The Finnish documentary: a critical overview of historical perspectives and thematic developments

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is dual. Firstly, by introducing and contextualizing its articles and authors, it functions as an introduction to this special edition of Studies in Documentary Film dedicated to contemporary Finnish documentary film. Secondly, it seeks to place these articles in an overarching context, in terms of both Finnish documentary film and documentary film more broadly. It is no accident that this collection concentrates on a small Nordic national cinema, as that cinema has made a lasting impression in the new ‘golden age’ of creative documentary during the 2000s and 2010s. Finland’s documentary ecology acts as a prism through which the factors and forces that dictate and effect the documentaries seen on global screens can be analysed and evaluated. In turn, this focus on Finland can illuminate some of the major issues facing documentary production in an age of challenge, transformation and promise.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary
• cinema
• nordic
• media production
• aesthetics
• Finnish
• funding
• transnational

Finnish documentary as case study

And Finland? Finland was just a paradise for documentaries.

During a keynote in Cardiff UK in May 2015, Paul Pauwels, director of the pan-European documentary organization European Documentary Network (EDN) gave a producer-level overview of the history and growth of documentary as a professional community of filmmakers across Europe during the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.¹ The speech was one he had given many times to different audiences, with adaptations in different countries, for different purposes. In this case, it was a speech directed at the documentary producer community of Wales, a small nation with its own ‘minority language’, seeking to learn from production practices on the continent of Europe. He took the recent history of Finnish documentary production as a case study to illustrate how things could develop in an emerging territory of documentary production.

In this context, as in many other contexts, Finland’s example as a case study for how a documentary film ecology is built, supported and funded is significant due to its success, especially considering its population size, and the relative isolation of its language group in the Nordic region, and beyond. With a population of 5.5 million, the expenditure per head on documentary is comparable to those of neighbouring cinematic giants such as Sweden and Denmark. With around an average of 34 feature-length documentaries released every year in domestic theatres between 2008 and 2015,² the documentary production culture also compares favourably with larger countries such as the UK (10 production and 3 completion grants given by British Film Institute (BFI) in 2015–2016³) and Germany (16 in 2015⁴). In addition, the films produced are credited as leading the accomplishment of documentary as a genre across Europe and the world with filmmaker such as Kiti Luostarinen, Pirjo Honkasalo and Jouko Aaltonen consistently winning pan-Nordic, Pan-European and global festival awards.

However, the Finnish case study does not only convey a success story. It is also a useful prism through which issues of contemporary media economics, politics, culture, technology and documentary form may be refracted. Due to Finland’s broadly social-democratic political milieu, its state subsidy for all forms of art has been generous in comparison to other world regions (the UK and the US, for example), with documentary as no exception. In terms of film culture, and the subsidy of film culture by the state, Finland has followed the French/German and Nordic pattern of heavily subsiding film production (again in distinction to the UK and the US) and in Finland, documentary has been singled out for special treatment in this respect. This has led to the creation of a mature and sophisticated production sector, and audience, for documentaries in Finland during the last 30 years.

This collection provides the first cohesive study of the contemporary situation of Finnish documentary film production and culture. It contextualizes these with the substantial changes the infrastructure of documentary production has gone through in the past few decades globally. Most importantly, it views these changes from the perspective of filmmakers themselves. This collection was born in 2013, when Dafydd Sills-Jones and Pietari Kääpä were both studying Finnish documentary in Helsinki, and during which time documentary funding was seriously disrupted due to the economic crash of 2008. During this time, they encountered an unusual and long tradition within Finnish documentary of scholarly, critical and sustained reflection by professional documentarists on their own work, on the Finnish documentary milieu, and on the global canonical traditions of documentary film (including doctoral dissertations by film producers such as Timo Korhonen and Jouko Aaltonen). In 2013, this was exacerbated by the freezing of budgets at Yleisradio (YLE), and the consequent turn by several documentary professionals to academic study and reflection on the documentary scene.

Some of this edition’s contributors may be primarily considered as filmmakers – Susanna Helke, Aaltonen, Antti Haase, Korhonen – and others primarily considered as critics – Jukka Kortti, Ilona Hongisto. However, a closer look exposes a more complex relationship between these poles, with figures like Aaltonen and Helke exemplifying a stance that bridges the gap between academia and media production, as established and award-winning filmmaking careers and scholars with a substantial research output. Thus, the collection is premised on the movement of its authors between the world of critical appraisal (in the academy) and professional media production. The closeness of these worlds is also to be seen in how figures such as Korhonen and Haase have supplemented established careers with academic study. Further evidence is available in terms of the collaboration between ‘fully’ academic writers, such as Hongisto and Kortti, with the personnel and processes of filmmaking.

A brief history of Finnish documentaries

In order to set the context for the articles in this special edition of Studies in Documentary Film, this chapter will now paint a general picture of transformations in the Finnish documentary film. These transformations are used to explain general patterns that make the case of Finnish documentary unique. We cover key areas of Finnish documentary history. We also address some of the fundamental considerations in film theory that these films evoke.

