“One gets the sense with The Art of War that Sun Tzu saw it as a vital part of his own strategy for personal survival, offering dire warnings to belligerent princelings that war was never to be taken lightly, and only considered as the last possible resort. There is an entire chapter on ‘Espionage’, not merely in a tactical sense for reconnaissance, but in terms of embedded assets within rival kingdoms, misinformation campaigns and double agents. Sun Tzu would do literally anything to prevent a war, and is not above sending a suicide mission to off an enemy leader before trouble begins. It will, he notes, save lives elsewhere.”
Star-crossed lovers Aliina (the ever-radiant Irma Seikkula) and Jalmari (Olavi Reimas) are separated by Aliina’s stern father Mr Jarvela (Väinö Sola), who thinks that his daughter can do better than a miller’s son. Sure enough, Aliina soon gains a new suitor in the form of the elderly widower Elias (Edvin Laine), a man from the next village who has pots of cash.
Realising that she is pregnant, Aliina gives in to Elias’s entreaties. Working at a distant saw mill, Jalmari hears that Aliina has got married and had a son, and returns, despondent to his home district, where he gets a job at Elias’s mill. There, he must fight off the predatory minx Kerttu (the relentlessly sassy Kirsi Hurme, in highly unconvincing braids), as well as the flirty Maija-Liisa (Tuire Orri), who is only chasing him to make her boyfriend jealous.
But it’s Aliina who he truly loves, and he begins seeing her again in secret. The jilted Kerttu tells her boyfriend to reveal the affair to Elias, to get Jalmari fired and take his job. A broken-hearted, vengeful Elias finds the lovers inside the mill’s wheelhouse, and locks them in, hoping to drown them when he opens the sluice gate. But his scheme is thwarted when Kerttu realises the consequences of her actions and organises a rescue.
Elias banishes his wayward wife, granting her only wish – a little cottage with Jalmari and their child. His sister Etla (Anni Aitto) offers words of comfort that are an inversion of the ending of The Women of Niskavuori (1938), telling him: “The young are young, the old must give way. The law of life is merciless. The harvest will increase. Then even the quiet hum of the old mill will continue.”
You would think that the Finns would have had enough of the rural-woman-with-illegitimate-child-reunited-with-true-love cliché, but this adaptation of Lauri Haarla’s 1942 stage play Keinu-morsian adds another one to the pile, despite its similarity to his earlier Scorned (1939) and God’s Storm (1940). Martti Larni’s script expands the original with a few action-packed exteriors of farm life and a funfair, but Suomen Filmiteollisuus hedged its bets by premiering the film in rural cinemas, ahead of its “first” night in That Fancy Helsinki.
Haarla finished the original script “while air-raid sirens were wailing in Helsinki”, and some of the press at the time noticed the palliative effect of a pastoral drama when audiences had other problems they wanted to forget. Despite panning the film as a waste of time, Paula Talaskivi in the Helsingin Sanomat noted: “Eino Heino’s camera has captured within its frame the rural views that constantly captivate my eyes and the brightness of summer nature.”
Eight decades on, the camerawork remains the most striking thing about it, including an opening shot in which the happy lovers on a swing remain static while the entire world spins around them. The forest scenes, too, are shot in natural Finnish light, with the skies ablaze but the foregrounds often shrouded in shadow because of the low sun. Lakes are shot with painterly indulgence, and dockside scenes bustle with documentary urgency. Then and now, Valentin Vaala’s film plays like a keepsake of a past that had already gone, and yet which looms so largely in the family backgrounds of many Finns, for whom the lakes and forests of their ancestry are never all that far away.
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Short History of Finland. He is watching all the Finnish films so you don’t have to.
It’s 2026, the year of pointy shoulders, the year of a man painted silver, standing inside a Darth Vader silhouette, singing that he wants more. The year in which Britain sings in German, and in which hosts Austria’s “My Lovely Horse” entry to avoid winning again includes a man with a blue star on his face, and people with animal heads. And in which Finland is the bookies’ favourite, because they’ve got a blonde playing the violin and a man singing inside a burning sauna.
