ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio: An Excessive Outsider

by Henry Bacon, Kimmo Laine, Jaakko Seppälä

Overview

Teuvo Tulio (1912–2000) was one of the most original directors in Finnish film history. Growing up in the newly independent Finland, he lived most of his life in the Finnish cultural and social context, yet he always remained something of an outsider and ended up as a total recluse.
This is the first English-language collection on this innovative director, exploring Tulio’s unique style and the extent, and effect of his obsessive recirculation of story elements and stylistic patterns in his work. A range of international scholars analyse how Tulio created his own brand of excessive melodrama, and follow the strange trajectory of his career from within the studio system to the outsider status of an independent producer-director.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474442183
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	05/30/2022
Series:	ReFocus: The International Directors Series
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.49(d)

About the Author

Professor Henry Bacon is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Helsinki

Kimmo Laine is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Turku. He is the co-author (with Henry Bacon and Jaakko Seppälä) of ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio (Edinburgh UniversityPress, 2020).

Dr Jaakko Seppälä is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Helsinki.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Tulio and traditions of melodrama

3. Biography of an Outsider

4. Outsider as an independent filmmaker

5. All that melodrama allows –Tulio’s films and their principal themes

6. Exploring a style of passion

7. Art of repetition

8. Tulio’s legacy

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

What People are Saying About This

Andrew Nestingen

Scholars have overlooked Teuvo Tulio’s melodramas; ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio revives them in their florid glory. Tulio’s films are an important chapter in the history of melodrama. They draw on opera, stage melodrama, silent cinema, Finnish rural melodrama and classical Hollywood aesthetics, but they also explode each of these through their manic creativity, fraught oppositions and fanatical repetition […] The first book on Tulio in English, this will be valuable to film historians, scholars of melodrama and cinephiles, igniting interest in this eccentric and original filmmaker.

Aki Kaurismäki

The great unknown Teuvo Tulio was the most melodramatic of all melodramatic directors. Next to him even the masters of the genre, including Douglas Sirk, look like social realists.

Professor Richard Dyer

How wonderful to have this alluring study put the fabulous cinema of Teuvo Tulio firmly on the map of world cinema where it belongs. Lucid and vivid, and a major contribution to current debates about melodrama, the book manages to be systematic and measured about films that are wild and passionate, establishing the crazed seriousness of their engagement with the world.

Editorial Reviews

Scholars have overlooked Teuvo Tulio’s melodramas; ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio revives them in their florid glory. Tulio’s films are an important chapter in the history of melodrama. They draw on opera, stage melodrama, silent cinema, Finnish rural melodrama and classical Hollywood aesthetics, but they also explode each of these through their manic creativity, fraught oppositions and fanatical repetition […] The first book on Tulio in English, this will be valuable to film historians, scholars of melodrama and cinephiles, igniting interest in this eccentric and original filmmaker.

Andrew Nestingen

The great unknown Teuvo Tulio was the most melodramatic of all melodramatic directors. Next to him even the masters of the genre, including Douglas Sirk, look like social realists.

Aki Kaurismäki

How wonderful to have this alluring study put the fabulous cinema of Teuvo Tulio firmly on the map of world cinema where it belongs. Lucid and vivid, and a major contribution to current debates about melodrama, the book manages to be systematic and measured about films that are wild and passionate, establishing the crazed seriousness of their engagement with the world.

Professor Richard Dyer