EDITORIAL F
or this issue, we decided to make some changes in the country selection. We know that this breaks our original concept, but we felt it was a good idea to do this so we can make sure to have quality material from wherever our people are. Therefore we have made Poland our guest star. Read what our reporter on the spot has to tell about what it is like to live out there, surrounded by Poles. This is not to say that we are not still what we set out to be, a Nordic magazine. We still want to make quality reporting about the creations of the people from up there, in the North and in the dark.
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big part of this issue is also Sodankylä Film Festival, where Ville spent an entire week collecting material and feeling the change in the air. As the staff of Godartet is Finnish, the film festival is a perfect way to celebrate the wonderful Midsummer, a time that leaves every town and city in Finland empty as the people escape to their cabins to enjoy each other’s company, have a bit too much to drink and hope to not to be one of those who drowned. Because unfortunately that happens every time. But enough about that. It is almost July and hopefully it will be a warm and sunny one! Enjoy your summer the only way that makes sense: By sitting back and reading some culture, the Godartet way. Whatever that means.
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h and one more thing that we can never stress enough: If you want to have your creations presented on our pages, contact us either by messaging us on Facebook or emailing us. Our address is godartetmagazine@gmail.com. Never forget, we’re here for you! We are one of you! Well, enough advertising. Leave this page and move on to the next!
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JUNE EDITORIAL 2 COLUMN 4 AMBIENT TEMPERATURE 6 INTRODUCTION TO POLAND 7 COLUMN 9 THE CHANGING TIDES OF THE NORTH 10 ESSAY 19 BATHROOM STALL WALL 22 LAST PAGE 23
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COLUMN Ville Koski
WHAT TO WATCH AND WHERE VILLE KOSKI
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ome weeks ago I got the pleasure of stumbling onto the premiere of the season 5 of Game of Thrones (worry not, no spoilers in this column!) at the Bio Rex in Helsinki. Bio Rex is one of the biggest silver-screens in Finland and Game of Thrones is a massively visual and brilliant TV show, so I figured the experience would be amazing. And visually it was, the brilliance of the show’s effects, detailed costumes and set design was a marvel to see on a big screen and watching Natalie Dormer on a big screen was the highpoint of my life (yes, my life is quite sad, why do you ask?). However, despite all the visual greatness of the big-screen Game of Thrones, I still felt something missing with the feeling of it all. When a few days after the event the same episode came to TV and I watched it again, it amazingly seemed better that way, which made me think about the differences of experiencing television and movies.
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ven though television and cinema share pretty much all the qualities in both storytelling mechanics and technological methods of presenting, the personal viewing experience of both is massively different. With TV-shows, you follow the characters of a TV-drama for weeks, identifying with them and caring for them from the comfort of your own sofa and maybe with friends and family along with you. But in cinema, you’re in the midst of a large crowd, in a totally dark space seeing the “collective dream” alone with yourself. Even though you may go to movies with friends or family, you can’t comment or talk to them during the movie (unless you’re an asshole) and therefore sit there by yourself. In this way, television as a medium is more home-y and easier than film that forces you into its world. TV’s immersion is joining its world into yours, almost as if it were part of the family. This (and Natalie Dormer) I believe is the reason I felt a bit weird watching GoT on a silver-screen; I couldn’t go “oh shit!” “oh, no!” or “that bastard!” while watching, but had to keep my two-cent thoughts to myself. It was as if a family member was acting in a play, you recognize them from the character, but can’t communicate with them.
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his effect can also be seen the other way around, while watching movies at the comfort of your home. Unless you’re a true enthusiast who shuts down all the lights in the house and shuts the phones and all, the cinematic experience never reaches the level of an actual movie theater. The charm of a collective dream dies as you’re watching it alone or with friends/family and as the
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events of the movie happen in your living room, they lose the magic of illusion as the fictional events touch the surface of reality. The fuel of that illusion is losing yourself to the story you are watching, and at home you can never truly achieve that, as you are constantly aware of where you are. Naturally, there are many things that can break the immersion in the cinema as well, such as cellphones or people crunching their candy-wrappers, but the key element of place doesn’t hold the value of reality. In a way, cinema is a place where you know you go to forget yourself and let the immersion flow through you and fill you. With this logic, while at home you subconsciously know you’re at home and therefore the immersion stays at its most shallow stage. Knowing this, the makers of television shows create their content for this surrounding, and it doesn’t feel less interesting like movies which are made originally for the silver-screen.
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n the end, this subject could be discussed and analyzed for pages on end, and this little column is just an intellectual flesh-wound. Still, I think the question of immersion and how the place of viewing affects is interesting and worth considering when talking about the comparison between television and movies.
Ville is the editor-in-chief of Godartet and wonders how video-games might look on a movie theatre.
