What’s Wrong with Finnish Cinema? What’s this got to do with Canada?

This blog post from 2005 is a must-read, even if you’re only interested in Canadian cinema. Finland has similar problems to Canada in cinema and even though Canada has many more advantages (language, location, size, population, budget) but we only seem to use these advantages to produce films in higher quantities, not quality.

We’ll try to get the blog’s author to write a guest post here, a “Ten Years Later” type of thing.

Finally, if you’re interested in what’s wrong with Finnish cinema, Dutch cinema, wherever cinema, I recommend two things for you.

Firstly, read about the problems facing other countries. Don’t think the maladies of your nation’s cinema are unique to your country. It is highly likely that some other country faces the exact same problems and has some sort of solution. This can be difficult because of language issues, for example — A Dutchwoman wants to read up about the problems in Finnish cinema to see parallels with the industry in the Netherlands, but unfortunately most of the discussion will be in Finnish. This is the case with most countries in the world, since almost every country in the world has a “What’s wrong with our cinema?” discussion, but it’s in their own native tongue, leaving you with nothing but rare glimpses like these when a blogger decides to speak out in English.

Secondly, read this blog. Yes, if you’re interested in “What’s wrong with the cinema of (insert any country here)” you should read about Canadian cinema and its problems. It’s because here in Canada and in this blog in general, we’re closer to identifying the biggest problems. So, let’s say a citizen of country X (population 5 million) says “Maybe it’s because we’re too small to produce great films.” That’s a weak excuse — here in Canada we’re 40 million and we’re still producing crap and we still say “we’re a small country.” The citizen from X will say “People don’t like watching films in the X-ian language.” Well, here in Canada we make movies in English and still no one wants to watch them. Not even Canadians want to watch Canadian films anymore. Country X’s economy has had a difficult few years, but Canada is not a poor country, so filmmakers have money to put in film and filmgoers have money to go to the movies, but it’s still not working.

I’m not dismissing poverty, weak economy, population size, language or anything else as a legitimate mitigating factor, but it’s not a reason why people make bad films.

I was invited to a screening for a Canadian film that turned out to be terrible. The script was very bad and that in turn influenced everything. The domino effect is poor script results in poor dialogues which appears as poor acting (an actor doing a good job with bad lines still appears to us as a bad actor. We blame him for the lines) > which leads to poor character development (the character swings from non-responsive to theatrically overreacting > bad picture. The director is the producer, screenwriter and editor, which means that he had no boss nor colleague to correct him. Every weakness that was in the script was passed on to the next level, it was shot on the set and not cut out in the editing room — parts that should not have been in the script to begin with, but with no checks and balances, it made it all the way to the final cut.

Terrible film. If I were to ask the director (directatór) why he kept that terrible scene or why he spend all this time and money making such a bad film? Can he say “Listen, we’re a small country”? Can he say “We’re only 40 million people”? I’m asking you why you did such a poor job and you’re listing facts about Canada?

Canada is a great country with many top-notch professionals, but film is the only industry where people use “we’re a small country” as an excuse for failure. A surgeon won’t kill your grandfather on the operating table and then say “We’re only 40 million people” for his malpractice. A history professor won’t get her facts wrong in a lecture and say “We’re a small country.” A chef won’t undercook your dish and serve you with salmonella on a platter and point to the population size. Yet that’s the same tired, old excuse we use for why our films perform poorly. Our films perform poorly because they are bad films. There’s no secret.

Discussions about Canadian films quickly turn to population size, as if it were a game of chance, one million monkeys on one million typewriters and all that. But great works of film are based on collaboration, not sheer numbers and luck. Filmmaking is a team sport. Game of Thrones is a great show not because “someone got lucky” or because the US has a large population, but because an award-winning writer wrote an award-winning novel that was turned into a TV show, directed by an award-winning director, edited by an award-winning editor, scored by an award-winning composer and so on. No one person can make a great film all by himself/herself. An infinite amount of monkeys, typewriters and time will only result in an infinite amount of trash.

For all you folks from smaller countries, the problem is rarely population size (unless you’re from somewhere like Tuvalu). Canada’s larger population (compared to Finland) has only resulted in more crap than anyone could handle, to the point where many Canadians refuse to watch anything labelled Canadian.

This deserves a separate post, so I’ll leave you to read about Finland.