7 - Film politics and censorship

Summary

In April 1943, at a moment when the ongoing World War II and the Finnish–Soviet Continuation War were having a massive effect on both filmmaking and the film trade, Ensio Hiitonen wrote an article for the social democratic newspaper Kansan Lehti called ‘Film as an Economic, Political and Cultural Factor’. Hiitonen, a representative of the Finnish Film Chamber and one of the crucial actors in Finnish film politics during and after World War II, surveyed the relationship between state and cinema, outlining four more or less interconnected perspectives. First, film was a business, an economic factor that from the state point of view had meant that it was primarily a target for taxation. Second, by favouring domestic production over imported films the state had a possibility of implementing national cultural politics. A radical means of regulating the proportion of domestic films to imported ones was to impose import restrictions. Third, film was a powerful weapon for various forms of propaganda. This, of course, was especially evident at the time the article was written. And fourth, film was an object of censorship, not only during the exceptional circumstances of the war years, but also during peacetime.

This chapter will discuss the relations of the state authorities and cinema from the four perspectives raised in Hiitonen’s newspaper article: film as the object of taxation, film as an object of censorship, film as propaganda, and film as a means of doing national and international politics. Some of these perspectives concern the film studios directly, and some indirectly, either as active agents or as objects of the state’s politics, or both. Yet, each of these factors crucially affected the preconditions and circumstances the studios operated in.

Film and taxation

A common complaint among film critics and professionals during the studio years was that, from the state’s perspective, film was seen primarily as a source of income and only secondarily as a cultural factor. Typical is the director Ilmari Unho’s bitter criticism from 1945:

As film has achieved a growingly significant position as a cultural factor, as true folk art, as a force shaping the views and ideals of – especially young – people, and as it has, at the same time, developed into a substantial national economic factor, the relation between film and the state has become ever more crucial.