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AMBIENT TEMPERATURE Piritta Pynnönen
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HIS spring I visited two Nordic art museums: first one is a still ongoing exhibition and the second one already ended. Two very different artists working in New York. Another one died young and the other one became famous in her later years. But they did meet and there’s a photo to proof that encounter. That photo is shown in Kiasma until the 13th of September.
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989) I Wan’t to see something I’ve never seen before. 13.3. – 13.9.2015
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hursday evening 12th of March was the opening nite for Kiasma.Kiasma was under renovation for a year. The first exhibition that followed was Robert Mapplethorpe’s impressive body of work including more than 250 works organized under nine different themes. The powerful imagery and choice of subjects in Mapplethorpe’s photographs bring to life the spirit of New York and the intensity of the seventies.
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obert Mapplethorpe died at the age of 42. His career as an artist lasted less than twenty years. In that time he made a lasting impact to contemporary art.
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he exhibition is organized under nine themes: BODY SCULPTURE, BODY AND GEOMETRY, STILL LIFES AND BODY DETAILS, CHAPEL & COLOUR BRACKET, MAPPLETHORPE AND WOMEN, PORTRAITS, EROS, POLAROIDS, STILL MOVING: a short film with Patti Smith.
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applethorpe photographed people who he met, loved and fucked. In his works the elements of pain, religion, sex, beauty, love and briefness of life is strongly connected with the statement of freedom to live your life as you please.
Moderna museet, Stockholm Louise Bourgeois (1911 – 2010) I Have Been to Hell and Back 14.2. – 17.5.2015
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ouise Bourgeois had a retrospective exhibition in New York as the first female artist in the history of MoMa. The year was 1982 and at the time she was 71 years old. That particular exhibition had enormous effect on the future artists to follow. Thirty-three years later she still manages to amaze. This time the venue is Moderna museet in the capital of Sweden, Stockholm.
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Have Been to Hell and Back was a cross-section of a lifetime of artistic work. These 103 works were chosen from different phases of Bourgeois’s career. The nine exhibition rooms were arranged thematically, not chronically. This approach to her work sorts out the things that she studied in her art, returning into them again and again. The themes were: Runaway girl, Loneliness, Trauma, Fragility, Nature Studies, Eternal movement, Relationships, Taking and giving, Balance.
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visited Moderna Museet in Stockholm on 17th of May. It was the last day of the exhibition. The first thing that I saw in front of the museum entrance was Maman, a nine metres tall slim legged spider. Walking inside the exhibition was interesting: the walls that separated the rooms are only knee-high. This architectural solution allowed you to see into the next room. That way you could get a taste of what is coming without leaving the room. Bourgeois’s drawings, paintings, textile and metallic sculptures and installations are organic and expressive.
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umanity, maternity, love, sex, death and pain, it’s all there, but in a way that is warm and comforting.
INTRODUCTION TO POLAND Juha Heikkinen
POLAND, NOT JUST A DUMP! JUHA HEIKKINEN
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hat is the culture of Poland? Is it only whatever was left behind when the Soviet Union collapsed? The sad truth is that in my mind, Poland was not a place you really wanted to visit that badly. Of course Auschwitz was a place I wanted to see, but I could not think of any other reason to go. So my idea of Polish culture was death. Having lived here for a little over 6 months, what can I say about Poland and Krakow? Well, I have to admit, this is a town for expats and tourists so one could argue that even though the beautiful architecture of the old town in the center of the city makes it clear that you are not in your former hometown Helsinki, the multitude of restaurants of all cultures and tastes makes it quite clear that you have to dig a bit deeper to get to know what makes these people Polish.
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oving here, I had every intention to learn the language and the history of this country. A word about the language: I am Finnish, so I should have no right to complain about this, but Polish is hard! And weird! And not easy! But hard! My language learning has unfortunately been limited to a curse word, a few numbers, the word for beer, greetings and thank you. And that pretty much covers it. And what about history? It goes back hundreds of years and there have been kings and conquerors. I tried to learn all about them by reading a book called A History of Poland for Everyone, which has a nice For Dummies feel to it. To my embarrassment, I did not finish the book, as I just could not get a hold of this huge list of people and events. This overflow of old may be what has also happened to my appreciation of the architecture in Krakow. I enjoy it, I love walking on its old streets, enjoying the vibe, but were someone to ask about a particular building, I could not answer any better than ”some old building”.
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his is a party town, there is no doubt about that. The booze is cheap and there is a lot of it on offer. That does not mean that drinking is the only thing to do here. From the old Polish city center to the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, there is a lot of history here and in between that history the streets are filled with cheap restaurants and cafes with brilliant things on offer. A fine example is Massolit Books, a book shop/cafe just down the street from our place that has an impressive selection of books from around the world. When we visited with my girlfriend, we asked for translated Polish literature and we certainly found it. We were able to escape with a couple recommendations: The Elephant, a collection of brilliantly absurd tales by Slawomir Mrozek and Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, short stories from Bruno Schulz, a writer who died suddenly before his time. Had he not died when he died, he could have been a force in western literature unlike any other. And I had never even heard of him.
