No Nordic director since Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller has communicated the influence of Nature on human lives so profoundly as Rauni Mollberg has done in his feature films.

Mollberg’s art flows from the Finnish landscape. His characters move not against the backdrop of field and lake and forest, but deep within that enveloping topography. They are born, they perish, and through the cycle of the seasons they undergo a process of spiritual growth and awareness -- all registered uniquely in terms of the cinema.

A Mollberg film grips us from the opening shot. His signature is unmistakable: the roving, subjective camera; the trance-like gaze of the actors; the mysterious, seething texture of the soundtrack. Dialogue never swamps the imagery in Mollberg’s cinema. His country folk stand guard over their words with the same frugal austerity as they do their food and drink.

Mollberg was over forty years of age when he directed his first feature for the big screen, Maa on syntinen laulu, in 1973. It proved an instant hit with Finnish audiences, drawing more than 700,000 spectators, and raced around the international festival circuit. I came to Helsinki to write about it for the Financial Times. Of course there had been other Finnish directors of considerable interest -- Erik Blomberg, Matti Kassila, Valentin Vaala, Risto Jarva and others. But Molle’s film seemed to throb with a new energy and intensity. I felt that here was a turning point in the history of Finnish cinema.

Prior to 1973, Mollberg had established a high reputation for his TV films. These included two adaptations of the fiction of Toivo Pekkanen, My Childhood and In the Shadow of the Factory. Both signified Mollberg’s political commitment, but in retrospect they are more important for the development of the director’s distinctive visual style. The camera tends to gaze down into people’s grave, disturbed, troubled faces from slightly above eye level. His characters, even when young, move heavily as though sleep-walking, weighed down by the burden of life. Actors inexpressive and pedestrian in other films are, with Mollberg, impassioned. In his capacity for "reading" and charting the human face on camera, Mollberg has only one peer, Ingmar Bergman, with Jan Troell an honourable runner-up.

Sunlight is so vital in Mollberg’s cinema. In the second part of Shadow of the Factory, there’s a shot of the young man looking at the sun through an empty juice can -- the sun is a life-giving force of palpable strength in Mollberg. The great, remorseless wheels of the old factory turn and turn, while the shrill shriek of chains and metal suggest the pain of physical labour. All this is relieved only by the sexuality of the dance one night at a local hall.

Mollberg made another memorable featurette for television that deserves mention today. Entitled The War Hermit, it was about an elderly villager caught up in the war against the Soviet Union. There are only a few lines of dialogue. The impact of the film comes from the reaction of the ailing man to his solitude and his snowbound environment. The man’s face is a kind of road map. In Molle’s world, each man is an island unto himself.

Timo Mukka, a kind of Finnish D.H. Lawrence, was only nineteen when he published Maa on syntinen laulu in 1964. He died less than ten years later. Like Lawrence, Mukka stressed the sexual drives that lurk behind human behaviour -- drives so strong that they cannot be stemmed, either by religious repression or by social indignation. Siskonranta, in southern Lapland, is an island in time, an archetypal community untouched by such modern inventions as the car or the aeroplane.

Life in this remote village is a ritual, a jeremiad of pain and despair, lit only by brief sparks of pleasure that the villagers snatch without thought for cost or consequence. Martta, the nineteen-year-old heroine, played so engagingly by Maritta Viitamäki, grows up in this atmosphere and tries to preserve a romantic vision of things. When a Lapp reindeer herdsman visits the area, Martta is smitten with desire. There is a brief, hectic exchange of ardour with none of the niceties of "courtship" that belong to another, unknown world beyond the horizon of Siskonranta. Soon Martta realises that she is pregnant. Her father, Jussi, sunk in bitterness and alcoholic misery, pursues the Lapp to his death in a frozen lake. Subsequently he hangs himself out of remorse. Martta’s appealing naivety is clouded with disillusionment. There is, however, some fleck of optimism in the film’s dark grain. Hannes, the foster-son, refuses the alcohol offered him by Jussi, and even though he has been seduced by Martta he survives the film as a hope for the future -- along with Martta’s baby, just as the baby holds hope for the future at the close of Molle’s later film, Ystävät. toverit.

