Half a century ago, Peter von Bagh left the town were he grew up: Oulu, to return to the city of his birth: Helsinki. Since then, Oulu has been a conspicuous absence in his filmmaking – a few times it is mentioned, but only obliquely, in passing. Von Bagh was a stranger back then in Oulu – the older Peter says about his younger self that he’d felt as if in exile… In Remembrance – A Small Movie about Oulu in the 1950s, Peter von Bagh relates some memories of his Oulu childhood – which makes it his first essay in autobiography. To be more precise: he uses his own life as a prism through which to look at Finnish history from yet another angle – Remembrance – A Small Movie about Oulu in the 1950s is not only a bitter-sweet personal remembrance of things past but at the same time a meditation on the making of a generation and on the plight and follies of postwar Finland, in that a film about teachers and pupils and that chain in which everyone who went to the city’s lyceum becomes a link. As von Bagh is wont, he shuttles back and forth through time, criss-crosses the decades, moves casually from subject to subject carried along by the harmonies of Olavi Virta and Leevi Madetoja. Caustic observations like “Garrisons disappear, wars don’t” or “Nokias come and go, mental hospitals stay” serve as punctuation marks – time and again, Remembrance – A Small Movie about Oulu in the 1950s sounds like a battle cry. Look homeward warmly, angel, and forward in anger.

Olaf Möller