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aving read The Elephant, I can say it is a refreshing medley of little stories, no more than a few pages in length, which make fun of the totalitarian way of life, of the rules and attitudes that defined everyday life. The stories have no unifying theme per se, other than the fact that the reader doesn’ t really have any chance of predicting what is going to happen, simply because of the fact that the stories break our sense of logic. Maybe the stories aren’t illogical, maybe it is the world we live in that is illogical and the 7
stories only highlight this fact by going a bit too far. Or maybe Polish people just have a logic of their own.
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s for The Street of Crocodiles, I have to admit I have yet to finish the book because I just find the impressively complex language a bit too wordy. Because of this, I struggle to keep up with what the writer wanted to say, sort of lost in the language. Of course the language should not be reduced to be a mere vessel of meaning and the poetry of the language is important on its own. However, I did not feel it served following the story very well. Or maybe I’m just lazy or dumb. Two very possible options.
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eading essays is always a gamble, as you cannot be entirely sure if the writer will write about anything worthwhile, especially if the collection is put together by collecting the writing together from throughout the years. The topics may vary dramatically, as was the case with a collection of essays from a writer called Jerzy Kosinski. As I read through the essays, I became familiar with a man who had written controversial novels that drew inspiration from his childhood. He was sent away from his family in order to avoid Nazi persecution. The image I got from the essays is that his work was largely based around this topic of oppression. This is of course common in cases where totalitarianism has had a profound effect on the life of the author. Kozinski also seemed to be a friend of sports, which could be seen in his portrayals of horse polo and skiing. These kinds of essays sort of left me confused, as they felt a bit pointless. Essays should stir up some ideas, not just explain a mundane interest. Here I have to admit that his essays surely doesn’t live up to my own standards. Is it an essay then, hmm...
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s far as art goes, I have managed to scratch at the surface of Poland’s contemporary art. While visiting the National Museum in Krakow to check out their permanent display for the affordable price of one zloty (approx. 25 cents), I got to see some really good artwork and photography. One photo-piece that consisted of two pictures stuck to my head. It was a nude picture of a very skinny woman, presumably going through chemotherapy. In the first picture (or at least this is the order I gave the photos), she was lying on the doctor’s table, in a sterile white surrounding, with a nurse sort of looking at her. In the second picture, she was lying the same way but this time she had male servants surrounding her and the entire scene was full of color and life. She was a sensual figure, something that was stripped from her in the first picture. I have to admit that I cannot recall any other pieces that stuck with me, but the other exhibitions were a collection of Polish military equipment from the middle ages to the first world war. I have to admit, I enjoyed looking at the medieval uniforms and weapons, thinking all the time, ”I saw that in Skyrim”. The last exhibition was one of those pots and pans kind of things, meaning I half ran through the entire section.
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o there you have it, some bits and pieces of my glimpses into the Polish heart. They are a rugged bunch, with little to none customer service skills or interest. They’re national pass-time is vodka and they occasionally drink beer as well. They eat meat and potatoes and seem to be a sports-loving bunch. In a way they are just like us Finns, or anybody else for that matter. Whatever your attitudes toward this hidden gem, if you haven’t visited, you should definitely give this place a chance. You’ll be pleasantly surprised, just like I was.
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nd that concludes this advertisement for the Poland’s national board of tourism. I do hope I see some of those tourist zlotys I help bring to the country.
This article was supposed to have pictures, but due to technical difficulties and a hectic schedule caused by a smaller move, the readers will be able to enjoy this article as it was intended by the Soviets, without Technicolor. 8
COLUMN
Fanny Grazzo
We at Godartet are effectively losing all hope and our will to live because of this monster’s writings. If you can hear us, send help!
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i ho hello lo lo! None other than the one and only one! What a drag this month has been, rain is such a pain, it’s only properly warm inside my pants, oh naughty me! I simply cannot understand why this editor guy is checking what I’m reading oh really. One should be able to enjoy freedom in his creating. Where would we be if Cervantes would have been constantly followed and censored while he was writing Decamerone? Nowhere, I tell you!! And if he would have created nothing, then perhaps none of us would have created nothing and at the end of the day we would be in the most horrendous situation where these two nerds would not have created this marvellous magazine and my words would not be read and enjoyed. Oh, my nerves cannot really take even the thought…
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peaking of mandarins, or was I speaking about mandarins, yes yes I must have, I do not really see the point in china, the thing you make vases and things with, not the country. The country I do adore, with all the people and stuff. I am very cultured you see, I truly am. It is raining outside now and that really makes me feel blue. Like a blueberry hoohoohoo!! Why did I say that, I just repeat the same thing over and over again, random to the next, one day to the next… Do you like me, dear readers? Please say you do? You must! Please!
