A sombre mood of loneliness
and overwhelming isolation hangs heavy over the succession of almost
indistinguishable landscape images which open cinematographer Erik Bloomberg’s
1952 directorial debut: a proto-folk horror cum ethnographic fairy-tale from Finland called The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura).
The scene is set immediately: we are in Lapland; the ‘present day'. As the opening titles are unveiled, the
camera follows the gaze of the indigenous reindeer herder who anonymously
inhabits the foreground of the first shot. A series of images, panning left to
right, give the impression of the camera revolving through a 360-degree turn.
Similar shots of vast snow-blanketed hills lightly spotted with lichen-stained
Birch trees, extending seemingly forever across the expansive horizon, dissolve
into each other repetitively as a lone female soprano intones a lilting melody
that wordlessly expresses its sense of mournful regret against the drone-like paganistic pulse of the rhythmic drumming it accompanies.
Already we are being subtly but robustly
assailed by intimations of the vast, unimaginable geological time-scales that have been at work in
producing such a haunted landscape. They indicate an ancient and essential, and
inescapably cyclical form of nature, built through a process of creative
repetition and imprinted with a harsh fatalism which seems to animate the land
and the sky and the rocks with an emotion that might be summarised thus as a
melancholy form of otherworldliness.
The strange mood is further enhanced
and expanded on in the following post-titles prologue sequence, which
details, in smudgy soft-focus imagery entirely without sound, the origins of
the film’s charismatic anti-heroine. Here, striking and beautifully composed
shots of the snowy fells of Lapland during dusk make a harrowing backdrop for
the image of a lone woman crossing the wilderness, fleeing hungry wolves
through a glooming expanse lit by the setting sun, until she finds partial
refuge from the elements in a small lean-to inhabited by a huddle of concerned
older women. They help deliver the pregnant stranger a healthy child in the midst of the warmth of a campfire, although the weakened mother dies during the
strenuous process of giving birth.
The most notable thing about
this dream-like section of the film (aside from its atmospheric simulation of the
silent movie conventions of an earlier age) is the narrative
relayed in the folk song on the soundtrack accompanying the images. It’s easy to miss upon first viewing, but the song’s lyrics -- which are, once again, sung by a solo female voice -- range far beyond the events depicted on screen and encompass not just the circumstances of the child’s
birth and her parentage, but also her future life as an adult, which includes her eventual
fate: which is to be hunted as an outsider through this same snowbound
landscape, not by wolves this time, but by members of her own community.
In fact, the song relates all
of the events which are about to be set before us in their entirety and
explains how everything we will see should be informed by the fact that the child was born to a witch who will inherit her mother’s curse. This is one
film where spoilers can be excused, since Bloomberg structures it deliberately
so that we know in outline from the very start everything that is about to
happen to its ill-fated central character.
It’s that inherent sense of
cyclical fatalism again, built into the structure of the story and expressed in
mimicry of the folkways of a traditional culture. The story draws on this for its
sense of supernatural potency. The silent-era imagery during this opening portion looks as though it inhabits a liminal space caught between fairy tale
and ethnographic representation, becoming a poetic visualisation of the
patriarchal constraints that inevitably come to delineate the formative
pathways that will shape this new-born child’s very sense of self in later
adulthood. There is by implication the sense that the story represents an archetypal
arrangement of elements constantly alive in this landscape, that
have played out many times before and will probably continue to do so again
and again in variations that spiral outwards to embrace an otherwise uncertain
future.
Even some of the core
features of the film’s production background feed into the mixture of the
factual and the fairy tale that informs its unique atmosphere. Actress Mirjami Kuosmanen plays the pregnant woman
hunted by wolves in the opening scene, and also the woman’s adult daughter,
Pirita: the main character in the rest of the film. The mythical, fantastical fable-like feel of the opening segment continues to exert its influence across
the very different, almost documentary styling of the sequences following it
(wherein certain traditional features of Sámi social culture are recreated on
camera) -- partly because of the identical appearance of these two related
characters both played by the same person.