There are traces of a national movement in documentary in Finland as far back as the 1920s, with seminal significant films such as Finlandia (Karu and Leväluoma 1922) representing key areas of the ‘national character’. Documentary production was sustained throughout the following decades (see Sedergren and Kippola 2015). The production was often in short film form with key directors, including New Wave auteurs Risto Jarva and Jörn Donner, finding their feet with socially committed productions. But by the 1970s, as with fiction cinema, the situation in Finland was highly attenuated. Regarded by some filmmakers as a quasi-mythical nadir of Finnish cinema (Sedergren 2013; Webster 2013), there were only two feature-length theatrical releases for domestic films in 1974, ushering urgent calls to rethink the role of the Finnish Film Foundation Suomen Elokuvasäätiö (SES). The Foundation, established in 1969, was at the time, an essential lifeline for any domestic film production and it considered documentary a key facet in providing a cinematic platform for Finnish national culture. While both fiction and documentary film suffered from the constraints new viewing patterns and social upheaval placed on sustainable production, the era provided, at least, a solid basis of support for key documentarians of the next few decades such as Pirjo Honkasalo and Lasse Naukkarinen.

In the late 1980s, the Finnish education ministry decreed that a levy was to be put on all blank cassettes and video tapes in order to offset the harm such media had to the profitability of media producers. Instead of making this a direct ‘royalty’ payment to the rights owner, the money was kept in a production fund, and it was also decided that that fund should be given over almost entirely to documentary production (AVEK 2001; Samola 2013). This was a specifically ‘national’ decision, taken due to the perceived need to project national narratives through Finland for those in Finland, and due to the logistical belief that the same fund could support far more individual productions in the documentary mode than in the fiction mode, due to the inherent lower costs of the former. Timo Korhonen, ex documentary commissioner at audiovisuaalisen kulttuurin edistämiskeskus (AVEK) and contributor to this special edition, sees this commitment to documentary in Finland as not only based on politico-economic logic, but that documentary suited Finland’s Lutheran ‘concern for everyday detail’ (Korhonen 2013).

During the fallow cinematic period, documentary production had been kept alive within the public service broadcaster, YLE. For the most part, its productions were topical, expository, national, journalistic. It was not until the fall of the USSR, and as Finland found itself in a new social and expressive space, that YLE’s documentary attention became more cinematic. In the early 1990s, two major documentary initiatives were launched. The first was Dokumenttiprojekti (The Documentary Project), launched as an anthology series of documentaries on YLE2. Second, a weekly slot for acquired international creative documentaries was formed on YLE1, on which international hits such as Hoop Dreams (James, 1994) and Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985) were shown side by side with documentaries funded by SES and AVEK (Korhonen 2013; Vehkalahti 2013; Volanen 2013).

The effect was to issue Finnish documentary makers with a stern challenge; can your film stand side by side with such masterpieces? The answer to this question came from a new generation of filmmakers sustained by a spirit of close cooperation between YLE, SES and AVEK, who in combination could provide a documentary budget of around EURO200k/hour, roughly the equivalent to similar budgets at the time in the UK and the USA. This ‘funding triangle’ enabled filmmakers to resource their films to the same extent as the largest TV language-market in the world at the time (i.e. the English language-market), and all at the service of a national population of just over 5 million. At the same time, during the early 1990s, the Finnish Film School Elokuvataiteen ja lavastustaiteen laitos - Aalto-yliopisto (ELO) based in Helsinki started its first documentary masters course. The students coming from this course were greeted by a film and TV sector ready to provide them with a platform and a sustainable industry, and indeed, these early entrants helped to form the sector as it evolved in its early years (Jääskeläinen 2013; Kuivalainen and Tuurna 2013; Vehkalahti 2013; Webster 2013).

There are many more details to this story of the development of documentary funding during this period (see Haase’s article in this special edition), but these bare bones provide enough substance to make a startling contrast with other national situations. In the UK, for example, as Finland was assembling its documentary funding triangle, the new regulatory and managerial ethos in broadcasting initiated by the Thatcher government was leading to a diminution of ‘serious television’, and with it the gradual shift in TV documentary from the creativity of anthology series such as 40 Minutes (BBC2, 1981–1994) to the less cinematically and critically ambitious, and more populist, docusoap tradition (see Barnett and Seymour 1999; Dover 2004; Dovey 2000; Kilborn 1998).

In the last two decades, a network of film festivals, distributors, development fora and documentary funds have slowly grown to produce a system of financing which is increasingly independent from that of TV. While commissions for television are still often the initial trigger for the gathering of co-production budgets, they comprise often as little as 5–10% of the overall production budget (Simonen 2016; Webster 2016). This movement towards the cinematic, and away from TV, has some possible implications for the populist approach of such films, with the need for name recognition and story scope sidelining many issues and areas of discussion, as cinematic documentaries seek to build audiences through claiming artistic, aesthetic or occasionally journalistic exceptionalism.