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have to find a way or at least a road or a boat. Yes, a boat will do… I do love the open sea. I was a seaman for quite some time. I travelled from one port to the next without a care in the world or a penny to my name. That I should do again. We must be free like birds and planes and crocodiles who eat animals and are dangerous like that one guy in the film. What was his name… The film was bad, maybe you know it?
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don’t feel the love from these marvellous chaps anymore like I used to. It’s like their not there and if they are, they aren’t listening. Please boys, hear me out, I need you! And you need each other! This is not a cry for help, this is a cry for love.
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must go now as I am not feeling very good. In fact I feel quite poorly. Maybe I am ill. I should go to the doctor and see what ails me, oh maybe they’ll know and I will be my perky self in no time hooray! Just you wait, boys and girls! Fanny will be back!
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THE CHANGING NOR
GODARTET MAGAZINE’S EXPERIENCE AT T VILLE KOSKI
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t is a combination of pure madness. A small village in the middle of nowhere, a sun that never sets, a massive circus tent and a brilliant cavalcade of movies playing 24 hours for 4 days. Add all these with the greatest minds of cinema and a few reindeer, you have the concept of the Midnight Sun Film Festival pretty well scripted. However, it is also an experience you just cannot understand if you don’t experience it yourself, so though this writing tries to give you some grasp of the happening, it is doomed from the beginning to be just a dry witness testimony of the magic that creates the Midnight Sun Film Festival. The festival was kind enough to accredit our little magazine this year to participate as press in the festival, which meant we got a cool pass hanging on our neck and all the movies for free. This also wasn’t our first time at the Midnight Sun Film Festival, Ville had been there twice before this year, which gave him some perspective to this year’s festival and helped him get through the whole limbo in one piece - even though he didn’t even try to break his record of 24 movies within 4 days. The summer of 2015 marked the 30th festival at Sodankylä and managed to break all its previous records in visitors by having over 30 000 movie-goers at the festival. However, despite all this we did notice some major shifts in the mood, and not all of them were good.
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G TIDES OF THE RTH
THE 30TH MIDNIGHT SUN FILM FESTIVAL.
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HE USED TO BE A BIG SHOT
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he first and foremost thing that struck us was the absence of the late, greater than life Peter von Bagh, who passed away last autumn and who was one of the original primus motors of the festival and whose presence and mind floated all around the festival. This year the festival started with a matinee in his honour at the cinema Lapinsuu, where some bits and pieces of von Bagh’s movies were screened and a discussion on his legacy and persona. The event had the unescapable feeling of requiem, as von Bagh’s colleagues and the festival’s leader shared their memories and thoughts of the man at the very stage von Bagh himself had presented films and interviewed filmmakers for 29 years. At the matinee, a sharp-eyed audience could also see von Bagh’s close friend and co-creator of the Midnight Sun Film Festival, Aki Kaurismäki visibly burdened with grief. With a great picture of von Bagh in the logo of this year’s festival shining a grin upon us, I couldn’t
help but to wonder how this brilliant legacy of his would continue and how his absence would affect the following few days of movie madness. Naturally, the most visible loss for a festival-goer were in the morning discussions. These were traditional morning events where von Bagh sat down with the festival guests and just discussed movies, moviemaking, life and art in general in front of the crowd for one or two hours. The beauty of these was that they weren’t exactly interviews (as one might visualise them) but actual discussion subtly lead by von Bagh into any direction he felt was right but that had brilliant spontaneous characteristics of a true discussion. This year, we saw the discussions with Nils Malmros, Miguel Gomez, Whit Stillman, Mike Leigh and Christian Petzold, who all were cool in their own way, but the overall quality of the discussion varied a lot and the blame for this was entirely on the leaders of the discussions. Legendary German film critic and Sodankylä-veteran Olof Möller was superb and had enough wit and charisma to handle the situation
reasons for their success is the programming. In film clubs and smaller film theaters, the heart and soul is in the programmes they have. The programme sets the theme and feel of the upcoming series and the content has to both follow and analyze the theme of the programme well and possibly even challenge it to renew the boundaries of a certain theme or find new perspectives in the films. In the Midnight Sun Film Festival, there has always been an interesting and surprising series and so was this year.