Step One: you will probably need to be quite drunk. Step Two: The following sights and sounds will occur during this Saturday’s Eurovision Song Contest. Can you spot them first? Remember to shout it out. As ever, there is more than one key change, and plenty of orbital cleavage. Keep your eyes (or ears) open for any of the following. And when you notice it, SHOUT IT OUT! Points can be scored all through the contest, on and off stage, including during the voting and in the greenroom, and there are quite a few to look for in the background video, too.
Golden glittery piano
Sudden angel wings
Starting upside down
Number 373 (it’s an area code)
FLAME ON! (every time there’s flames)
Giant opera singer
Glowing white spaghetti
Singing in a face mask
KEY CHANGE!
Hands make a heart
SWORD!
The slowmo backing dancers
COSTUME CHANGE
Lyrics: “You’re in my head, my heart, my body part.”
Neon gazebo
Scooter!
The Matrix backing dancers
Hands through the stage!
Onstage knitting
Singing to a pocket watch
Danes in a box
Greek statue comes to life
Fireman’s pole
Singing inside a giant gemstone
Backflip
Suddenly she’s wearing shades
WINKING!
A white witch hovering off the ground
Chair dancing
Imaginary bouzouki solo
Onstage Bacofoil box
One Thigh-high
Bimbling*
Orbital cleavage**
Buddha Jazz Hands***
Someone says “Jaja Dingdong!” — An oldie but a goodie, liable to crop up during the voting.
Greece awards 12 points to Cyprus / Former Yugoslavian Republic awards 12 points to Former Yugoslavian Republic.
(*swaying one’s head from side to side in a snakey fashion) (**ostentatious cleavage sufficient to see from a satellite in orbit, which, according to Eurovision bra consultant Tom Clancy, requires a minimum of C-cup)
(***the dancers all pile behind the singer in a line and then fling their arms out, creating a multi-limbed oriental deity-look)
[Credits Roll into the Sea] has a lovely high concept, of a woman who believes that she has no story, but really wants to make one happen before she dies. The title of John Tarachine’s manga has a pun concealed within it. The “Umi” could mean ocean, but here it is also the name of our heroine, Umiko, a 65-year-old widow who is seized, after a lifetime of movie-watching, with the inspiration that she wants to make a film before she dies. Tarachine’s manga is a lovely evocation of the creative arts and the creative mind, starting with a woman who has never done anything before, immediately thrown off by the need to actually have an idea. Not even knowing what kind of film she wants to make, she heads off to the cinema to watch The Old Man and the Sea, where she runs into the androgynous and occasionally cross-dressing film student Kai Hamauchi.
The encounter with Kai introduces Umiko to a whole world of people just waiting for success in the arts, and to the fact that nobody is going to hand her a producer’s title on a plate. A producer needs to find the money, have the idea, sort out the script, find the actors, scout the locations… suddenly Umiko’s twilight years are vibrantly busy, and the whole thing is a touching memorial to her late husband, whom she first met on a date to the movies.
Repeatedly, Tarachine pokes around the fine line in media mogulship between getting stuff done and just goofing off. Is Umiko a dabbling dilettante or a producer in waiting? Is she having a cheesecake in a café with her mate, or is she investigating the possibility of a funding proposition? Is she off on a pointless daytrip with Kai, or is she scouting a location? One day, this might all turn into a movie… or nothing. It’s a lovely investigation of the literal glamour of movie magic.
Extracted from my Manga Snapshot article on Mystery Bonita magazine, from NEO #224, 2022. Credits Roll into the Sea will be released as an animated feature in 2027.
“His first novel, Paradise, is a ‘genetic’ romance, in which two star-crossed prehistoric lovers are separated by the Bering Strait, only for their distant descendants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be reunited by some strange attraction and hereditary memory. However, it was with Ring, a supernatural detective drama, that Suzuki first found true success. Combining an eerie sense of the time abyss of the Japanese countryside, in which modern comforts are written only lightly over centuries of tradition and secrets, with one of fiction’s most perfect basilisks, it posits a ‘haunted’ scrap of film that will strike its viewer dead unless it is shown to another, hence passing on the ‘curse’.”
Fittingly on David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, I stumble across a podcast that latches onto the “history as a calendar year” analogy that I stole from Life on Earth.
It even comes with a bunch of nifty, and I am guessing, A.I.-generated infographics to summarise the book. But who are these anonymous podcasters? Could this be the first review of my work delivered by robots?