In more recent years, public service broadcasting (PSB)-funded social documentary has been on the decline globally, and there has been a growth in commercial cinematic documentary, from the obscurity of the 1980s, to the Palme D’Or victory of Bowling For Columbine (Moore, 2002), and on to the commercial and critical success of films such as The Look of Silence (Oppenheimer, 2014). The funding of such cinematic documentaries are almost always premised on some level of international collaborative financing, and the productions usually take in excess of five years from conception to distribution, and their budgets can be very high (EURO250k-1Mk). This has led to a continually growing strain placed on the producers of feature documentaries to reach their audiences, which has in turn seriously impacted the sustainability of documentary filmmakers’ careers (EDN 2016). Finland’s robust system has allowed, to a degree, its documentary makers to navigate relatively safely through the increasing turbulent waters of twenty-first-century media production, as economic, politics and technology combine to transform and destabilize media work and consumption patterns.

However, Finland has not been immune to the pressure put on public funding structures by the global economic crisis of 2008, with PSB affected, and through it, the ‘paradise’ of the Finnish documentary environment. Simultaneously, mobile, cheap and highly useable digital video technology has transformed not only the reality of social space, but also the patterns of production and distribution. This transformation simultaneously promised greater access to the means of producing documentary films as well as their physical distribution through online channels. However, these technological and politico-economic changes have also had the effect of narrowing the gateways through which mature cinematic voices can reach an educated audience.

The possibility and potential of online distribution networks emerged as simultaneous challenges to the TV documentary alongside the re-emergence of cinematic documentary. Such platforms include video on demand (VOD) channels by existing established sources such as distributors (e.g. Dogwoof Productions), or festivals (e.g. Sundance Channel, Documentary Alliance), entrepreneurial start-ups (e.g. www.danishdox.com) or even national film funders (e.g. BFI player). In addition, there are large new players who aggregate much of this material for global territories on a subscription basis (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Prime). All these examples threaten to undercut the price structures of traditional TV and cinema gatekeepers. This occurs at the same technological moment as a range of new camera set-ups make the production of high-end video possible for almost anyone. The digital single-lens reflex revolution, and with it the launch of affordable camera packages from manufacturers such as Canon, Sony, Blackmagic and even established manufactures such as ARRI, have created a situation in which the documentary film market is hugely over-supplied, and all with the potential for any one filmmaker to reach all possible audience members with one keystroke.

Clearly, then, considerable support for sustainable documentary production exists in Finland in comparison to other similar-sized countries, but simultaneously, the production and distribution of documentaries need to take into account new cultural political realities – such as the short-sighted austerity measures imposed by the Sipilä government, which has a major impact on the arts – as well as the changing technologies for producing and disseminating documentary film. Finland’s example is therefore a useful locus for the study of the dynamics of these interrelated factors.

Finland as case study in transnational small nation film culture

While we have spent much of the above discussing the specific national qualities of Finnish documentary film, it is clear that documentary film production, both on an international level and in Finland, is increasingly premised on transnational connectivity. The concept of the transnational can be defined here as an understanding of an increased sense of flow between national organizations. Flows here comprise production arrangements and personnel, finance, organizational integration, the themes of the films as well as their distribution. The key to understanding transnational approaches to film culture comes from seeing the changes they contribute to the respective national cultures. Here, transformations in the constitution of cultures are the main topic of study (see Ezra and Rowden 2005; Kääpä and Seppälä 2012).

Several developments in Finnish documentary film outlined above cannot simply be explained by recourse to the nation. The fact that the themes of the majority of the films now concern some level of understanding of the world outside of Finland testify to this. While the majority of the films produced are to do with topics of national, or even more appropriately local, significance, many of the key projects concern global considerations – from the lives of immigrant beggars on the streets of Helsinki (Kerjäläiselokuva / A Beggar Film, 2011) to the moral responsibilities of Finnish companies operating in China (Punaisen metsän hotelli / The Red Forest Hotel, 2012). In addition, if we pay attention to the narrative or aesthetic qualities of the films, we can see the concept of flow at work. Ideas about how to deal with certain thematic issues or how to communicate in cinematic language are shaped by means that are most often productively considered part of international documentary. Such developments often emerge out of workshops like the European Documentary Network’s ‘12 For The Future’ development programme conducted through fora at Helsinki’s Docpoint Festival along with the Nordisk Panorama Film festival in Malmö.

The management of such events has been led by Finnish figures such as Jarmo Jääskeläinen, Eila Werning and Iikka Vehkalahti, placing Finnish documentary at the heart of the development of a pan-European co-production network that encouraged the flourishing of the creative documentary form in Europe and beyond during the 1990s and 2000s. It also remains a staple co-production partner within Nordic co-productions, especially at organizations like the Nordic Film and Television Fund (NFTF), and in co-production with other European documentary-producing nations. Even the work of organizations such as Afridocs is often led by Finnish personnel. Thus, production organizations and personnel are in contact with one another and exchange ideas in ways that often draw on cultural and organizational notions of nation, but which operate in accordance with the much more complex logic of transnationalism. Finally, financing is also premised on international arrangements as we can see from the percentages afforded to different factors in production. From this perspective, it is clear that Finnish documentary needs to be considered in transnational terms as ‘nation’ does not do justice to its complex organizational and production arrangements. The national is a ‘limiting’ or ‘restrictive’ categorization (Higson 2000) that does not allow us to acknowledge production realities and exchanges of cultural forms in the most comprehensive means possible.