well, but the rest of the discussion-leaders turned the discussions into interviews. This of course isn’t absolutely a bad thing, as the guests are usually so interesting that they could talk about gardening and make it interesting, but it is a small piece of charm lost with the relaxed discussions that Midnight Sun used to have. One thing that goes over our heads is why there were multiple discussion-leaders instead of one who would do all of them (we’re looking at Olof, by the way), but there are many other things that left went over our heads as well. Like bees. Anyhow, as the morning discussion desperately missed Peter von Bagh’s charm, we could not help but to notice how the scenery did as well. In this we of course are biased, because we have been at the festival before and got used to seeing the man walking around the village, chatting with people and generally hanging around, with his strange aura of wisdom, but in our eyes, that lacking made the small village of Sodankylä even smaller. Also, like a cruel but fitting act of symbolism, the classic grill von Bagh frequently ate in (Godartet’s editor often lined after him for a late-nigh snack there) was gone as well. Times, oh how they are a-changing! IT’S THE STUFF THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF
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f course, Midnight Sun Film Festival has always been about the movies and the basic rule of thumb has always been that no matter what you walk in to watch, it’s always a good film. The festival screens films almost 24 hours a day (there’s maybe a two-three hour break somewhere between 06 and 09 am) and filling those hours with quality movies is a massive challenge that the Midnight Sun Film Festival has always managed to rise up to. One of the
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fter we took our first look of the programme, we at Godartet felt scared; there was maybe one or two films (not counting the Mike Leigh -ones) or directors that we knew and nothing else that rang any bell. However, we knew this effect is more a possibility and less a threat, and after buying the festival catalogue with short presentations of all the movies, we started to get the idea of how this year was about to be for us. Naturally all the guest film-makers had
their series with their films, as well as a really cool series of some of the best films by Peter von Bagh, including his masterful documentaries on legendary Finnish cultural movers like Tapio Rautavaara and Reino Helismaa, as well as his only full length fiction, Kreivi, which at least is an interesting historical anecdote with absolutely amazing theme music. Another beautiful series was the 70 mm series at the big tent. Shown in a massive silver screen at the big tent, they screened such visual masterpieces as the 2001: Space Odyssey and Dersu Uzala in their greatest, 70 mm form. However, Godartet’s absolute favourite was the Masterclass by Olaf Möller, which consisted
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of Slovakian movies mainly from the Czechoslovakian era. This series itself underlined both the value and importance of well-curated film festivals, as all the films were hard to even know about, extremely difficult to see even on DVD and practically impossible to see on a silver-screen outside of festivals and film archives’ theatres. We unfortunately didn’t have the time to see them all, but the ones we did, alongside with Möller’s great presentations to the films, gave thrilling and interesting viewpoints to the Slovakian mind-set and every-day life. Our favourite film of the festival was also among this series; Hanak’s Pictures of the Old World that consisted only of small, brief followings of old country-people’s lives with some guiding interviewing. It was an extraordinarily beautiful documentation of the change that happens everywhere and all the time, and proved that if people just manage to keep their spirit up, life can never get to them. Even if you’d have to manage a full farm alone without legs for the most of your life.
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ot all films were good, though. However, with this many films in screening, this is naturally inevitable, but it is extremely interesting to note how the bad films were always found within two categories; Finnish films and new films, and especially new Finnish films. We didn’t see films such as Ollaan Vapaita (directly translated “Let’s be free” or Päin Seinää (“Against the wall” but we talked to some people who did see them and nobody had anything
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good to say about them. Both were new Finnish comedies about 30-something people struggling to find their ways in life, which is a story told in modern Finnish cinema so many times that we at Godartet can’t even count so far. Another new Finnish film was Henkesi edestä (could be traslated “For your dear life”), that apparently wasn’t exactly horrible, but underlined the morale so much that even the bees flying over us would understand it. It is truly depressing to see how the worst films in the otherwise great festival are modern Finnish films, but the current can’t change if we don’t mention it and talk about it. Finnish movie culture is in a crisis, we shouldn’t and we can’t just put all our cards on Kaurismäki brothers in terms of quality and then produce crap with the rest of the filmmakers. The worst film we saw the festival was Under the Skin, which starred and storywise consisted mostly of naked Scarlett Johansson. It also proved that we are becoming adults as we disliked the film for lacking a coherent story and interesting characters, instead of loving it just for showing us a nude Scarlett Johansson. I LOOK AT PEOPLE AND SEE NOTHING WORTH LIKING
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his year the Midnight Sun Film festival broke all of its previous records in terms of visitors by having over 30,000 film-goers. One might think this only a good thing; more people means more money and more money means more possibilities in im-
certain screenings that get sold-out every time, such as the silent films with actual orchestras or the karaoke-screenings, but if most of the programme is sold out at the halfway point of the festival, those coming in after that are going to be disgruntled. This year we were there as press, and understand that we were the leeches tolerated only because they have to, and therefore understand that many doors were sold out before us and live with it, but we have to feel for the volunteers who works long hours in ticket-sales, guarding the venues or overseeing that people behave in the theaters and who after a shift can’t get their free tickets to anything because all is gone. That may just pose a threat for the festival’s interest in the eyes of those brilliant, absolutely praiseworthy youngsters who run festivals like these as volunteers. At this point we also wish to give a big hand to these people, we only met super-great people working as volunteers; everyone was friendly, fun and professional, no matter the spot they worked in.
