10th June 2015 Peter von Bagh matinee: The Life and Deeds of Peter von Bagh

Producer-director Jouko Aaltonen, researcher Sakari Toiviainen in the background. (Image: Juho Liukkonen)

Miguel Marías, Bernard Eisenschitz and Olaf Möller. Image: Juho Liukkonen.

The 30th Midnight Sun Film Festival began with a commemorative matinee held in Cinema Lapinsuu in honour of the late Festival Director Peter von Bagh. In the Finnish part of the event, the festival’s Artistic Director Timo Malmi interviewed film researcher Sakari Toiviainen and director-producer Jouko Aaltonen, who had both been von Bagh’s working partners.

Discussing von Bagh, the foremost thing that came up was the amazing range of his roles from that of an internationally renowned critic to researcher and filmmaker. Von Bagh’s opus on Finnish art history, Song of Finland, received a special mention when Aki Kaurismäki came up to the stage and recommended that the book be included as a mandatory part of Finnish school syllabus. Aaltonen took note of von Bagh’s exceptional ability to perceive wide-ranging topics in his works.
 
Von Bagh’s working partners were of the opinion that his childhood in Oulu as well as the early passing of his mother partly explained the director’s productivity and cinephilia - for Peter, film clubs were a window to the world, as Sakari Toiviainen phrased. The director got his career in festival programming started early on in film clubs, eventually leading him to direct international film festivals. The panelists remembered von Bagh as someone who preferred to avoid bureaucracy and who as a director liked to allot responsibility and freedom to everyone.
 
Three of von Bagh’s early short films were presented in the matinee, including the student occupation film Vanhan valtaus (1968), in which, according to Toiviainen, there is already present the interplay of fact and fiction typical of von Bagh’s works. The political themes of this film reached their apex in the film Socialism, released last year. The conversation also touched on the recent digitalisation of film screenings, of which “Petteri” was strongly against. However, von Bagh valued the sense of community brought on by the cinema-experience even more highly than the correct screening format.
 
The second part of the matinee featured Olaf Möller interviewing critic Miguel Marías and film historian Bernard Eisenschitz on von Bagh’s body of work. The international guests partly emphasized the same aspects as their Finnish colleagues, praising von Bagh for his tireless productivity, insightful associations, wide-ranging erudition on different fields of art and history, as well as his part in making Finnish cinema known internationally.