Another factor complicating the production and distribution of Finnish documentary film is the small nation context of these films. Small nations are defined by limitations in population size, a distinctive scope of GDP, geographical location, linguistic considerations as well as cultural isolation (though these do not all apply to each country categorized in such terms). As suggested by Hjort and Petrie (2007), small nations are an important subject of study due to the ways they diversify the global cinematic landscape. Not only do they highlight the necessity to explore cinematic cultures outside of dominant constellations like Hollywood, but also they indicate the complex diversity of approaches to producing film culture. It is also worth remembering that in small nation film cultures, the concept of the transnational takes on alternative political implications. In the case of anglophile countries such as the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, shared linguistic and historical frames of reference expand the scope and trajectory of documentary films. The case is very different in many small nation contexts where audiences are limited by both the thematic references and linguistic conventions used. There is a tension here between the anglophile media world and ‘world cinema’, a problematic conceptualization that underlines the hegemonies governing global distribution of film. It is not difficult to identify examples of such hegemonic concessions in Nordic documentary film with well-known examples such as Into Eternity (2011) using English as its main language of communication.

But even in these small contexts, or precisely due to the smallness of these contexts, transnational forms of collaboration emerge as a strong strategy. For example, the Finnish Film Foundation’s New Finnish Documentary Films 2011–2012 (SES, 2012), an overview of developments in documentary film production, starts out by exploring the significance of the documentary form for Finnish film culture. Oftentimes, the smallness of these cultures is precisely their source of advantage. The fact that producers and organizations have to deal with limited resources even as they draw on arguments for the uniqueness of these cultures creates a situation where the necessity to produce and contribute to the body of films of a particular national cinema is considered a mandate for indigenous producers. Finland especially qualifies for this due to its small population, the uniqueness of its language, its historical role in between the East and the West and many of its cultural particularities.

While the SES document outlines the many advances made by Finnish individuals and organizations, it is not difficult to observe a persistent transnational narrative running alongside and through this surface-based assertion of national particularity. Many of the articles argue for the necessity to see Finnish documentary as inherently international in its outlook and production modes. For example, the SES documentary commissioner Elina Kivihalme is interviewed on her views on contemporary documentaries where she argues that Finnish filmmakers are increasingly networking across borders and Finnish production funds are being allocated to films with little ‘obviously’ Finnish content. According to her, this ‘new, extroverted attitude’ means that ‘Finnish documentaries are being made on all continents. Filmmakers no longer stay at home with their blinders on; instead, they go elsewhere to look for universal stories and conquer the world’ (SES, 2012, 23).

However, in reality, this complex connectivity also raises a set of problems around professional sustainability and monetization. How are the makers of these films to live whilst making them? How is the viewer to navigate through the mass of documentaries available? In Finland too, online distribution is increasingly a fact as the YLE Areena platform testifies, but only for domestic audiences. In 2014, SES established a new venture to support emerging filmmakers with short documentary production, which would be distributed exclusively through an online platform. The venture, known as dox@net received 73 applications in its inaugural 2014 call. The platform now hosts a range of experimental and interactive documentaries with one of the films (Pillua Aloittelijoille / Pussy for Beginners, 2015) receiving over 189.000 views as well as interest abroad.

The national imperative involves a conscious policy decision to fund films whose aim is partially to project visions of Finland back to Finland in the Finnish language, in response to the media colonialism of Anglophile media, and also to project Finland outwards to the world, both editorially and industrially. A successful text can exploit a larger potential audience (and therefore financial return) than a text made in the Finnish language. But the transnational economic imperative is not only about economies of scale but of production value as text for text, a Finnish film must compete on the same level with international documentary films. If one is to compete with anglophile media in terms of production value, then budgets need to be aggregated across countries, but such collaborations bring up questions over ownership of content as well as editorial problems in the story.

Katja Gauriloff’s Säilöttyjä unelmia / Canned Dreams (2012) provides an example of this dialogue in operation. The film starts out from a Finnish basis, in terms of both content and production resources, as it investigates the cultural implications of the production of a can of ravioli sold for less than a euro in Finnish supermarkets. The wheat for the product was grown in Ukraine, the meat farmed in Demark, the tomatoes from Italy, the tin from Columbia, and all the countries covered in the film were able to justify funding the film on national terms, whilst the film itself justified itself on transnational grounds. The success of the film is testament to the producers’ ingenuity in brokering such a coherent editorial stance in a complex coproduction deal, but this example also serves to highlight the tensions and contradictions in the situation; every Finnish film cannot be funded in this way, and if they were, what of those stories which seek to address questions of more local or personal relevance? Indeed, many of the articles in this special issue are written by Finnish documentary producers, but that does not simply imply that their scope of relevance is somehow only about national culture and identity. Instead, the work of Korhonen and Aaltonen, for example, are more concerned with personal identity politics or questions of pan-human relevance than some outright thematising of nation. Thus, even as this issue is positioned to be about Finnish documentary, we must be mindful that the national cultural level is only one level of significance here.

Finland as a case study of documentary poetics

One of the challenges evoked by a focus on small nation documentary cinema is the way in which an empirical perspective focusing solely on national culture can obfuscate some of the nuances and positions of creative work within a specific culture. Documentary filmmaking in one place may closely resemble, in terms of content and form, work made in another place, but may in reality have very different, and specifically cultural meanings. Thus, any analysis correlating a film’s cultural content with the origins of its production needs to find a careful balance between reading too much into such cultural implications or negating them to a degree that is unhelpful for understanding the film’s range of meanings.

