An Extended Finnish Saturday Matinee

April 30, 2011 10:44 AM

Finnish YouTube user Ishexan has uploaded seven English subtitled movies in parts: Broken Blossoms (1919), Aelita (1924), The Gipsy Charmer (1929), The Tragedy of Elina (1938), The Activists (1939), The Wooden Pauper's Bride (1944), and Sampo (1959), which is based on the epic poem The Kalevala. The films are mostly Finnish, though Aelita is a silent Russian sci-fi film, and Sampo was a joint Finnish and Soviet production. More film clips inside (mostly Finnish documentaries and "dorky musical numbers").

Other videos are collected into the following playlists:

History of Finland (16 videos)
Finnish Folklore (6 videos)
Carelian Wedding (1921) (5 videos)
Finns in The US (1948) (7 videos)

Dorky Musical Numbers: Finland (35 videos)
Dorky International Music Numbers (37 videos)

Plus, three episodes of The Munsters (My Fair Munster, Call of the Wild, and Mummy Munster). Some of these videos have been identified as NBC Universal content, so there might be a country-based content block on them for you, depending on where you are.

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The Gipsy Charmer (sp) is not well documented in any convenient single-link format online, but in coverage of the larger career of Teuvo Tulio.

The Kalevala was previously covered on MetaFilter (twice, in fact). US viewers might find the film familiar, if they've seen the MST3k-ification of The Day the Earth Froze, the US dubbed and edited version of the film.

Most of these films were recorded from the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE), though some of the short documentaries seem to be home-made or low-budget.

And I don't know why Llama Agility is the featured video on Ishexan's profile, when the video was posted by another user.

posted by filthy light thief (12 comments total)

Kiitos paljon!
posted by ursus_comiter at 11:03 AM on April 30, 2011

I love you, filthy light thief.
posted by jtron at 11:08 AM on April 30, 2011

Thank you for posting this! As the descendant of Finnish immigrants, I really enjoy discovering Finns in the US.

1) I know people who share last names with persons highlighted in the documentary.

2) I got a kick out of when the camera showed the children and stated they spoke more English than Finnish. Those kids are the same age as my grandparents, who were the first generation of my family to not speak Finnish (or Swedish). I don't understand any Finnish either. To me, it sounds the baby that resulted from a drunken one nighter between Italian and Japanese.

3) "Crossing the border to Wisconsin we are surprise to see so many bars." Some things never change.

Another nice reminder that my ancestors were such incredibly blonde, incredibly dorky people.
posted by riruro at 11:28 AM on April 30, 2011

I really am not intending in making it a pattern to post extended Saturday matinees like this, it just happened that I ran across this io9 post on Aelita and I noticed that Ishexan had a nice little collection of films. I thought it would be a shame to ignore all those other films.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:28 AM on April 30, 2011

SAMPO!
posted by the bricabrac man at 12:09 PM on April 30, 2011 [2 favorites]

Very relevant to my interests. ;-).
Thanks for posting.
posted by dorkydancer at 1:52 PM on April 30, 2011

Neat collection! It's worth noting that Broken Blossoms is probably the least Finnish of this bunch - it's one of all-American D. W. Griffith's best films.
posted by bubukaba at 1:54 PM on April 30, 2011

I knew Sampo sounded weirdly familiar. I saw that MST3K when I was quite young and it really made an impression.
posted by troublesome at 2:46 PM on April 30, 2011

Broken Blossoms has been free to watch or download at the Internet Archive for a long time, like a lot of silent era classics.
posted by dgaicun at 3:56 PM on April 30, 2011 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the reminder to check Archive.org, dgaicun. Sadly, Aelita isn't there, but the recent "musical" edit is (more information on the edit).
posted by filthy light thief at 4:05 PM on April 30, 2011

And thanks for the clarification, bubukaba. I meant to add a short write-up on each film, but clearly that didn't happen.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:10 PM on April 30, 2011

ONLY A SAAAAMPO!!
posted by JHarris at 9:15 PM on May 1, 2011