Discovering Teuvo Tulio

November 15, 2008 - December 4, 2008

The Way You Wanted Me, November 23

It’s rare these days that we can introduce a new name from the past to our sophisticated film audiences, but here is one to know: Teuvo Tulio, the wild and willful director of Finnish melodramas from the 1930s and 1940s. Aki Kaurismäki touted Tulio as an incomparable master of melodrama, and you can see his influence on the contemporary director in much the same way we know the Mexican melodrama tradition influenced Buñuel and Ripstein, and Douglas Sirk influenced Fassbinder.

Tulio (1912–2000), born Theodor Tugal in Latvia, moved to Finland when young. He acted in silent films, becoming known as “Finland’s Valentino”; when he turned to directing in the late thirties, he poured an erotic passion worthy of Valentino into the act of filmmaking itself. In his early “haystack dramas,” Tulio paid homage to the spectacular nature cinematography of Scandinavian silents and retold classic coming-of-age stories, embellishing these with outrageous use of orchestral music and editing to rival Eisenstein (he produced and edited all his films of this era). As war approached, his themes and imagery became considerably darker, more urban and expressionistic.

The thread that runs through all these films is the sexual frankness that overturns the very conventions Tulio so consciously resurrects. Surely if every woman who innocently engaged in premarital sex went down the road Tulio maps, prostitution would have accounted for half of Finland’s GDP, but Tulio uses this Trojan warhorse over and over again to effect a bold statement about class, sexual inequality, and female objectification. This is the moral of his moral tales; if a director has an alter ego in every film, Tulio’s is a woman.

We are pleased to present four Teuvo Tulio classics, restored and preserved by the National Audiovisual Archive (former Finnish Film Archive).

Judy Bloch
Publications Director

Saturday, November 15, 2008
6:30 p.m. The Song of the Scarlet Flower
A classic novel adapted with “stunning natural vistas . . . luminous cinematography.”—UCLA

Wednesday, November 19, 2008
7:00 p.m. In the Fields of Dreams
A sexually frank melodrama of a shepherdess led astray—the apotheosis of Finnish director Tulio’s exuberant use of nature cinematography, classical music, montage, and startling juxtaposition, adding up to an eroticism of the cinema.

Sunday, November 23, 2008
5:30 p.m. The Way You Wanted Me
Tulio shot this brutal, tender melodrama in 1943, as war raged in Finland and the nation’s future hung in the balance.

Thursday, December 4, 2008
6:30 p.m. The Cross of Love
“A mixture of Stroheim, Sternberg and Cecil B. DeMille.”—UCLA

Discovering Teuvo Tulio is organized at PFA by Kathy Geritz. We wish to thank the following institutions and individuals for making this series possible: Satu Laaksonen, Film Programmer & Cultural Exchange, National Audiovisual Archive (former Finnish Film Archive); Florence Almozini and Adrienne Mancia, BAMcinématek; Margaret Parsons, National Gallery of Art.