A profile of the country of Finland.A profile of the country of Finland.A profile of the country of Finland.
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Was the Finland of the 1930s quite such a quaint and Ruritanian place as it appears here?
"Arctic Highway" is a short travelogue tracing a journey through Finland from Helsingfors northwards to the Arctic Circle and the far north of the country. The film was made in 1939, probably shortly before the outbreak of the Winter War of 1939/40 between Finland and the Soviet Union, as this conflict is not referred to in the film. I use the form "Helsingfors" rather than "Helsinki" for the Finnish capital because it is used in the film itself, as was standard English usage in the 1930s.
When I call the film a "travelogue" I do not mean that it was made to give audiences ideas about where to go for their next holiday. For the majority of British people in the thirties, "going on holiday" meant, at best, a week (or if they were lucky a fortnight) in the nearest seaside resort to their home town. Even the well-to-do minority who could afford foreign travel generally confined themselves to a few Western European or Mediterranean destinations; Finland would have been well off the beaten track. The idea, rather, was to show audiences something of a country most of them could never hope to visit.
Helsingfors emerges from the film as a modern, bustling city; much stress is placed upon its modern architecture, with a then-fashionable Art Deco competing with a severely rectilinear Modernist style. Outside the capital, however, Finland comes across as a much more traditional place, at times almost mediaeval. Only the southernmost portion of the Arctic Highway is actually metalled; most of it is little more than a dirt track. We see a country with no agricultural machinery and where crops are harvested by hand, a place where houses are crude log-built structures, where people still wear traditional folk costumes as their everyday dress and where there is little industry apart from logging.
Was the Finland of the 1930s quite such a quaint and Ruritanian place as it appears here? Quite possibly not, but then the film-makers evidently decided to concentrate on those aspects of Finnish life which they felt would most interest their audiences. A documentary about a far-off, strange and exotic part of the world is always going to be more interesting than one about a foreign country which, apart from the language and a colder climate, does not seem very different from England. Old travelogues like this one are not just interesting for what they can tell the modern viewer about other countries. They are also interesting for what they can tell us about the British themselves and how earlier generations liked to see other countries.
When I call the film a "travelogue" I do not mean that it was made to give audiences ideas about where to go for their next holiday. For the majority of British people in the thirties, "going on holiday" meant, at best, a week (or if they were lucky a fortnight) in the nearest seaside resort to their home town. Even the well-to-do minority who could afford foreign travel generally confined themselves to a few Western European or Mediterranean destinations; Finland would have been well off the beaten track. The idea, rather, was to show audiences something of a country most of them could never hope to visit.
Helsingfors emerges from the film as a modern, bustling city; much stress is placed upon its modern architecture, with a then-fashionable Art Deco competing with a severely rectilinear Modernist style. Outside the capital, however, Finland comes across as a much more traditional place, at times almost mediaeval. Only the southernmost portion of the Arctic Highway is actually metalled; most of it is little more than a dirt track. We see a country with no agricultural machinery and where crops are harvested by hand, a place where houses are crude log-built structures, where people still wear traditional folk costumes as their everyday dress and where there is little industry apart from logging.
Was the Finland of the 1930s quite such a quaint and Ruritanian place as it appears here? Quite possibly not, but then the film-makers evidently decided to concentrate on those aspects of Finnish life which they felt would most interest their audiences. A documentary about a far-off, strange and exotic part of the world is always going to be more interesting than one about a foreign country which, apart from the language and a colder climate, does not seem very different from England. Old travelogues like this one are not just interesting for what they can tell the modern viewer about other countries. They are also interesting for what they can tell us about the British themselves and how earlier generations liked to see other countries.
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- JamesHitchcock
- May 2, 2019
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- Runtime20 minutes
- Color
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