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proving. Of course, this is true in a way (just look at Godartet; we have no readers, no money and absolutely no way of digging ourselves out of this mess), but it also poses some threats of which we already saw some signs of this year. First one is of course the sheer amount of people; Sodankylä is a village of about or less than 10,000 people, so its possibilities in housing three times the visitors are limited. And so are the venues of the festival, even though they had a new, bigger tent that had an impressive 1,500 seats and three other, smaller venues, a huge amount of screenings were sold out. Once again, this is good financially, but it sure is sad to hear from someone who has travelled 1,000 kilometres to specially see some films to complain how they were already sold out in the morning. Now, everyone who has gone to the festival before knows that there are
nother issue that comes with big crowds is the side-effects. Usually the Midnight Sun Film festival has always been only about movies and the audience has consisted of these people; film-nuts coming to see movies they never see anywhere else. This year, however, we saw a lot of people who really didn’t seem to fit in. Many of those who seemed only to come for the “festival experience” of drinking and partying. The festival had set up a new pop-up bar to accompany the usual beer tent, which is fine by me, but in the end it’s only an activity unrelated to movies. No, we at Godartet don’t judge drinking or spit in glasses and took a pint at Sodankylä between movies as well as anyone else, but if the festival is changing its focus from films to everyday-drinking festival, we feel it is a bad turn. A horrible indication of this already happening was a strange tent sauna accompanied by a hot-tub that was brought near the festival area by YLE (The Finnish Broadcasting Company). They also had a DJ playing and talking and all this was open for partying literally all through the night. When we at Godartet went to see the venue at about 4 p.m. in the afternoon, there were naked people urinating around the grass, clearly too wasted to understand what they were doing and where and when we checked the place out the next morning, the beach was filled with litter and passed-out people and we heard 1 5
that the police had visited there at least a couple of times, taking people into custody for substance use. It is important to understand that this event had nothing to do with the official Midnight Sun Film Festival and was YLE’s stand, but it was a prime example of an utterly unrelated sideshow that appears when the masses take over any festival. Like one guy there said; “This festival is the best, all these different artsy people and everyone completely wasted”.
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ortunately, the things just mentioned are all outside the film theatres and tents, so in the end they won’t disturb one’s experience with film in any way. Unfortunately, some parts of that carefree attitude has lured its way into the screenings in a horrible manner. I don’t mind when people snap open their beers during the movie, but hate the sound of candy-wrappers and chipbags that crunch all through the movie. The latter wasn’t too much present in Sodankylä, but depressingly every film we got to see we did see at least three bleak lights of cellphones in the corners of our eyes as people checked the time, Facebook, messages and email during movies. Another annoyance was people talking, commenting on movies to their friends and at one particular film, someone decided to stomp their feet along with the movie’s bass soundtrack much louder than the film’s score. All of this breaks the immersion from those who are trying to watch the film, so personally I find it hard to understand both the rudeness of these people and more so their inability to concentrate on the film even for the about two hours it takes. But as bastardous as these actions are, they are only affected by other audience members. It was a sad, shameful moment at the screening of Luis Bunuel’s Nazarin, which was a part of the Masterclass -series and was presented by Miguel Marias, when Marias was literally cut short in
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his presentation by audience members who started applauding him out in mid-sentence. Visibly confused, he didn’t even end the sentence but left the theater, because the audience apparently felt they knew more than a man who has dedicated his life to cinema and has worked as the manager of Spanish Film Archives and Spanish Film Institute and had arrived to Sodankylä only to present this one film for the audience. But hey, listening is hard… I guess. LOVE DOESN’T DIE, IT ONLY LEAVES US. IT’S US WHO DIE.
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o, in the end this article turned out to be something completely different that we expected when we set out north, just as the festival turned out different than we remembered. And it wasn’t our memory that failed us, it was the change in tides that betrayed us. The final straw for us hit the last day, at the screening of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Bear when in the middle of the movie’s greatest scenes, some piece of shit for a human being started taking photographs of the film. With the flash on. After the third picture I kindly (but firmly) asked them to stop, but my words were lost in wind as the audience was treated to 3 more flashes. And to top it all of, when the film ended some other lady came to me and complained how I shouldn’t have commented on someone’s photographing the film as it didn’t bother her at all. That was the moment we at Godartet realised that the Midnight Sun Film Festival was over for us and left with the next bus south. However, we can’t blame the festival for people misbehaving, because they can’t help that. From the festival’s side, everything was as close to perfection as possible, at least from our point of view. It’s the people and the attitude that is changing. And yes, I’m the first to admit that I am purist and an old prude, who wants to watch movies without being interrupted by talking,
flashing mobiles, cameras or anything else - unless the film calls for it like the brilliant screening of a 1970s porno at 3 am at the festival where people shouted and moaned along with the actors - but with films like Truffaut’s Wild Child, the situation needs the silence it deserves. And no, people like me don’t have to go to movies if we can’t stand these actions in the theatre, but I still find it sad to see how an amazing festival that was created by the greatest minds of Finnish cinema is turning into a festival like any other rock-fest, where you go for one band but stay for the party. Hopefully I am wrong and just had a string of bad luck, but if this is the way to go, film nuts like us gracefully still have festivals like Love and Anarchy and Night Visions to go for. This year we wanted the truth, but couldn’t handle it. The subheadings are lines from The Roaring Twenties, The Maltese Falcon, There Will Be Blood and Shadows in Paradise. For more of our photos from festival, head to godartet.com, for more on Peter von Bagh and his works, check out Juha’s brilliant essay on page 19. A day-to-day travelogue of the festival will be published monthly in Godartet Magazine starting July!
