In pursuit of emotions: the emotive turn and post-political sentiment in Finnish documentary film culture

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the emergence of an emotive turn in the Finnish documentary film culture of the last two decades. The transformation of address in contemporary documentary film culture lies not just in a postmodernist paradigm shift from the collective voice to the personal one but in the ways personal and subjective strategies are tied to reflections on the emotive and psychological realm of life and how this coincides with the rise of the culture of self-construction. Instead of conventionally historical, societal or political observations, more and more films – in terms of their perspective, approach and topic – have dealt with the area of emotions, family relations, questions of identity and individual growing pains. Also, in films which critically address political subject matters such as consumerism or global warming, especially films in which the filmmaker conducts a self-experiment, the ideal of individualism is conveyed by the narrative strategy. These films can be called political selfies: they position the self they construct at the epicenter of the ecological and sociopolitical catastrophes of the globalized world. Inspired by, for example, Chantal Mouffe's and Jacques Rancière's writings, this article scrutinizes the positioning of the political subjectivity these films suggest.

KEYWORDS:

• Documentary
• social documentary
• Finland
• post-political
• emotive

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The term creative documentary has been commonly used in European documentary film production culture since the early 2000s . IDFA, as the biggest documentary film festival in the world, has defined creative documentary as an art form which is ‘painstakingly designed and expresses the personal vision of the maker’. https://www.idfa.nl/industry/mission-statement.aspx

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susanna Helke

Notes on contributor

Susanna Helke is an award-winning documentary filmmaker (e.g. American Vagabond, 2013, Playground, 2010, The Idle Ones, 2001, White Sky, 1998, Sin, 1996). Her films have been screened at major film festivals such as IDFA (e.g. master section 2014), Hot Docs, Visions du Réel, Chicago International film festival, etc. She is presently employed as an associate professor and the director of the Critical Cinema Lab at the Film, Television and Scenography Department of Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.