes of Jesus.
However, art cannot be assigned the societal task of making people visible; this task belongs to society itself. Whether art is part of society depends on the perspective of the artist and the observer. For me, art is a counterforce to at least this kind of society, in which we have lived for the past government term and perhaps even the last two hundred years.
Filmmakers, however, among all artists, have the most effective means to do good with their art if they wish, including societal good. The accessibility of film is in a class of its own, compared to, for example, a novel. In Finland, however, the situation is complicated by the fact that film is dependent on state support. Every production support decision made by the film foundation is also a societal decision. If the public's gaze is to be directed away from the life of ordinary people, it is easily done by funding films about great men or pop stars of the past.
A healthy society, however, dares to look at itself critically, and it succeeds best by supporting art that has something to say about the prevailing conditions.
Everything I have learned about the film industry in recent years, while writing a film based on my debut novel (together with the aforementioned Ville Janker!), argues that a more serious problem than the lack of money plaguing the industry is a lack of courage among both creators and financiers. If the film foundation and Yle do not want to fund socially conscious films, creators will not dare to offer them such films either.
Playing it safe might earn five stars from a Helsingin Sanomat critic and secure funding for the next project, but immortal or even long-lasting art is not created that way.
Illustration: Taru Liikanen