8 - Epilogue

Summary

What happened to the Finnish film studios and the studio system? A sense of crisis had manifested itself from time to time long before the 1960s. As we have seen in this book, the film industry was hit by various kinds of crises through the decades, some of which were internal, some external and some both. The early 1930s crisis can clearly be characterised as having both external factors including the general recession and the coming of recorded sound and internal ones such as the power struggle within Suomi-Filmi. The difficulties encountered by the film industry during and immediately after World War II were also varied in nature. In addition to the obvious obstacles caused by the state of war (difficulties in international trade, the scarcity of raw film stock and other materials), the film industry created its own internal crisis over its stance towards American films.

The actual structural crisis that led to the gradual breakdown of the studio system is usually dated to the late 1950s, with a more specific turning point in 1957–8, when the majors started laying off their staff and reducing their feature film production. Discussions about the crisis in domestic filmmaking had, however, been going on for nearly a decade. Although the actual term ‘crisis’ was often used both in the early and the late 1950s, the meaning, or at least the emphasis, of the word was different. Generally, while in the early 1950 critics and other commentators from outside or on the outskirts of the film industry perceived the crisis in terms of quality, film producers laid stress on taxation and other economic factors. The most comprehensive and talked-about debate on the crisis was organised by the left-wing newspaper Vapaa Sana in early 1952. The introduction to the first part of the debate read:

Of all domestic arts, cinema is the one that has lately been the focus of attention. This is because complaints about a crisis of domestic film have risen from two directions. Whereas film critics as well as the more enlightened sectors of the audience confirm the unsound artistic quality of film production time after time, the film producers complain that financial difficulties, the rise of production costs, taxation and competition from foreign popular films, will become a death trap for domestic cinema, and that it is only a matter of time before it is revealed whether it will be able to exist at all.