| As anticipation mounts for our own once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time poll, this week the Swedish film magazine FLM published the results of its poll of 72 film critics and scholars to determine the best Swedish films. No surprises that Ingmar Bergman nabbed five spots in the top 25. He missed out on pole position though. Instead, the Swedes honoured Victor Sjöström’s 101-year-old silent fantasy The Phantom Carriage, a film Bergman himself professed to watching once a year.
When the Finns got together to vote for the best Finnish films back in 1992, the winner was a film scarcely known in the Anglosphere, but which is now seeing the light of day in a new 4K restoration at the BFI London Film Festival. In fact, in this full length version, Mikko Niskanen’s monumental Eight Deadly Shots is actually a miniseries – four episodes running together at more than five hours, which screened on Finnish TV in the spring of 1972 before being edited down to a 140-minute theatrical version.
Drawing on a real-life mass shooting in Finland in 1969, Niskanen’s series is an extraordinary slow-burn tragedy about the circumstances that lead a tenant farmer to kill four policemen. With piercing humanity, Niskanen himself plays the farmer, Pasi, a beleaguered family man and incorrigible moonshiner struggling to make ends meet. Over the four absorbing 80-minute episodes, we follow his daily grind – his odd jobs, marital disputes, those furtive meetings in the woods to distil (and imbibe) illegal booze.
As this intimate epic moves through the seasons, including sparse Christmas scenes and thick carpets of snow, the boxy, black-and-white images tie Niskanen’s film to the legacy of Italian neorealism. But there’s a finely grained psychological intensity and individuality to his performance as Pasi that takes us somewhere deeper. Eight Deadly Shots’ accumulation of detail and duress, its account of an ordinary man losing his grip, is novelistic and harrowing.
Renowned Finnish film archivist Peter von Bagh has been the film’s main cheerleader. It was him who showed it to Martin Scorsese, with a view to his Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project helping to fund a digital restoration. It’s said to have been von Bagh’s dying wish that the complete Eight Deadly Shots would be restored and seen again around the world.
The eventual restoration from original 16mm material was unveiled at Finland’s Midnight Sun Film Festival in June, before wowing the cinephile community at Bologna (where von Bagh had been festival director) later that month. BFI curator James Bell was there, and it was he who would recommend Eight Deadly Shots to the LFF. “There was much talk among festivalgoers about the film beforehand,” he tells me, “that it was a masterpiece, the ‘greatest Finnish film ever made’ according to Aki Kaurismaki – and the restoration event of the year. But who could justify taking 5 1/2 hours plus interval out of the busy festival schedule to watch it?”
Nonetheless, he took the punt and describes the screening as “a revelation”. “The atmosphere in the cinema was special, and got progressively tenser as the film becomes increasingly, overwhelmingly absorbing. Emerging into Bologna’s 40C heat after five hours in chilly, snow-covered Finnish forests was disorientating to say the least, but there was a recognition between everyone leaving the cinema that we had seen something remarkable.”
The LFF screening today promises to be just as special, but the good news for those missing it is that this valuable rediscovery is available to stream on BFI Player until 23 October.
— Sam Wigley |
