Television Review | Nyrki Tapiovaara’s clever thriller tells the story of freedom fighters in 1904 Helsinki

Culture|Television review

Drama

Stolen Death ★★★★

Finland 1938

TV1 at 1:20 p.m. and Yle Areena only live (K7)

Lyrics are no longer enough, now we have to get weapons, decide the young activists who oppose the tsarist rule in Helsinki at the beginning of the 20th century.

Fist Tapiovaara (1911–1940) A stolen death is based on Runar Schildt (1988–1925) to the Civil War novel Meat grinder (1919), from which mainly the three main characters and the basic setting were left in the film.

Socially awakened Vesa Robert Hedman of a bourgeois family (Ilmari Mänty) leads an activist cell, followed by Manja (Tuulikki Paananen), of criminal businessman Robert Claesson (Santeri Karilo) good-hearted friend. Claesson would like to sell the weapons he has hidden, but if the price is not to his liking, he threatens to expose the rebels.

A radical leftist Tapiovaara ended up as a film artist through the work of an attention-grabbing critic and lucky coincidences: he was asked to direct the adaptation Juhani Ahon From Juha.

The successful debut (1937) harnessed nature and the countryside as a central element of film narrative, and In Stolen Death the director used the houses and streets, stairwells and backyards of the urban milieu just as skillfully.

Having seen the new European cinema of his time in Paris, Tapiovaara shunned the tradition of theater-based dramatic films. Although he carefully trained the actors, the film’s several purely cinematic means, the long scenes that proceed without dialogue, with all the escapes and chases, attract attention.

The basement and portico images breathe the contrasts of expressionism, and the camera recorded views either from below or directly above.

Producer-in the capacity of writer-photographer Erik Blomberg shortened the film by 15 minutes for the 1954 rerun. If the reception was partly estranged from the director’s modern expression, later times convinced of the uniqueness of the vision

Film historian Sakari Toiviainen According to the assessment of the 1990s, no other individual Finnish director has been able to offer “the same fruitful mixture of radicalism, avant-garde and classicism” as Nyrki Tapiovaara, and that “following intellectuals, socially aware, who have considered film theory” Finnish directors only appeared in the 1960s.

In today’s world political situation A stolen death There may be a new interest in depictions of the freedom struggle that are distanced from hard concreteness to more theoretical idealism.