Bloomberg’s evocative cinematography also emphasises the continuity between the fantastical sides to
the story and the immediate and more practical nature of the lifestyle of the
indigenous population: contradictory qualities which seem to define a landscape that invokes a form of atavism that encourages feelings of an awestruck sublime
caught midway between terror and wonder. With its eerie featureless horizons
where low clouds hang across flat fells and deep glacial valleys, and where
vast herds of migrating animals greatly outnumber the huddled communities of
humans who must work together to earn a living in this harsh but weirdly
beautiful environment, we can easily come to understand the appeal of the belief system of the Sámi people, with its foundations in animism. The film
successfully conjures a psychological state that assumes agency existing across
the whole spectrum of the natural environment, drawing on animating energy contained
within the rocks and plants and animals as well as humans. The White Reindeer echoes
many of the films that later came to be grouped under the genre term ‘folk
horror’, in that it posits a world in which modern forms of contemporary,
Christianised patriarchal Sámi culture have not replaced traditional animist
beliefs but rather formed a palimpsest that merely obscures them. We sense
their continuity and essence in every event depicted, through a combination of
narrative rhyming, metaphor and the striking visual compositions which make up
a landscape portrait of the weather systems and climatic conditions providing such a mysterious backdrop to the story.
Kuosmanen and Bloomberg were
very much a husband and wife team, and The White Reindeer was a collaborative
project in the truest sense of the word. When Bloomberg came to expand his
directorial ambitions from short documentaries to feature-length ficiton films, it was
Kuosmanen who came up with the initial idea for The White Reindeer and then
later co-wrote the screenplay with her husband. As well as playing two roles in
the movie, she also oversaw this low-budget project’s costuming and makeup. For
his part, Bloomberg’s approach to the fantastical material (which was based on
traditional regional legends about similar shape-shifting entities), did not
represent an abrupt break with his former documentary output. In fact, the
subject matter affords him an opportunity to revisit some of the material that
constituted his first documentary short, made in 1947, and included with this
new UK edition of the film. Titled With the Reindeer, this seven-minute-long
short showed how traditional Sámi culture is organised around the herding of
reindeer. It tells how the various herding communities come together regularly
for an organised ‘round up’ to determine who owns what, with the community
‘corralling’ procedure necessarily involving every member of the various
tribes.
The imagery included in this
short narrated film – of herders crowding into lean-tos during the hunt and
engaged in lassoing their antlered quarry to the ground – reoccurs throughout
The White Reindeer itself and often looks similarly authentic. Like such
documentary footage, the film has very minimal foley effects, which on one
level lends it a rather endearingly amateurish ‘stitched together’ quality that
actually rather works in its favour in a manner that is very reminiscent of
the atmosphere created in Herk Harvey’s film, Carnival of Souls. Although it
eschews the narration we associate with conventional documentary forms, its use
of music to set a very specific tone to accompany these authentic-looking images of everyday Sámi life lend it, when they’re combined with other
similarities in presentation such as the use of a hand-held camera, the distinct feel of cinema vérité.
The film’s music, by Einar
Englund, is an essential component in establishing the unique real/unreal tone
of The White Reindeer. Deprived of a more sophisticated effects soundtrack for
establishing the mood, and with very minimal dialogue, Bloomberg has to rely instead on the music to an even greater extent to bring to the fore what the
characters are experiencing internally, or to help elucidate the group dynamics
operating within the indigenous Sámi community while demonstrating Pirita’s
place within it. It’s a documentary or early newsreel technique which creates a
particularly resonant experience for the viewer, becoming all the more acute as
superstition and fantastical elements of the supernatural take on more and more
significance for the development of Pirita’s story.
As a result, Englund’s score is incredibly
dominant throughout, its cues encompassing everything from the
sprightly sleigh-bell anchored orchestral fanfare accompanying the chaotic
reindeer race at the start of the first act (showing how Pirita initially fits
comfortably into a very male-dominated competitive culture and is accepted within it); to
elegiac, delicately woven folk-based Ralph Vaughn Williams-inspired paeans to a
landscape at once romantic and ominously forbidding. Here the music works
alongside contemplative, atmosphere-enhancing interludes to the action that,
again, highlight the animism underpinning Sámi beliefs.
