ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio

Reviews / Votes

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. -- Aki Kaurismaeki, film director 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. -- Andrew Nestingen, Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Adjunct Professor of Cinema Studies, University of Washington 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. -- Professor Richard Dyer, King's College London 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. -- Professor Richard Dyer, King's College London