To illustrate this balancing act, Finnish documentary film presents an intriguing case study in documentary poetics. Discussions of documentary poetics are often broadly polar: cinéma vérité versus direct cinema; East versus West; TV versus cinema; independent versus in-house; narrative-driven versus Avant-Garde. Although such oppositions do not always assist in the nuanced work of tracing the connections between onscreen form and cognition so central to academic analyses of documentary over the decades (Corner 2008, 22–23), all of these oppositions are helpful in mapping the kind of variety of documentary form appearing with regularity in the contemporary Finnish documentary scene.

Another useful opposition is that of television and cinema, often seen as a fundamental division in terms of aesthetic form and social function (Corner 2008, 21), and documentary arguably has a very different life on both platforms. On TV, the sound track tends to be the dominant means of imparting information, with the visual style recessive and often austere, sometimes marked by direct address through either an authoritative presenter or voice over. This often goes hand in hand with a domestic and/or topical approach, as such programmes are mostly dependent on immediate and region-specific audience viewing figures in their evaluation. In order to capture the attention of the audience in a multi-channel (and device) environment such as the living room, and to ensure the highest possible retention of viewers, these programmes are often carefully and strictly formatted to deliver jeopardy and resolution in reassuringly predictable patterns. In the cinema, the audience is invited to gaze at the screen, the imagery is more expressive, the soundscapes can be more suggestive, the durations of texts can be longer and need less verbal communication of information, and a less prescribed structure of narrative development. Indeed, for films to win prizes at major festivals such as International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam or the Berlinale, their mastery and use of the contradictions and oddities of the documentary form need to be evident.

Finnish documentaries have, in the main, brought these two closer together than they appear in other territories and national cinemas. This is due in part to the funding structure outlined above and in Haase’s article in this special edition, which has facilitated and insisted upon cinematic standards in TV documentary production. It is also due to the way in which theatrical release and TV transmission have increasingly become a collaborative and co-dependent process. A minimum theatrical release of two weeks is required for Jussi (the Finnish Oscars) award nominations in the category of best documentary film, the award of which can boost cinematic box office takings. In addition, over recent years, YLE has allowed its commissions to gain a brief theatrical release window before their first transmission, as this has proven successful in drawing attention to a film, allowing a mechanism for reviews and word of mouth to develop, and leading to improved viewing figures for the eventual TV broadcast (Vehkalahti 2013).

The oppositions of Direct Cinema/Cinema Verite and East/West are both useful, in that they articulate something about the bridging position Finnish documentary holds across the traditions of the anglophile documentary and the traditions of continental European documentary. To the West lies the Anglophile territories of the reasoned and objectively observed documentary tradition, and to the East the more mystic and factually asymmetrical traditions of Polish and Russian documentary traditions (Helke 2013). Added to this is Finland’s specific version of the Nordic outlook, an outlook that has developed its own cinematic lexicon through filmmakers such as Bergman, Kaurismäki and Von Trier, whilst also being steeped in consideration of global human rights, and attendant to multiple political situations across the world. In terms of documentary film, this leads to a spectrum of aesthetic approaches, which could be referred to, very broadly, as a ‘Finnish documentary style’. This is, of course, keeping in mind that any such style is always a result of cultural interaction across many borders and traditions of film production. But for the purposes of this issue, it is useful to identify some of these general parameters, especially as they feed into policy discussions on both the domestic and the international level (as Haase’s contribution outlines).

The dominant grouping in Finnish documentary is the work emanating from makers who were trained at the national film school (ELO) in Helsinki. As has already been stated, the ELO began its specific documentary master’s course in the early 1990s, and thanks to close links with YLE were able to create a clear industrial pathway for its graduates. Students from the school in the 1990s describe the ethos of the ELO as being heavily authored, and many eminent figures in Finnish documentary today (Olsson, 2016; Webster 2013) talk about the lasting influence of guest speakers from different branches of world documentary, such as Phillip Hoffmann and Paul Watson, as having informed not only their documentary practice, but that of the whole ecology of Finnish documentary.

The ELO’s present professor of documentary, Susanna Helke (a contributor to this collection) can stand as a partial symbol of the ELO’s position on documentary. Her films are authored, cinematically literate, complex films that deliberately foreground the interaction between factual and fictional representative modes, often using a technique Helke refers to as ‘replayed reality’ (Helke 2004) in which film subjects become contributors in a sophisticated art process, rather than being objectified through a simplistic or formulaic process of observation. Helke inherited the ethos from other teachers such as Kanerva Cederstrom who, while having different artistic ‘voices’, also upheld many of the same principles.