Whenever Bloomberg’s
cinematographic style moves away from a realistic mode grounded in naturalistic
landscapes or the traditional practices of the indigenous population and
encompasses a more Gothic register in order to highlight the more fable-like
aspects of the tale, the director makes use of expressionistic techniques that would not
look out of place in a 1930s Universal Horror picture. Englund’s score also
tracks this transformation in the character of Pirita through the different style of cues
accompanying such moments. These often anticipate the bubbling tension to be
found in the music of the composer James Bernard (particularly in the scores he
wrote for films made by Hammer Pictures later in the ‘50s and ‘60s): there are
sequences, particularly in the middle section of the film, when Pirita is
struggling with her dual nature, in which The White Reindeer’s dominant sense
of docudrama-like verisimilitude gives way completely to a Gothic excess that is replete
with highly-charged symbolic imagery elaborating on the concept of the
female vampire as acutely as anything Terrence Fisher was to place upon the screen only a few years afterwards.
The White Reindeer constantly moves back-and-forth between these two extremes of visual representation to create a work that acts as a subtle character study couched in the visual language of a dark folk myth, about someone who finds herself compelled to reject the moral and social norms of the society which had previously sustained her and anchored her sense of selfhood, and so who can only end up more isolated than ever as a result of pursuing the taboo-breaking fulfilment of her deepest needs.
The gender aspects of this theme are foregrounded early on and are evident in Pirita's delight in the communal excitement of a reindeer race which gives way to a flirtatious tumble in the snow and awakens her, perhaps for the first time, to romantic and sexual feelings. Aslak (Kalervo Nissilä), one of the other competitors in the race, followers her as she breaks away from the others, and playfully lassos her like one of the deers he herds for a living, joking that “a reindeer is fast, but a wolf is faster!” Already this comment verbally reminds us of the film’s mythical opening, when Pirita’s witch mother was pursued by wolves across the moonlit fells. It also anticipates the tragic conclusion of the film, and provides an Angela Carter-like fairy-tale animal metaphor for the pursuit of love and sex in a patriarchal setting which demonstrates how a spirited, rebellious form of femininity might well play along with the idea of being the hunted prey in the game of love, but that there might also be much danger and eventually a price to pay for colluding in such gestures.
Pirita and Aslak’s love match develops along the conventional lines, drawing their relationship under the umbrella of this society’s mandated semi-feudal form of romantic union -- with coins and heirlooms exchanged by the parents as a marriage dowry, and a raucous reception held in the grooms’ parents tiny home, which is where the entire community comes together to provide approval in the form of drunken revelry and expectant glances. But it's not long before this protective cocoon of marital bliss is disrupted by Aslak’s need to be away from home (and Pirita) for long periods on the fells, herding and corralling the reindeer. Pirita’s completely new and unexpected experience of loneliness only seems to highlight how important feeling valued by her mostly male peers had previously been in forging her identity; household chores and enforced introspection do not sit well with her personality, and she cannot help but notice -- and be flattered by -- any male attention that now comes her way.
Her internal dissatisfaction
finally crystallises into one of the most memorable scenes of the film: Pirita visits the hut of the local Shaman in search of a love potion that might help her win back the attention of her husband when he comes home after long absences too exhausted to fulfil her needs. The shaman, Tsalkku-Nilla (Arvo Lehesmaa), turns out to be a strange crab-like hermit, seemingly banished to the outskirts of the Sámi community to
live his isolated existence in a remote shack located somewhere in the snowy
Finnish wilderness, where he awaits his 'clients', squatting like some feral
animal over a boiling cauldron of questionable substances that are heated by a fire that
also illuminates the equally grotesque pet goat permanently positioned at his
side! It is as though this Shaman character represents the dangerous, subterranean and atavistic
portions of his culture that are unconsciously rejected by its wider population, yet
allowed to continue to exist so long as they stay safely out of sight whilst a
‘civilising’ veneer of Christianised belief and morality is displayed on the
surface in their sted.
Those, like Pirita, who find
it difficult to live a fulfilled existence under such a scheme of things might periodically visit this disquieting figure out of some unvoiced need to
feel an authentic connection with their lost heritage and with the world of the
spirits underpinning the old beliefs, but the impression is that it has become
a furtive activity that would be scorned if anyone were to find out about it.
The shaman is himself, though, yet another expression of accusatory patriarchal
authority, who immediately attempts to shame Pirita for finding herself in such
an unwholesome position, knowingly cackling to himself “you women, young and
old the same!” His proffered solution to her feelings of loneliness and
rejection take the physical form of a bubbling potion brewed from a lurid ingredients
list that is inclusive of such delights as graveyard soil and “the balls of ten bull
moose”; and he informs her that she must “sacrifice to the stone god the first
living thing she meets on her way home” in order to reap the full benefits of
this profane curative.