Mollberg’s achievement in Maa on syntinen laulu is this: he has gone straight to the pulse of the matter without relying on a pretentious, schematic approach. Death comes to the inhabitants of Siskonranta as unaffectedly as it does to the reindeer, despatched as they are with a single, expert blow in the corral. The old folk cast long, envious glances back at their own youth, mirrored in Martta and her lover. Alcohol is there as the perpetual salve, of course, and the church still threatens the village sinners with fire and brimstone. But it’s Nature that decrees the course and the necessities of existence in this community. A dance takes place in the moist, almost luminous air of early evening, unifying landscape and human beings in a weave of colour and shadow like some Anders Zorn painting come to life. The single cow is the vital source of nourishment to each household, as in Mikko Niskanen’s Kahdeksan surmanluotia -- a film that shares many elements with Maa on syntinen laulu.

When, in one of the film’s most gruesome scenes, a still-born calf has to be dismembered and removed from a cow’s womb, in an ill-lit cabin, the sense of loss is overwhelming. The memory of this sequence filters through Molle’s film, dictating a mood of death and anguish. Life is primitive in its demands. The precipice seems to lie just beyond the borders of each composition, each frame. The building of coffins is routine work for the Mäkelä family, part of the texture of life. The weary stallion trudges through the snow, dragging the long white box with familiar trust. In such moments, Mollberg rises to the level of the greatest Nordic historical novelists, such as Sigrid Undset and her epic Kristin Lavransdatter.

Beneath the pretty pictures, moreover, Mollberg makes us aware of something far more disturbing. Like the English novelist Thomas Hardy, he sees his country folk shifting to the tune of some invisible, unfathomed spiritual force. It is a ceaseless cadence, a rhythm obeyed instinctively by everyone. It is there in lighter moments, such as the interlude in the sauna, with Martta thrashing the gleaming bodies of the men with the birch twigs. But it is also dominant in a more frightening guise among the religious congregation. As the preacher harangues the inhabitants of the village, they begin -- one by one -- to stamp the floor with their feet, until the sound becomes all-pervasive -- a weird, searing communion of protest that, little by little, is transformed into a primordial orgy. Even the pastor must submit to this relentless natural summons.

The film was made under difficult conditions. Lapland possesses a population density of a mere five persons per square mile. At the time Molle and his crew shot the film, there was still no road leading to Siskonranta. The crew had to haul their equipment over the rough terrain at a rate of only ten kilometres a day. Some sequences were shot in temperatures on around 40 degrees below zero. Cameras had to be dragged over snowfields, a metre deep. Many of the characters were played by genuine Lapps. The result is that the film possesses an authenticity, and a muscular strength, that recalls Valkoinen peura, perhaps the only Finnish production of comparable epic status.

Some foreign critics reacted with shock to the poverty described by Molle in Maa on syntinen laulu. But the director asserts that it is, and I quote, "In no sense a film about Lapland. Of course it describes Lapps and their life, but the themes are universally human. I have made a film about feeling and emotions. Today, our world of feelings is being narrowed down: it is the technocrats who manage things, and deep human emotions are left in the background -- in Mukka’s text they emerge strong, and fresh." Unquote.

Milka, made in 1980, was also based on a novel by Timo K. Mukka. It follows the spiritual yearning, and the sexual awakening, of a young girl in the Lapp forests. She and her widowed mother both fall under the spell of the same man, who is appropriately -- and quite seriously -- called "Christ-Devil." Irma Huntus as the farmer’s daughter gives a performance of translucent ardour. Mollberg inspires her, as he does Maritta Niitamäki in Maa on syntinen laulu -- encourages her to live her character without succumbing to the self-conscious style of the Actors’ Studio.

The religious undertones of Milka may be detected not only in the names of certain characters, but also in the devout, incantatory flow of the conversations. The borderline between what Milka believes and what actually occurs, finally vanishes altogether. By the close of the film, Milka has come to terms with reality, and bears the child of "Christ-Devil." Parturition acquires in a Mollberg movie something of considerable significance. The birth of Milka’s son is like the surging up of the water at the end of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring -- another work that intertwines the sacred and the profane. It also recalls the arrival of Martta’s baby in Maa on sytinen laulu.