Other aspects of the Finnish documentary style concern an editing strategy widely referred to as the Nordic Rhythm (Mehtonen 2013). Closely aligned to this strategy is the concept of ‘meaning by duration’, where temporal dynamics are essential elements in the meaning-making process of the film. Helke describes the origins and usefulness of this approach especially with reference to the art documentary cinema traditions of Eastern Europe (Helke 2013). However, the Nordic rhythm in the Finnish context is applied across a wider range of work than that of avant-garde or ‘art’ documentary cinema. This concept loosely encompasses the variety of editing practices that privilege longer takes, and which invite the audience to enter into a world and interpret it. Diverse films such as Kuivalainen’s Aranda (2011), Madsen’s Into Eternity (2013) Aaltonen’s Kusum (2000), and Webster’s Recipes for Disaster (2008), all exhibit passages of the Nordic rhythm, despite their very different forms, audiences and authors. It can therefore be argued that documentaries that are classed as being demonstrative of a ‘Finnish style’ whilst being diverse, spring from a shared well of cinematic contemplation.

Yet, we must also remember, as Markku Heikkinen suggests, that even as there is a perception of Finnish films as ‘Slavically slow, Finns have coproduced documentaries with other Nordic countries and distributed them all over the world, and those films have no slowness whatsoever. Dramaturgically they are playful and challenge both reportages and the latest trends in fiction and are not afraid of being entertaining. Is this wild and crazy attitude a proof of “Finnishness”? (SES, 2012: 24). Clearly for this writer and director, any sense of a Finnish documentary poetics is not something that can be taken for granted – instead, it seems to be something that exists on the level of dialogue, or as a signifier that can be put to many uses, both in terms of providing identifiable material for content, and as a marketing tool to ensure that these films are able to travel internationally. The relevance of such arguments is not difficult to see with recent developments in Finnish documentary production.

If most of the films above can be characterized as subjective, personal modes of authorial documentary drawing on more classical elements of the Nordic Rhythm, a relatively new tradition of populist and popular character-driven observational documentary has emerged alongside them, as seen in the work of Joonas Neuvonen (Reindeerspotting – Pako Joulumaasta /Reindeerspotting – Escape from Santaland, 2010), Jukka Kärkkäinen (Kovasikajuttu /The Punk Syndrome, 2012), Petri Luukainen (Tavarataivas/My Stuff, 2013) and Wille Hyvänen (Onnelliset/The Salesmen of Happiness, 2015). These films adopt a more accessible film language, deploying a version of Direct Cinema techniques in which scenes have temporal continuity, are arranged in accordance with the logistics of conventional dramaturgy, and ‘cast’ real-life social actors with audience appeal. The success of films like Reindeerspotting at the domestic box office has made theatrical release a major aspiration for young filmmakers, and in turn have brought criticism of these films for moving away from social commentary and towards entertainment (Aaltonen 2013; Kuivalainen and Tuurna 2013; Webster 2013).⁵

Finland as a case study of documentary production practices

A recently emergent perspective that seeks to address many of the issues we have discussed above is the field of ‘production studies’, an analytical approach based on the groundwork of earlier studies of production processes, hierarchies and group dynamics in Hollywood (e.g. Powdermaker 1950), and news production (e.g. Rosten 1937). The re-emergence of production studies is predicated on an attempt to find a middle way between economically and textually deterministic accounts of media work (Mayer, Banks, and Caldwell 2009, 3). Traditionally, empirical studies of media production concentrated on three levels of study, the ‘individual media worker … organizational structure and routines … wider social, political and cultural environment’ (Williams 2003, 97). But newer formulations of production studies have sought to investigate the meeting places of these three levels.

For example, Cottle (2003) calls for a mode of media production analysis that avoids the problems of economic determinism implicit in studies drawing from political economy, on the one hand, and the vagaries of ideology that arguably maintain a strong hold on academic work in cultural studies, on the other. For Cottle, political economy has a tendency to rely on examples of a connection between the organization of social classes and the organization of media production, accepting the precept that the ruling class controls ‘the means of mental production’ (Cottle 2003, 7). But Cottle argues that such theorizations were ‘outweighed by contradictions’ (2003, 7), and under such analyses, the processes of media production become subject to ‘impersonal Laws’ (2003, 9), which do not take heed of the complex of motivational imperatives that drive media production onwards, nor the complex of meanings reasonably extractable from any media text. Both these failings point to political economy’s tendency to economic determinism, and the subsequent downgrading of individual agency and the complexity of ideological and subjective formations.

As a means of navigating a middle way, Cottle urges that lessons be drawn from the tradition of studying the production of news, with its emphasis on processes, roles, professional codes, and a combination of the discursive and administrative to be found in Foucault’s formulation of the notion of ‘practice’ (an activity that is neither false consciousness, nor creative autonomy), and Scannel’s notion of ‘communicative intentionality’, however incomplete the intention may end up to be (Cottle 2003, 16–18). To this end, Cottle concentrates on a ‘meso’ layer of activity in media production and organization that binds together a ‘macro’ level of regulation and competitive economic processes that political economy often emphasizes, and a ‘micro’ level that looks at the specific strategies put into place by producers as they carry out their individual creative labour under the general framework dictated by macro considerations.

