First Day and a Half in Helsinki

I took four planes and laid over in three cities – Cincinnati, Paris and Stockholm – to arrive in Finland. 22 combined hours of recycled air navigating glass walkways and squished in coach class.

The comforting sight of Peter and Olaf at the end of the train station in Helsinki made it all worthwhile.

Olaf Möller (left) and Peter von Bagh

Olaf, a film critic and curator from Cologne, I’ve known for the better part of the last decade. He’s the most omnivorous filmgoer on the planet – have a glance at his year-end lists in places like Sight & Sound and Senses of Cinema if you dare to question the assertion – and a polemicist whose rigorous aesthetic has a one-word definition (of his own invention, naturally): Ferronian.

Peter, a man of many caps, is one of those legendary figures that you hear and read about for years before you muster up the courage to approach (at least that was the case for me). I met him three years ago at one of the two festivals – Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna – where he acts as Artistic Director. The other is Midnight Sun in Sodankylä, where I’ll be heading for the first time tonight.

Peter is cut from the same cloth as Jonathan Rosenbaum (who introduced me to him), Robert Daudelin, Peter Kubelka, Freddy Buache, João Bénard da Costa, Miguel Marías, Peter Wollen, Charles Barr, Tom Luddy, and other critics, archive curators and festival programmers who began to devour cinema in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s and defended a passionate spirit of cinephilia in places where the very notion was often seriously impoverished.

Olaf and I are humbly following this lineage. Except that the playing field is changing rather drastically as we enter into an uncertain digital era. Film is disappearing and funding for archival maintenance and presentation is at a low point. Omnivores like like Olaf and myself may find in the next decade that our primary sources of nourishment have been depleted. 

Will our species survive? For the time being, we enjoy the privilege of attending a festival in the arctic circle (!) that projects almost entirely in 35mm. But those days seem numbered. More films are being shown digitally than ever before at this year's Il Cinema Ritrovato, and Peter has voiced his ambivalence about this. Yesterday at dinner he wondered aloud how long he will stick around now that this is the overwhelming reality that he has to face.

Peter has enjoyed repertory film (as in film) screening culture for over half a century. Unlikely that the next generation will have such an ample time span to luxuriate in the beauty of celluloid -- or, forgetting celluloid, to see much of anything from the first century of cinema beyond a thousand or so canonical titles on DCP. Anyone familiar with the challenges of digital archiving knows that the costs are daunting, and that studios and other smaller companies have and will likely continue to balk at the notion of preserving their precious assets at the current price tag.

Guys like Olaf have a lot urgent work ahead of them. How many people in 2050 will be able to say that they saw a Raoul Walsh silent in 35mm? 

The digital doomsday scenario that many are prognosticating can leave one exasperated, but it can also instill a veteran filmgoer with a new found sense of purpose. For the next 30 days I will attend five film festivals in five countries -- Midnight Sun, Edinburgh, Il Cinema Ritrovato, Karlovy Vary, and Marseille -- and I will try to remind myself at each and every screening how wonderfully lucky I am to be (t)here at this moment.

--

Tonight I head to Sodankylä where Midnight Sun takes place. It's a thousand kilometres north of Helsinki in the Arctic Circle. The sun never goes down and screenings go until 5am and then start back up at 10am. Joe Dante, Alan Rudolph, Harriet Andersson, Béla Tarr and others will be there. Olaf has told me about the reindeer kebab and the traffic light that always works even though there are no cars. Other than that, I don't know much about the place.

Peter generously let me camp out in his Helsinki office last night. For a few more hours I get to enjoy what is probably the largest and most impressive private collection of cinema books I have laid my eyes on:

I feel like a kid in a candy store.