Katariina Lillqvist makes political art out of puppet animations

Mannerheim iconoclast happy enough to take on Marx, too

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By Jyrki Räikkä in Tampere
     
      The Mannerheim sitting on a living-room table in Pispala looks relatively innocent, in spite of his military garb and helmet. The same goes for the valet sitting next to him, albeit the servant-doll is not wearing a stitch of clothing.
      And yet this pairing, under the direction of puppet animator Katariina Lillqvist, has thoroughly upset the apple cart as far as Finnish national icons are concerned.
     
The fantastical puppet animation Uralin perhonen (“Butterfly from the Urals”, “Far from the Urals”) tells in tragi-comic fashion the story of the alleged homosexual relationship between Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim and his Kirghiz valet, but it also delves into the life of members of the Red faction in Tampere during Finland’s bloody Civil War in 1918.
      Lillqvist wants her film to provoke discussion on the Mannerheim myth, but admits she has been surprised and shocked at the furore that the film has generated in the evening papers even before it had its first screening.
      The 26-minute puppet animation takes part next week in the Tampere Film Festival.
      At the advance screening in Tampere on February 29th, there were considerable security measures in place, owing to the threats and hate mail that Lillqvist had received.
     
"The most impassioned opponents of the film - sight unseen - are those people to whom the legend of Mannerheim is necessary in the current world climate. The old-fashioned illusion of the nation-state has been shattered and the meaning of patriotism is in a constant state of flux", says Lillqvist.
      "Even climate change can be a factor in creating a sense of spiritual insecurity, as we are inexorably losing our winters. Those old traditional images of war heroes in their white uniforms skiing through waist-deep snow are starting to become a dim and distant memory."
     
Lillqvist understands that in a time of change it is typical for the human psyche to cling on to traditional, time-honoured beliefs. But she does not feel that this should prevent free discussion and debate or making art.
      "The Prophet Muhammad brings people security, too, but it is a different matter to what extent discussion is permitted in Islamic countries on the new generation’s interpretations of The Koran.”
     
Lillqvist’s animations have stirred up a hornet’s nest in the past, too. The Serbs were livid in 1996 at the Berlin Film Festival, when she showed up with Maalaislääkäri (“The Country Doctor”), which won a Silver Bear award.
      The piece took the Franz Kafka short story and located the events in war-torn Sarajevo, which did not go down at all well in Belgrade.
      The maker received all manner of threats against her person on that occasion as well.
      Katariina Lillqvist also regards as highly political a later work, the 1999 production Ksenia Pietarilalainen (“Xenia: The Saint of St. Petersburg”), which explores the renaissance of saints in modern Russia.
      Also bearing a strong social theme are the puppet animations Lillqvist has made during the current decade on the history of European Roma.
     
Marionette animations are viewed in Finland as almost entirely a children’s culture thing, but Lillqvist is a pupil of the Czech school of animation.
      In Prague, puppet-theatre has been used as a medium of political satire since the Middle Ages. In at least one case, puppet-masters who poked fun at His Holiness the Pope paid for their satire with their heads.
      In Lillqvist’s own view, “Butterfly from the Urals” has stronger links with Finnish historical matters than her earlier animations, although to be quite accurate she did make references to the battles in Tampere during the Civil War in her 1995 film Tyttö ja sotamies (“The Maiden and the Soldier”).
     
The history of Tampere - a stronghold of the Red faction - during the Civil War is a subject that is close to the director and has direct associations with her own family history.
      It is also a subject that is to this day raw and hard to handle, even in the local surroundings.
      Though Tampere was the location for some of the crucial battles in the conflict, Lillqvist says that when she was at school in the city not a word was spoken about the subject in the classroom.
     
As a child in Pispala, she became interested in the tales and songs and legends told by the old locals about the Civil War times.
      Among them was the legend of Mannerheim and his manservant from the east.
      Katariina Lillqvist says that the film is not a documentary but a symbolist film based on the old legend.
      She also points out that the film not only shows the less heroic side of Mannerheim but also finds room to sneer at Karl Marx, whose portrait on a Pispala parlour wall does not save any of those who swear by his name.
      Lillqvist is an independent leftist who is inspired by the pacifist and Tolstoyesque ideals of the workers’ movement from the pre-Civil War era.
      She acknowledges that it would be just as easy to make a satire about the Reds as the Whites.
      “To take one pertinent example, the fate of those Finnish socialists who emigrated to the early Soviet Russia would be a fascinating subject - for things did not go at all the way they had dreamed and imagined.”
     
“Butterfly from the Urals” has in some way allowed Lillqvist to come to terms with her Mannerheim demons and reach an inner rapprochement.
      Now she sees the former military leader and President as a symbol of loneliness - a hero who lost contact with his family and was often leaving the country.
      “I no longer have the image of a merciless butcher-general. Mannerheim was a complex character who from his earliest years was seeking his place in a very strange and turbulent world. He was the prisoner of his own legend.”
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 1.3.2008

More on this subject:
 The cut wings of a butterfly

Previously in HS International Edition:
  Mannerheim´s tiger-skin trophy now adorns wall in Finnish garrison (5.2.2008)
  After 90 years, the Finnish Civil War remains a sensitive subject (29.1.2008)
  Controversial Mannerheim puppet animation wins prize at Tampere Film Festival (10.3.2008)
  Civil War was Finland´s first modern war (22.8.2006)

Links:
  Katariina Lillqvist (IMDB)
  Camera Cagliostro, Katariina Lillqvist
  Mannerheim and the Finnish Civil War (Mannerheim web portal)
  Tampere Film Festival
  C.G.E. Mannerheim (Wikipedia)

JYRKI RÄIKKÄ / Helsingin Sanomat
jyrki.raikka@hs.fi