Such considerations are crucial when examining the documentary ecology of Finland. This ecology articulates a specific relationship between governmental and regulatory structures (macro), media industry structures and practices (meso), and the detailed authorial and technical labour involved in producing documentaries (micro). The broadly social-democratic milieu of Finland’s politics has led to a generous level of state support for documentary production (macro). However, it is only until recent decades that a sustainable film production sector has emerged, the delay of which has been mainly due to the size of Finland’s internal cinematic marketplace. The development of this sector is largely due to the development of a pan-European co-production marketplace for feature-length documentaries, and partly due to a cultural commitment to cooperation and co-production over and above commercial competition (meso). This sector has developed partially due to the conditions made possible through a supportive regulatory structure and a tradition of cultural co-operation, and also partly because of the aspirations, deliberate actions and creativity of a group of dedicated and visionary filmmakers (micro).

Another key element of production studies is the central position of producer ethnography. Paterson and Zoellner (2010) suggests that ethnography is an essential part of production studies, but it also needs to be a kind of ‘informed ethnography’ in which the analyst is able to understand the intimate details of the meso and micro layers of production organization, and also able to explain/translate them out of experience into the academic realm. Zoellner considers the data gathered from interviews with documentary filmmakers to have the specific epistemological status required, in that they not only provide access to hidden production narratives, but they also throw light on the way in which cultural producers produce, and therefore how culture reproduces itself.

Here, the scale of the documentary ecology in Finland provides an appropriate case study; it is large enough to contain effects and processes that have been repeated across the world, but it is also small enough to enable a meaningful circumnavigation. Due to the close-knit nature of the documentary production ecology in Finland, it is clear to both professionals and academic researchers when and where important decisions and distinctions are made between commercial, cultural and aesthetic values within the production of documentary films. Indeed, this special edition is evidence of the sophistication with which media professionals in Finland think about their work, and the place of their works in the world. This level of sophistication can be considered as a direct extension of the widespread interest and acculturation in Finnish society towards documentary film.

This special edition

The discussion above on documentary poetics through the lens of production studies is of particular interest to the articles in this special edition. Firstly, the terrain of national, and transnational film and TV culture is addressed in different ways by the contributions of Antti Haase, and Jukka Kortti. Haase presents a detailed account of the golden age of Finnish documentary, systematically laying out the way in which the funding triangle has structured this particular area of cultural production in Finland, and pointedly moving his discussion away from that of textual and authorial determination. What emerges in particular is the role of financiers as ‘product authors’, and how Haase’s discussion of the economics of documentary production necessarily involves discussion of the transnational, and of the production process itself.

Kortti’s article takes these discussions in a different direction. Whilst his preoccupation is with the way in which history is represented in TV documentary, his discussion necessarily involves the ideological, historiographical processes through which history is received as material for cultural production, and how that material is transformed in the process of material production. Whilst Kortti uses carefully chosen case studies to trace the textual construction of nationhood, otherness and historical causality, this sample also connects back to issues of TV’s industrial structure, and the filmmaking processes that flow from those structures.

Helke, Aaltonen and Korhonen then take us closer to the processes of documentary production. Helke’s article surveys the landmark Finnish creative documentaries of recent years, and applies them to an evolving cultural and technological backdrop. Helke draws connections between the cultural and the textual that show the subtlety and inverse nature of the processes by which material and practices move from one level to the other. These connections demonstrate the diversity of the Finnish golden age of documentary, but also trace common preoccupations with constructions of authority, selfhood, difference and identity.

Aaltonen and Korhonen’s articles take the theme of the relationship between a macro background and individual expression and practice further. Aaltonen places his discussion of the notion of ‘voice’ in Finnish documentary squarely in the field of industrial structure. In a novel approach that echoes Haase’s perspective on the economics of documentary making in Finland, Aaltonen traces the ways in which not only contributors and authors, but also funders and culture itself, lend timbres to the ‘voice’ of a documentary. Korhonen turns attention to his own practice, examining how the logics of form and production process are negotiated in the ‘micro’ layer of Cottle’s scheme. Using a Sartrean framework, Korhonen is able to penetrate ‘the moment of production’ as Cottle puts it, to show that even in a global medium, the decisions made on location and in the cutting room, can sophisticatedly articulate a shared cultural standpoint.

Finally, Hongisto closes in even further on her object of study, as the work of documentary cinematographer Heidi Färm becomes the focus for the way in which Finnish documentary articulates the inherent contradictions of the documentary form. Here, Hongisto connects the cinematographic gestures of Färm’s films to their cinematic progenitors (Pasolini, Rouch). In an echo of Aaltonen’s invocation of Bakhtinian polyphony, Hongisto’s analyses demonstrate how Deleuze’s notion of ‘free indirect discourse’ and Brannigan’s ‘multiplicity of voices’ enable the documentaries in question to create multi-layered, self-reflexive and self-critical depictions of ‘real’ events and situations.

Epilogue: the state of Finnish documentary, and its likely near future

All of these contributors demonstrate the sophistication and diversity of the documentary scene in Finland, and its value as a means of understanding how a small documentary culture operates. This is in no small part due to the intimate knowledge these writers have of production processes and milieus, in addition to the intricacies of the academic conceptualization of documentary film itself. This sophistication is characteristic of the documentary ecology of Finland, a sophistication that promises to continue, despite difficult political terrain. Since the beginning of the compilation of this special edition in 2013, there have been many changes to the filmmaking milieu in Finland, and many continuations. Since the Sipilä government was elected in 2015, many sectors of Finnish national life that were held to be sacrosanct and emblematic of national identity have been challenged, and in some cases dismantled under a neo-liberal political mission.