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18
ESSAY
Juha Heikkinen CONSIDERATIONS ON PETER VON BAGH JUHA HEIKKINEN
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renaissance man: Film critic, historian, film director, editor, writer, you name it. The phrase that is often too easily used is actually apt when describing the Helsinki-born Peter von Bagh who died in 2014 and whose name is something of a household name in Finland. Von Bagh worked as the head of the Finnish Film Archive, was the editor-in-chief of Filmihullu (film nut) magazine and co-founder and director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival. His achievements are not limited to Finland, as he was also the artistic director of the film festival Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna.
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hysical works by him include about 40 non-fiction books, which handle mostly films. He also made around 60 films himself. The best praise can only come from the people who knew him and worked with him and his work. Here are some examples of what people had to say about Peter von Bagh in a panel discussion led by Timo Malmi (TM), the artistic director of the Sodankylä Film Festival. The panelists were film researcher and colleague of von Bagh’s, Sakari Toiviainen (ST) as well a Jouko Aaltonen (JA), a film director himself and also a producer of von Bagh’s films. But first, an important comment from Aki Kaurismäki: AKI KAURISMÄKI: (shows up in the audience). Why isn’t Peter’s Sininen laulu mandatory learning material in the schools? The teachers could just press play and go for a smoke. (Returns to the audience to look sad).
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his comment is a clear testament to how Peter von Bagh was perceived by the film-making community. In Finland, he is widely known as Peter von Bagh, the film critic and knower of everything film. JA: Even in the cinema Peter’s production was really big when you look at the content. Reoccurring themes, culture, art, the collective experience of history could be seen everywhere with him. The way he wrote, filmed, talked, associated, created. ST: He had contacts around the world. Had he worked in England or France, he would have surely been forced to stay in his own language region, but working from Finland, he was able/was forced to go out into the world. Above all imperialist arroganse. Incredible work ethic. TM: He actually left over 10 000 pages of unfinished material, including portraials of Orson 1 9
Welles and John Ford. Towards the end, whenever he realized he wouldn’t be able to finish a project, he took on a new one. TM: Once I was joking about making a short documentary film about Peter’s legendary office. A couple of weeks later he had the synopsis ready. He was very quick to get into ideas. Scott of the Antarctic was the first film he saw, his childhood must have affected his productivity later in life, the same as with Fassbinder. Peter’s mother died young, his father was distant. He did not like Oulu and he had a difficult childhood. ST: A motherless childhood affected by a mental institution, what do you get? Productivity compensating for a lack of childhood? JA: Even as a child, cinema was ”a tool for longing and compensation”. ST: In little villages cinema was the only hobby with some value. In the 60’s the best films in the world came even into the smallest villages (compare to other culture). The significance of film clubs is enormous as they provide a lifeline and a window into the world. Nowadays the situation should be better but is it really? Film used to be a unique experience. TM: Peter became a national institution but in the beginning he was very political. ST: He was in the front of the radical movement in the 60s but was different from the mainstream. At a time when Stalinism was strong, he protested by reading Trotski. Became patriotic through reading history. JA: He was a leftist behind his public image and in a way he did return to his roots. ST: To a degree his views did become softer towards the end and he was competing against death. JA: He was a stark defender of film. Personally I do not agree with him, as customs and cultures change. Even though I do not agree with him completely, I respect his principles. ST: I am old school myself and I am nostalgic about film. A digitized version is just a glozzy copy of the original. TM: This is why it is our principle here in Sodankylä to view the films as by the medium they were filmed with. As for Peter von Bagh’s significance, this is what the panelists had to say: ST: It’s too early to say about Peter’s significance and the obligations he left behind. There will never again be a man as large and important as Peter. JA: His legacy was that he started things like the Sodankylä Film Festival and he was also an educator of the public. Studying him will surely prove interesting for the future generations of researchers. 2 0
Here are also a few words by Gianluca Farinelli, the director of the Bologna film archive as he introduced the film The Machine That Kills Bad People: “It is difficult not to cry because everything here reminds me of Peter.” “In the Bologna festival they are preparing a program that is a fictitious dialogue with Peter” “His love of the cinema was based on his love of Finland, its remote location and the film country that emerged from those conditions. The rest of us know Finland through Peter’s writing and Kaurismäki, as a country of the cinema”. “When a person dies, an entire world disappears. With the loss of Peter we lost an entire film catalogue.” “His body of work is a miracle as it is so large. He had the gentleness and lightness of a child but he did everything as an artist”. “Ingenious ability to synthesize” “Like Peter said: ”Nokias come and go, mental institutions remain’”.