In 1977, Mollberg had directed an altogether sunnier film, entitled Alka hyvä ihmiseksi. His inspiration was a book and play by "Aapeli" (the pseudonym of Simo Puupponen). It was called "Peter’s Courtyard," and it was set in a small Finnish town during the Prohibition era of the 1920’s. A woman arrives in this community, and resolves to improve the lives of its inhabitants. But she finds that there is no room for an "angel" in this gallery of perennial misfits and outsiders.

Mollberg has never been attracted by the prosperous, bourgeois, city-dwellers to be found in so many modern Finnish movies. In their bucolic circumstances, Mollberg’s people remain in closer touch with the essential cadence of life much more intensely than they would ever be in an urban milieu. In Milka, for example, practically every shot begins on a close-up of a tree or natural object before the camera tracks away to discover a human being in its path.

Tuntematon sotilas, which appeared in 1985, proved almost as popular as Maa on syntinen laulu, with attendances of some 600,000 in Finland alone. Väinö Linna’s novel about a platoon of young soldiers in the bitter Continuation War against the Soviet Union had already been made into a hugely successful film by Edvin Laine. Thirty years later, Molle took up the challenge of adapting Tuntematon for a new generation -- a generation no longer stirred by patriotic fervour, and to which the clatter of guns was only a distant folk memory. A generation, too, that had been influenced by the images of war from Vietnam, Biafra, and Angola.

Molle boldly selected a group of young and inexperienced actors, and kept them together for more than a year, rather as Peter Jackson did recently with his cast for Lord of the Rings in New Zealand. In this way we can observe their ageing and maturing on screen during the movie, literally. Caught up in the remorseless wheels of war, the youngsters find time for drinking, joking, swindling, and heroics. The film begins and ends on similar, haunting images -- the bare, vulnerable chests of young troops. In the first shot they pulse with life, and are injected by the army doctor as part of the induction process. In the closing shot they lie inanimate on a crude cart, just two of the thousands of corpses destroyed in the havoc of battle.

Molle remained unerringly faithful to Linna’s novel. The pithiest dialogue and the most dramatic incidents are rendered on screen precisely as they are in the pages of the book. And Mollberg echoes Linna’s fundamental sentiment -- that war is an almighty folly that engulfs the ordinary soldier and sends him scurrying hither and thither at the command of crass and arrogant officers. Only one other Nordic film communicates so well this sense of confusion and rout, and that is Bergman’s Skammen. For both Bergman and Mollberg, the most terrifying and unforgivable price of war is the effect on the individual’s psyche. Bravery is contorted into sadism, respect degenerates into scorn and loathing.

The physical attrition of battle is brilliantly presented by Molle. These soldiers had no recourse to airstrikes and napalm, nor did they boast an innate skill at guerrilla tactics of the kind that enabled the wily Vietcong to castrate the mighty US army. Time and again, Russian tanks burst through the Finnish lines -- yet we never see a Finnish tank -- indeed no armour to speak of at all. Even the Colonel drives round in a battered saloon car. Machine-guns are borne clumsily over the snow and through the forests. Rations are frugal. Clothing inadequate. Horses are used to transport the dead and wounded.

Taking his cue from the terrain, Molle has allowed green to dominate the chromatic scale of his film. Green is the eternal colour of sickness and fear, of young trees and foliage, of immaturity -- and death.

Human dignity is the first casualty in war. Two events from Tuntematon illustrate this point with terrifying efficiency. In a cold, snow-clad dawn, two soldiers are shot for insubordination. They stand in the shelter of a rural hut. One has grabbed a final cigarette and has refused a blindfold. The other averts his gaze, and trembles with fear. The law has condemned them -- for what? Refusing to obey orders for the umpteenth time? To behave like guinea pigs who twist and turn at their masters’ whim? Then, in the infernal retreat from the Eastern front, an ambulance comes under fire from enemy troops. Shrieking and groaning with agony, the wounded men stagger out of a blazing vehicle, only to be mown down like animals. Few sights in the cinema are so repellent as this brutal violation of the Red Cross ideal. Not for Mollberg the gentlemanly behaviour of Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion or David Lean’s In Which We Serve. War respects no codes, and the devil takes the hindmost.