The ‘funding triangle’ came under increasing pressure between 2013 and 2016, as all three of its corners, YLE, AVEK and SES, experienced existential crises. YLE’s documentary commissioning was frozen for a year between 2013 and 2014, and when it returned, YLE’s funding had been moved from a TV license to an index-linked grant from the state budget. Then, in 2015, the index-linked rise in YLE’s budget was frozen, as it has again been in 2016, partly due to lobbying from the commercial TV and press sectors (Teivanen 2016). AVEK’s attempt to have hard disk space counted as part of its levy failed, due in some measure to the lobbying of the IT industry. Consequently, its ability to commission films and enter into co-production was severely curtailed (EDN 2016). SES also underwent scrutiny of its ability to distribute public funds under its independent status, and was threatened with being subsumed into governmental structures, a chastening thought in the midst of austerity policies (Aaltonen 2016).

However, as things stand in 2016, the documentary ecology of Finland looks stable, at last in the mid-term. YLE continues to commission feature documentaries, albeit in lower numbers and at lower rates of pay, and therefore is still able to unlock further funds for producers through the SES and through pan-Nordic agreements, from other broadcasters and film foundations in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland (Aaltonen 2016; Korhonen 2016; Vehkalahti 2016). AVEK, which was on the verge of obsolescence in the face of declining tape stock sales has been given new funding by the Ministry of Education, and now is able to contribute to a greater extent than before to any single budget (Rousu and Samola 2016). SES has won its corner for the time being, although its commissioning system has changed in 2016, promising to increase the amount of grants given, but with the possible implication that each project contribution will be lower (Jääskeläinen 2016; Webster 2016).

In addition to the survivability of the triangle, the main audience for documentaries on TV and in the cinema, the over 50s, remain engaged and willing to view these films on TV and pay to watch documentaries in theatres (Vehkalahti 2016). This is despite the threat to traditional documentary distribution from digital and VOD platforms such as Netflix. Yet, no sustainable documentary platform has yet emerged to take television and cinema’s place in the Finnish context. The effects that a further decline in PSB, and the maturing of a younger generation who have grown up without television, are yet to be felt.

However, in terms of aesthetics, a change can be felt in the form of a subtle movement towards a more explicit use of political discourse within the ‘Finnish style’. Kuivalainen’s new film, Soul of the Forest (working title, in production), seeks to layer political themes with poetic expression, in part in order to redress her frustration with the lack of recognition that her earlier Aranda (2011) received (Kuivalainen 2016). Nina Brandt’s latest film If I Were a Bird (working title, in production) attempts a new ‘literal empathy’ with the film’s subject, rejecting conventional dramaturgical continuity (Mehtonen 2016). Webster’s Little Yellow Boots (working title, in production) uses the dramatic conceit of the filmmaker’s imaginary great granddaughter to soften the political edge of his film on climate change, in order to appeal to a younger audience (Webster 2016).

These films all reflect the return of the political into the traditionally subjective and introspective Finnish documentary oeuvre, as the recent global economic crisis, the global environmental crisis, the Ukrainian crisis, the international migration crisis, as well as the emerging European political crisis, all coincide with Finland’s own crisis of identity in the context of a new neo-liberal government. These have certainly instigated a pull towards the political that many makers are finding impossible to resist (Helke 2016). It remains to be seen how the structures and poetics of Finnish documentary will respond to these events.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dafydd Sills-Jones

Notes on contributors

Dafydd Sills-Jones is documentary film tutor and Director of Postgraduate Studies, at the Institute for Literature, Languages and Creative Arts, at Aberystwyth University. He specializes in the theory and practice of documentary film, about which he publishes in traditional and practice-as-research traditions. He worked in media production for 10 years as a researcher, director and producer. He is currently researching the notion of creativity in the creative documentary across Europe, and exploring through filmmaking how music-led documentary editing can offer new ways of structuring political discourse.

Pietari Kääpä

Pietari Kääpä is Associate Professor in Media and Communications at University of Warwick. His work combines transnational and environmental approaches to the study of media and the creative industries. He has published seven books, edited several collections as well as contributed peer-reviewed articles in different areas of media and communications. He currently works on a project on environmental regulation of Nordic media. Kääpä also holds a Docentship in Film and Television Studies from the University of Helsinki.

Notes

1. Paul Pauwels, Director of the European Documentary Network gave a keynote at an event organized by DOGFEN (Wales Documentary Network) in Cardiff May 19th, 2015.

2. Thirty-four is the annual average number of feature docs funded by SES during the period 2008–2015.

3. According to the BFI, only 10 production, and 3 completion grants were given by them to documentary features in 2015–2016.

4. According to The Numbers website, only 16 feature docs were made by companies based in Germany in 2015: www.the-numbers.com?Germany?movies#tabs±year, accessed 09/07/2016.

5. Whilst these interviewees – John Webster, Jouko Aaltonen, Anu Kuivalainen, Markku Tuurna – noted these criticisms, they did not necessarily agree with them.