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Rakkauden Risti [Cross of Love] – Teuvo Tulio
Topic Started: Aug 9 2015, 12:39 AM (264 Views)
brian d
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Cross of Love (1946), dir. Teuvo Tulio
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Along with melodrama, Teuvo Tulio's films are known for displaying the struggle for love in the countryside, in what were known as "haystack dramas," with rural folk romancing and rolling around in the... well... haystacks. These rural milieus emphasized forests, rivers, and seasides, but surprisingly enough, he made only one film featuring a lighthouse: Cross of Love, from 1946. This was the eighth of fifteen films that Tulio completed, and the third to star Regina Lillanheimo, who was the protagonist of several of Tulio's films in the 1940s and 50s.

In Cross of Love, Tulio takes the viewer into the city for the second time, after The Way You Wanted Me, from two years earlier, showing the threat of city life that was common to Finnish melodramas at the time. Tulio starts us out along the seaside, where the lighthouse keeper's daughter Rita dreams of moving to the city, but is held back by her domineering father. [And yay! For the first time in this genre, the lighthouse works as a fairly clear phallic symbol! More of that to come if we make it to round 5.] When she does run off, she ends up falling for a painter who wishes to paint her as a crucified figure, giving the film its title in a more overt sense. The symbolism is admittedly a bit obvious, but gives way to lovely images. The thing that sets this film apart from most of Tulio's other films, along with the lighthouse, is the wonderful cinematography, in particular in some of the painting scenes.

For more plot details and some interpretations, check out these reviews:

from The Institute of Contemporary Arts
This expressionistic, lurid melodrama is one of Tulio’s best-known films. A lighthouse keeper’s daughter is seduced by a stranger washed up on their shore. Soon she’s left home for the city with little idea of the hardships that await her. It’s easy to see how this film influenced Fassbinder so deeply, with its compassionate and yet cruelly objective study of a woman, betrayed by her lover into a life of prostitution. The gorgeous abstract lighting, crazed sets and titular Cross of Love make this one of Tulios most visually ravishing films.

from Electric Sheep
A montage of tempestuous winds and angry waves: within seconds of the opening of Cross of Love (1945), Tulio makes sure we know discord will ensue. In this adaptation of Pushkin’s ‘The Stationmaster’, Riita, the daughter of a lighthouse owner, dreams of escape until a shipwrecked playboy lures her out of her father’s grasp and, like the waves, takes her away into the city. An all too recognisable set-up, the city is of course infested with putrid greed, corrupted codes and dangerous deeds that evoke von Sternberg (Underworld, 1927) and von Stroheim (Greed, 1924). Abandoned and lost, the innocent Riita turns amoral and amorous as she caves into a life of prostitution, a fallen woman í la G.W. Pabst’s Lulu. Cross of Love follows the patterns of Finland’s post-war ‘problem films’, which warned their viewers of social horrors (at least Riita escapes syphilis, a common fate for the genre’s characters) and incorporates betrayal and hoodwinking antagonists, themes that were censored in wartime cinema. The moral decay of the city positioned against the idyllic glow of countryside fields was also typical of Tulio’s 1940s scenarios (The Way You Wanted Me, 1944), and only a slight departure from his pre-war ‘haystack dramas’, pastoral scandals rooted and trapped within their settings (The Song of the Scarlet Flower, 1938, and In the Field of Dreams, 1940).

and part of the book The Directory of World Cinema

And some neat pictures!
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Enjoy!
I will talk breathlessly about Spanish and Portuguese cinema, João César Monteiro, Ritwik Ghatak, and Jacques Rivette, and hardly ever about anything else.
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rischka
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nazi trumps fuck off!!
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i started this film 5 minutes ago. there's a cat 3 minutes in

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i anticipate good things :sh:

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brian d
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ooh, good timing! and yes, there are good things to come. it's maybe tulio's second best film, and that's saying a lot! ;)
I will talk breathlessly about Spanish and Portuguese cinema, João César Monteiro, Ritwik Ghatak, and Jacques Rivette, and hardly ever about anything else.
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