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ReFocus: The International Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo TulioAn Excessive Outsider

By Henry Bacon, Kimmo Laine and Jaakko Seppälä

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£105.00

In stock

About this book

Examines the work of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio who created his own aesthetics of melodramatic excess
  • Offers the first English language study of this exceptional filmmaker
  • Systematically explores both the stylistic features and the attitudes toward sexuality of an extreme form of film melodrama
  • Analyses the options a highly individualistic filmmaker had in coping with the studio system and trying to survive as an independent producer-director
  • Examines the strange career of an increasingly reclusive artist working within the most public of art forms

Teuvo Tulio (1912–2000) was one of the most obsessive directors in film history. As an independent producer and an increasingly reclusive personality he developed his own, excessive brand of melodrama, haunted by irresistible temptations, obsessive desires, mad jealousies and toxic moralism. All this has now been thoroughly explored by means of combining cultural and historical contextualisation with formalist analysis.

ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio: An Excessive Outsider is the first English-language study on this innovative director. Three internationally recognized scholars analyse the strange trajectory of his career through its impressive beginning within the Finnish studio system to becoming an outsider, an independent producer-director who could single-mindedly pursue his own, highly idiosyncratic line.

Reviews

The great unknown Teuvo Tulio was the most melodramatic of all melodramatic directors. Next to him even the masters of the genre, including Douglas Sirk, look like social realists.
Scholars have overlooked Teuvo Tulio’s melodramas; ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio revives them in their florid glory. Tulio’s films are an important chapter in the history of melodrama. They draw on opera, stage melodrama, silent cinema, Finnish rural melodrama and classical Hollywood aesthetics, but they also explode each of these through their manic creativity, fraught oppositions and fanatical repetition […] The first book on Tulio in English, this will be valuable to film historians, scholars of melodrama and cinephiles, igniting interest in this eccentric and original filmmaker.
How wonderful to have this alluring study put the fabulous cinema of Teuvo Tulio firmly on the map of world cinema where it belongs. Lucid and vivid, and a major contribution to current debates about melodrama, the book manages to be systematic and measured about films that are wild and passionate, establishing the crazed seriousness of their engagement with the world.
How wonderful to have this alluring study put the fabulous cinema of Teuvo Tulio firmly on the map of world cinema where it belongs. Lucid and vivid, and a major contribution to current debates about melodrama, the book manages to be systematic and measured about films that are wild and passionate, establishing the crazed seriousness of their engagement with the world.
Table of contents

1. Introduction

    2. Tulio and traditions of melodrama

      3. Biography of an Outsider

      4. Outsider as an independent filmmaker

        5. All that melodrama allows –Tulio’s films and their principal themes

          6. Exploring a style of passion

            7. Art of repetition

              8. Tulio’s legacy

                Filmography

                Bibliography

                Index

                About the contributors

                Henry Bacon

                Professor Henry Bacon is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Helsinki

                Kimmo Laine

                Kimmo Laine is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Turku. He is the co-author (with Henry Bacon and Jaakko Seppälä) of ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

                Jaakko Seppälä

                Dr Jaakko Seppälä is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Helsinki.

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