How ironic, and how laudable, that Molle, in describing a war that really did involve the Russians, has refused even a sop to traditional Finnish sisu and patriotism. The "enemy" becomes not so much the Evil Empire of the Soviets as the faceless politicians who have smashed everyone’s world to fragments.

Tuntematon sotilas becomes a seamless nightmare, relieved only by occasional flashes of humour, and a long central sequence showing the men boozing and relaxing. No stirring music in the Hollywood tradition -- not even the strains of Sibelius’s Finlandia, which brought Edvin Laine’s 1955 version to a cathartic close. Esa Vuorinen’s camera seems tied to the troops as they trudge through the woods or dash for cover while under fire. This is the sort of camerawork Robert Capa might have achieved had he worked with motion pictures instead of still photographs.

The audience can never afford the luxury of contemplation: it is compelled to identify with the common soldiers, with Rokka, Koskela, Rahikainen and the rest. To share their confusion and panic, their drunken capers and their startling, unforgivable deaths. And the film demonstrates that however a man dies in war, he dies in an ugly, appalling manner, something we see every few days in Iraq these months and days. The powerful message of Molle’s movie is that, once unleashed, war rides like a juggernaut through the lives of ordinary people. War itself is more dangerous than the weapons at its command. He himself has said, and I quote: "I wanted to destroy the clichés of the war movie genre. The ghastliness is not so much the limbs flying in all directions as the way people’s features change beneath the duress of war over a four-year spell." Unquote

So Mollberg’s Tuntematon radiates a powerful humanism and pacifism not acknowledged by many older Finns, who still preferred the robust humour and zesty, vernacular virtues of the Edvin Laine version. But then no film by Rauni Mollberg offers a comfortable ride. And for all the agony of the frontline fighting, the forest and the lakes and the fields survive at the end of all Mollberg’s work. No pessimism can take root while the sun gleams on water and the virgin snow envelops the countryside, and the birds rustle and sing unseen in the woods. The soldiers come and go like a species, and for Mollberg the human animal remains the most precious of all earth’s possessions, an enigma worthy of endless scrutiny and compassion.

The fall of Saddam Hussein has given a new zing to Molle’s other major film, Ystävät, toverit, released in the early nineteen-nineties. Its ostensible theme of an arms magnate enjoying the tribute of East and West, Fascist and liberal, friend and foe, is in the end less significant than the craving for natural fulfilment that runs through the film like a powerful current through water.

Arno Jurmala, lord of his Lapland domain, extracts millions of tonnes of ore from the fells, creating ammunition for the likes of Hitler, Franco, Churchill, and the oh-so-neutral Swedes. Like Coppola’s Godfather, Jurmala regards the world in terms of Family, and everyone has his price. Behind the exotic celebrations that mark his birthday at the start of the film, there lies a dark cloud of intrigue and coercion. Like the Godfather, too, Jurmala never kills with his own hands. His gory crimes are performed by others, at his discreet command.

At the heart of Ystävät, toverit, however, stands a more fascinating personality even than Jurmala. Lisa, played by Stina Ekblad, is the magnate’s wife. She dreams of giving birth to a son, of complying with the eternal rhythm of the Nature she sees and appreciates all around her.

Mollberg’s taste for the ironic aside, as well as the earthy humour familiar from his previous films, embellishes Ystävät, toverit, even after the slaughter and annihilation of war have left their mark on this Nordic landscape. For Molle, of course, Nature has her own means of purging such desecration, and images one cherishes from this film remain those of open skies and undulating fells.

Molle’s work is important in 2004 because, although set in a Nordic environment, it has a relevance to universal issues. Armed conflict continues to rage across the globe, in Africa, in the Middle East, Latin America, even, during the 1990’s, in our own continent. Unemployment is high in many countries. The migration to the cities has left whole areas of the countryside moored in a crumbling past. Molle’s films address these problems in a profound, humanist way. His work must be shown, and shown again, so that each new generation can discover his wit and wisdom afresh.

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© Copyright Peter Cowie 2004. No part of this article may be reprinted without permission of the author.
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