Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions
Anu Koivunen
Literature & Fiction
Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions
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Films are integral to national imagination. Promotional publicity markets “domestic films” not only as entertaining, exciting, or moving, but also as topical and relevant in different ways. Reviewers assess new films with reference to other films and cultural products as well as social and political issues. Through such interpretive framings by contemporaries and later generations, popular cinema is embedded both in national imagination and endless intertextual and intermedial frameworks. Moreover, films themselves become signs to be cited and recycled as illustrations of cultural, social, and political history as well as national mentality. In the age of television, “old films” continue to live as history and memory.

In Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions, Anu Koivunen analyzes the historicity as well as the intertextuality and intermediality of film reception by focusing on a cycle of Finnish family melodrama and its key role in thinking about gender, sexuality, nation, and history. Close-reading posters, advertisements, publicity-stills, trailers, review journalism, and critical commentary, she demonstrates how The Women of Niskavuori (1938 and 1958), Loviisa (1946), Heta Niskavuori (1952), Aarne Niskavuori (1954), Niskavuori Fights (1957), and Niskavuori (1984) have operated as sites for imagining “our agrarian past”, our Heimat and heritage as well as “the strong Finnish woman” or “the weak man in crisis”. Based on extensive empirical research, Koivunen argues that the Niskavuori films have mobilized readings in terms of history and memory, feminist nationalism and men’s movement, left-wing allegories and right-wing morality as well as realism and melodrama. Through processes of citation, repetition, and re-cycling the films have acquired not only a heterogeneous and contradictory interpretive legacy, but also an affective force.

This book is part of the Studia Fennica Historica series.

Language
English
ISBN
951-746-544-0
Performative Histories, Foundational Fictions
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: PERFORMATIVE FRAMINGS, FOUNDATIONAL FICTIONS
Prologue: from Niskavuori to Tara
Public fantasies across the cultural screen: questions and aims
Exploring the “given-to-be-seen”: the theory
Performativity and film studies: the background
Interpretive framings, narrative images: the method
The roots and routes of Niskavuori: the intermedial framework
The sites of framing: the research material
Outline of the book
THE ARCHIVE – NISKAVUORI AS HERITAGE AND HEIMAT
Anathema to history? Niskavuori films in the televisual age
Versions of history
Television as a history machine
A heritage experience: Niskavuori (1984)
The making of national cinema
Museum aesthetics: simulating heritage
Remembering Heimat: post-war Niskavuori films
History or memory: Niskavuori Fights (1957)
Blut und Boden: Aarne Niskavuori (1954)
Picturing the homeland: Loviisa (1946) and Aarne Niskavuori (1954)
Heimat as history and memory
In the beginning there was history
THE MONUMENT-WOMAN: MATRON, MOTHER, MATRIARCH, AND MONSTER
A modern monument to tradition: The Women of Niskavuori (1938)
The power and persistence of tradition
The secret warmth underneath
Monumental, memorial, museal – modern
The monumental “Finnish woman”
The making of the monument, or becoming-a-woman in Loviisa (1946)
The “Finnish woman”: peasant, national, and feminist
Mother Earth: Aarne Niskavuori (1954)
Matriarch and monster: deconstructing the monument in the 1950s
Cornerstone of the propertied class
Masculine women, pathological “(s)mothers”
Power-figures and she-devils: Louhi, Loviisa, and Heta Niskavuori (1952)
From doubling to splitting: postulating authorial intentions
A rye dynasty: matron or mafioso?
Parodic reiterations: Pohjavuorelaisia (1972)
Seductions of the monument
THE MAN-IN-CRISIS: FROM THE WEAK MAN TO THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY
Protect the Finnish man! Aarne and Juhani Niskavuori in the age of television
The unhappy Oedipus in The Women of Niskavuori (1938)
Half peasant, half gentleman
The sovereign man: Tauno Palo as the spectacular lover
Rehabilitating manhood: The prodigal son and the missing father
Niskavuori is a male tragedy!
Akusti as the missing father
The Subject of history: The narrative re-focalization in the 1980
SEXUAL POLITICS: PASSION, REPRESSION, AND TRANSGRESSION
Reading against the grain: reading repression in the 1990s and 1980s
The decades of innocence and the stubborn drive
The gendered and classed grammar of nation
Malviina
Siipirikko, the Broken-Winged
Steward
The first reception: The Women of Niskavuori (1936, 1938) and the cultural crisis
A drama of ideas or a marital drama?
A new woman
The hysterical wife
The fallen peasant and other scandals: re-viewing the censorship debate
Appropriating censorship
The lure of lyricism, or the cinematic sex appeal
Passion without politics? Readings of Niskavuori as soap opera
Haunting signatures: framing the authorial legend
RE-CITABLE LEGACIES, MELODRAMATIC PLEASURES
Re-citable legacies
Melodramatic pleasures
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Primary research material
Appendix 1: Niskavuori films (1938—1984)
Appendix 2: The Niskavuori story on radio and television (1945–2000)
Appendix 3: Niskavuori plays in theatres (1936—2000)
Appendix 4: Review journalism and articles in newspapers, popular magazines and trade press
Appendix 5: Archival sources (trailers, posters, programme leaflets, pr-material)
Appendix 6: Other published material on Hella Wuolijoki and Niskavuori plays and films
Appendix 7: List of audiovisual citations
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