In The Overlook, A.V. Club film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky examines the misfits, underappreciated gems, and underseen classics of film history.
“How can you wear a white wedding dress over your filthy body?”
—The Cross Of Love
In the pantheon of unclassifiable filmmakers, there is a special place for Teuvo Tulio, Finland’s king of shameless melodrama. A fetishist, an outsider artist of 1940s and ’50s film, he was outrageous, incapable of subtlety, rising to a higher plane of camp—beyond Ken Russell, beyond Nicolas Cage doing an accent, beyond Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. His films feature distorted, bug-eyed acting, sometimes petrified in ecstasy, equally redolent of silent cliffhanger serials and late-night infomercials; a camera style that deliriously scrambles silent Soviet and German cinema with smoky Hollywood glamour, while maintaining almost no continuity; plots that are as formulaic as they are insane. The paradox of Tulio is that...
“How can you wear a white wedding dress over your filthy body?”
—The Cross Of Love
In the pantheon of unclassifiable filmmakers, there is a special place for Teuvo Tulio, Finland’s king of shameless melodrama. A fetishist, an outsider artist of 1940s and ’50s film, he was outrageous, incapable of subtlety, rising to a higher plane of camp—beyond Ken Russell, beyond Nicolas Cage doing an accent, beyond Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. His films feature distorted, bug-eyed acting, sometimes petrified in ecstasy, equally redolent of silent cliffhanger serials and late-night infomercials; a camera style that deliriously scrambles silent Soviet and German cinema with smoky Hollywood glamour, while maintaining almost no continuity; plots that are as formulaic as they are insane. The paradox of Tulio is that...
- 1/17/2017
- by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- avclub.com
Teuvo Tulio's Lost Masterpieces, London
What? You've never heard of Teuvo Tulio? Where have you been? Clearly not in mid-century Finland, or you'd know all about this unsung, unorthodox auteur. A former silent screen idol, Tulio fashioned an unabashedly melodramatic style behind the camera (his heroes were Cukor, Lubitsch and Von Sternberg), oblivious to his own lack of budget or professionalism. His movies typically mix fallen women, country charmers, ripe rural imagery and social commentary, as shown in the four restored movies here, made between 1938 and 1946, with the series opening with In The Field Of Dreams. His influence can be detected in the works of Fassbinder, Guy Maddin and Aki Kaurismäki, some of whose films play alongside Tulio's here, plus Cukor's The Women.
Ica, SW1, Fri to 23 Dec
Dreams Of A Life Q&As, London
It's no understatement to describe Carol Morley's forthcoming documentary as one of the...
What? You've never heard of Teuvo Tulio? Where have you been? Clearly not in mid-century Finland, or you'd know all about this unsung, unorthodox auteur. A former silent screen idol, Tulio fashioned an unabashedly melodramatic style behind the camera (his heroes were Cukor, Lubitsch and Von Sternberg), oblivious to his own lack of budget or professionalism. His movies typically mix fallen women, country charmers, ripe rural imagery and social commentary, as shown in the four restored movies here, made between 1938 and 1946, with the series opening with In The Field Of Dreams. His influence can be detected in the works of Fassbinder, Guy Maddin and Aki Kaurismäki, some of whose films play alongside Tulio's here, plus Cukor's The Women.
Ica, SW1, Fri to 23 Dec
Dreams Of A Life Q&As, London
It's no understatement to describe Carol Morley's forthcoming documentary as one of the...
- 12/10/2011
- by Steve Rose
- The Guardian - Film News
Above: a publicity still from Avoveteen (1938), the absent inspiration behind this retrospective.
When Simon Popek of the Ljubljana International Film Festival invited us to present a carte blanche at these year's edition (November 9th - 20th), our first thoughts went into totally different directions from the one we finally followed. Problem was: Once we got going, the going... To cut a long story short: We either ended up with programs that were too complex and huge to do inside Simon's parameters (six slots; majority of films should be from Europe) or long lists of titles that didn't add up to anything varied, inspiring and fun.
Then, it hit us: Let's do a carte blanche like probably nobody ever did before. Normally, it works like this: The honoree shows a bunch of generally well-known and -respected films, plus maybe—maybe—one slightly less-known item. Now, what would be the opposite of that?...
When Simon Popek of the Ljubljana International Film Festival invited us to present a carte blanche at these year's edition (November 9th - 20th), our first thoughts went into totally different directions from the one we finally followed. Problem was: Once we got going, the going... To cut a long story short: We either ended up with programs that were too complex and huge to do inside Simon's parameters (six slots; majority of films should be from Europe) or long lists of titles that didn't add up to anything varied, inspiring and fun.
Then, it hit us: Let's do a carte blanche like probably nobody ever did before. Normally, it works like this: The honoree shows a bunch of generally well-known and -respected films, plus maybe—maybe—one slightly less-known item. Now, what would be the opposite of that?...
- 11/4/2011
- MUBI
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