The Emperor Meiji tried to draw a line under the seditious leanings of some of those in his service. Pointedly, in 1879, he changed the name of the “Tokyo Shrine to Summon the Spirits” to the “Shrine to Quiet the State” (Yasukuni Jinja). Like many of the other classical Chinese allusions in 19th-century Japanese politics, this reference tends to be cited out of context, without much consideration of the text being quoted. In the original Chinese, the term is found in an official’s defence of his decision to put a soldier into a government position:
“I have done it to secure the quiet of the State. When you have men who have rendered great service, and you do not give them the noblest offices, are they likely to remain quiet? There are few who can do so.”
Amid the songs of the 1930s, one stands out not for its musical or lyrical achievement, but for its tone. “Mother at the Nine Steps” (Kudan no Haha, 1939) was written for the spring ceremony at the Yasukuni Shrine, where the newest war dead would be ceremonially accepted into its halls. The song tells the story of a lady from the provinces, coming to the Nine-stepped Hill (Kudanzaka) that leads to the venue:
From Ueno Station to the Nine Steps
Frustrated by unfamiliar places
Taking a whole day and relying on my walking stick
I’ve come to see you, Son.
A large gate that can reach the sky
What an honor to be enshrined
In such a magnificent place as a god.
Your mother is shedding tears of joy.
I put my hands together kneeling
I find myself chanting a prayer to the Buddha.
I am taken aback and flustered.
Sorry, Son, I’m such a yokel.
Just like a kite giving birth to a hawk
I appreciate how fortunate I am.
Just to show you your Order of the Golden Kite
I’ve come all the way to Kudanzaka.
It seems oddly ungracious to ridicule a bereaved mother for being a “yokel”, like she hasn’t suffered enough. But for music historian Osada Gyoji, that is part of the song’s subversive appeal. We have gone, in the space of two years, from the unlikely sight of mothers waving off their sons “without tears,” to this broken old woman in the big city shedding tears that are plainly not “of joy” at all, but continuing to put a brave face on her personal desolation.
“The verb for beheading, in this context, retains a visceral sense of the battlefield – it is not the stark, slashing kiru of a ritual execution, but the unpleasant, gritty kubinejikiru, literally, ‘head twisting off and cutting’, wrenching the head from the neck with the aid of a dagger or butcher’s knife.”
Sorry if it’s a bit quiet on the blog at the moment, but I am literally all at sea, onboard the MS Westerdam on a two-week circumnavigation of Japan. I’m this voyage’s designated expert with Road Scholar, a company that “enriches” travellers’ experiences by forcing them to spend time with me, something that readers of this blog get for free. I’ve been lecturing about the samurai and the history of Japanese food, and squiring people around castles and tea farms, sake breweries and museums. This week alone, I’ve soaked in the hot springs at Arima, shouted myself hoarse at a sumo wrestling match, and joined in the celebrations in Kochi when the locals discovered they’d struck the tourist jackpot by becoming the subject of the just-announced 2028 NHK taiga drama.
“Nobly deciding to film in the location where the original novel was set, Zhang Yimou was disappointed to discover that the locals had stopped growing sorghum altogether, instead preferring more lucrative cash crops like peanuts. In order to match the novel’s descriptions of tall, waving gaoliang grass, he would have to pay the locals to actually plant some, and so as the script was being written, farmers in Shandong were being paid to sow sorghum seeds on sixteen acres of waste ground.
“Shooting was delayed by almost a month, when Zhang and his crew returned to the area to find that the farmers had neglected to water the fields – sorghum can be a fast-growing crop, but it is thirsty, and the crew had to spend several weeks tending to it, while the production money bled on a daily basis.
“Mo Yan’s original novel ends in the present day of its composition – the 1980s – with the narrator visiting his family graves, and fuming at the sight of a new, modern form of sorghum. He angrily berates the locals for bringing in ugly, squat hybrid sorghum from Hainan far to the south.
“Hybrid sorghum is a high-yield crop, but tastes awful, causes constipation and, most importantly isn’t red. To Zhang Yimou’s great horror, his tame farmers had sown eight acres with the wrong kind of grass…”
From my video essay in the new Blu-ray of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, coming in July from Whole Grain Pictures (US).
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 