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e hope this collection of thoughts by people who knew him helped you understand the man who was an important part of Finnish film history. Like the panelists said, there will never again be a man as large as him. And perhaps it is good, at least for now. It will surely take some time to fully understand all that Peter von Bagh was, so we will have some catching up to do before we are ready to welcome another giant. I know I do. It’s interesting to think what makes a person as productive as he was. Does your childhood affect you in such a way, that it may drive you to create something new with such a strong drive? I cannot say if there is research done about the issue, but all I can say is that it is a comforting thought that being exposed to enough ugliness helps or even makes one make the world so much more beautiful. What ugliness Peter von Bagh saw in his world, helped us others see the beauty in ours. And for that we are all in his debt.
When it comes to movies, Juha is but a humble little quack compared to Peter von Bagh. Hopefully, if he is still somewhere, he will look at Juha’s effort with a kind smile on his face. 2 1
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ONE MORE THING, JUST FOR YOU, OUR DEAR
NORWEGIAN/SWEDISH/FINNISH/ESTONIAN/POLISH READER!
ARE YOU AN ARTIST, OR DO YOU KNOW ANY ARTISTS OR THOUGHTFUL PEOPLE IN SOME OTHER FIELDS? YES? WOW, THAT IS SO COOL! IF YOU OR YOUR FRIENDS WISH TO SEE THEIR NAMES IN THIS MAGAZINE, THAT CAN EASILY BE ARRANGED! HERE’S WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR: WRITERS!
ARTISTS!
Essays, short stories, poems. You name it, we’ll take it! If you have anything in your drawer just waiting to see the light of day, send it to us and we might just publish it. We’re not telling you how to write your stuff, but in essays we’re looking for something that’s related to Nordic arts or culture. Poems and short stories are of course a free-roam, but local point of view is preferred. We don’t have any word or character limitations like those silly professionals, but we hope that you remain in a maximum of 15 A4 pages with some basic size 12 font. Also, no politics, religion, sports or other unrelated boredom!
This is why we do this, to give visibility to amazing artists. Whatever is your medium, from painting to sculpture and photography to textile design, we’re willing to let you promote yourself. In each number we have room for 5 artists and each artist gets a total of 6 spreads to promote themselves (1 spread is a mandatory cover, so 5 is just for art) that you can use any way you wish. Not all of them have to be used, of course. We’ll take care of the lay-out and the end result will always be approved by you before publishing and all the copyrights remain with you.
TIPS!
READERS!
Do you have local knowledge of the best culture events in your town that nobody else knows? Or maybe you have a great idea for a feature story, Gonzo-concept or otherwise great ideas on how to make Godartet a better magazine? If so, do contact us! We’re eager to know what’s happening out there.
If you don’t have anything to contribute, but just like to read our nifty little paper, do share us with the world! We’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Issuu, we have our own webpage and a YouTube channel so there are many ways for spreading the word about Godartet. And for this, we salute you! Sharing is daring... Or something like that.
And just for all to know, we can’t compensate for your writings, as Godartet works purely on voluntary work (this includes Ville and Juha). However, we also won’t be charging you for anything, and we hope to help you in any way we can. Also, don’t worry about your English, because Godartet has a professional proofreader, who makes sure your words are solid. Hope to hear from you soon!
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LEGAL INFORMATION GODARTET IS A NON-COMMERCIAL, NON-PROFIT MAGAZINE AIMING TO SUPPORT, SPREAD AND ANALYSE ART AND CULTURE FROM NORWAY, SWEDEN, FINLAND AND ESTONIA. THE MAGAZINE IS BASED IN HELSINKI, FINLAND. EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: VILLE KOSKI. SENIOR EDITOR: JUHA HEIKKINEN. EVERYTHING PUBLISHED IN GODARTET IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND ALL OF THE COPYRIGHTS BELONG TO THEIR RESPECTIVE MAKERS UNLESS SPECIFICALLY MARKED OTHERWISE. DO NOT COPY, ALTER, SHARE OR IN OTHER WAYS USE THE MATERIAL IN GODARTET WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE SPECIFIC COPYRIGHT OWNER, WHOM YOU MAY CONTACT DIRECTLY OR THROUGH GODARTET MAGAZINE. ANYONE BREAKING THESE RULES WILL BE CAUGHT, FOUND AND - FOR YOUR INFORMATION - WE THINK LANNISTER IS THE COOLEST HOUSE IN GAME OF THRONES. ANY QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS CAN BE SENT TO GODARTETMAGAZINE@GMAIL.COM. HAPPY READINGS!