However, his domineering
atavism -- founded on the assumption of male-centred authority -- is
immediately challenged when the shaman’s traditional spirit drum reveals to him
Pirita’s witch origins. Now that she has been brought into close contact for
the first time in her life with the elemental spirit realms from which her
suppressed heritage derives its power, the carved piece of reindeer antler
acting as the shaman’s drum marker dances of its own accord across the personalised map of the spirit world painted on the drumhead; or rather it
moves while now under Pirita’s control instead of his, as she suddenly
transforms in an instant from beleaguered supplicant into powerful supernatural entity, leaving the terrified shaman instantly divested of all power and
authority.
The imagery and editing here are feverish, expressionistic and delirious; Bloomberg propels us straight away
into another sequence equally as affecting, in which the newly empowered but almost
deranged Pirita hurries outside into the snowy whited out fells to sacrifice
her husband’s wedding gift of a white reindeer calf before the great ‘stone
god’, as instructed. This imagery is powerfully transgressive, paganistic, and
ritualistic; it taps into the mythical wellspring suggested by an interest in
the poetry of landscape from which folk horror derives much of its power. In destroying the calf, Pirita is decisively rejecting her role as
nurturer and caregiver and dutiful wife. In symbolically slaying this innocent
creature -- given to her as a wedding gift -- she is rejecting Christian
purity, motherhood and her husband’s authority. The act is performed like a diabolic ceremony before a great slab-like stone monument: a black finger crowned
by a reindeer skull and topped by a mantle of antler horns pointing up to the ominous
cloud-strewn heavens. The monument towers like a centrepiece above a reindeer ‘graveyard', with antler ‘grave markers’ jaggedly
piercing its icy surroundings like barbed wire on an abandoned battlefield.
This moment also constitutes
the film’s decisive break with realism and a turn to fully-fledged poetic
fantasy: a brief slow-motion shot in negative of a reindeer galloping across
the snowy landscape might or might not be deliberately intended as a reference
to F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) -- in which Heir Hutter’s coach ride through
the forested mountainside on his way to Graf Orlok’s castle is also shown in
the negative as a way of indicating his crossing over into a supernatural realm
during the journey (Jean Cocteau also used the same idea two years before the
release of The White Reindeer to depict a motorcar traversing an invisible
threshold as it enters the Underworld in Orphée) -- but it certainly marks out a change in the tone of the rest of the film from here on in, with Pirita’s double nature and
her increasing alienation from her community becoming the narrative’s primary
focus. It’s an angle which the film addresses in a style combining the traditional fairy
tale and all its mythic resonance with a stylistic form of horror cinema that is based
around vampires and werewolves, producing a unique dark fantasy aesthetic
grounded in Nordic culture. In this phase of its evolution, the film’s ability
to draw on elements of horror and myth to create a psychological portrait of
the alienation and the increasing marginalisation of a single character is
reminiscent of some of Ingmar Bergman’s best work, a comparison which is especially pertinent seeing as much of the film’s power resides in Bloomberg’s ability
to capture the compelling and versatile performance given throughout by Mirjami
Kuosmanen, as Pirita grapples with the results of her post-transformation status,
much as Bergman often focused his most psychologically penetrating work on
female performances, in particular, those of his long-time partner and collaborator Liv
Ullman.
Eureka Entertainment’s recent
release of The White Reindeer on dual-format Blu-ray and DVD as part of the Masters of Cinema series offers
a beautifully crisp 4K restoration by the National Audiovisual Institute of
Finland. Several insightful essays by film critic Alexandra Heller Nichols and
journalist Philip Kemp are included in an excellent accompanying booklet, which,
together with film historian Kat Ellinger’s knowledgeable commentary track and
Amy Simmons’ video essay, Pleasure and
Punishment: The Portrayal of Witches in Nordic Cinema, provides a fully
rounded introduction to the film and its context. From Nordic art cinema to
folk horror, The White Reindeer contributes an important chapter in the
evolution of both, one that is sure to become much more widely known about and appreciated
thanks to this essential release.
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