Donner – privat / Donner in Private

Jörn Donner's last interview in December 2019. Photo: Hannu-Pekka Vitikainen © Bufo. Publicity photo for: John Webster: Donner – privat (2021).

Harriet Andersson and Ingmar Bergman visited Helsinki in 1954 to promote Summer with Monika. Jörn Donner (in the middle, at the age of 21) interviewed them. From: John Webster: Donner – privat (2021) with commentary by Harriet Andersson ("Ingmar Bergman was very jealous"). My screenshot.

 

Donner the fisherman with a good catch. Jörn Donner home movies. From: John Webster: Donner – privat (2021) with commentary by his son Rafael Donner. My screenshot.

FI 2021. P: Misha Jaari, Mark Lwoff, Ari Tolppanen.
    D: John Webster. Cin: Hannu-Pekka Vitikainen. Lighting: Jani Lehtinen. AD: Otso Linnalaakso. VFX: Eki Haikka. M: Pedro Hietanen. S design: Karri Niinivaara. S recording: Karri Niinivaara - Jan Alvermark (Stockholm / Johan Donner) - Tuomas Kantelinen (Helsinki / Harriet Andersson). ED: Tuuli Kuittinen. Colour definition: Hannu-Pekka Vitikainen.
    Based on Jörn Donner's last interview in December 2019.
    Based on Jörn Donner's private archive of home movies and 30.000 photos.
    Manuscript and plan for Jörn Donner's last inteview: Pirjo Honkasalo.
    Featuring: Anders Carpelan, Rafael Donner, Johan Donner, Harriet Andersson, Tuula Söderberg, Bitte Westerlund.
    Language: Swedish.
    80 min
    Festival premiere: 29 Jan 2021 DocPoint online.
    Telepremiere: 6 Feb 2021 Yle Teema Fem.
    Vimeo preview copy with English subtitles viewed on a 4K tv screen at home in Lappeenranta, 25 Dec 2020.

AA: Jörn Donner was a public figure whose field of activities in culture, media and politics was so vast that writing his biography would be a daunting project.

John Webster's focus, as stated in the title of his film, is on the private Jörn Donner. His public life is presented only as a framework.

This is an authorized project – authorized by Jörn Donner himself during the last months of his life to a make it "warts and all".

Webster was given access to the private family archives, including home movies and a vast collection of photographs covering Donner's entire life: 30.000 photos mostly taken by Donner himself, "a treasure chest" introduced by Jörn's trusted book designer Anders Carpelan. Most of the photos have never been seen in public before. The discovery of the photos was a surprise even to Jörn's own family.

We hear the remarks of his oldest son Johan Donner, condemning Jörn as a bad father, always neglecting his children. We also hear the testimony of his youngest son Rafael Donner, telling that Jörn was a good father, taking good care of his children.

We meet the "arrogant, self-centered motherfucker" (Johan Donner) and the young explorer avid to explore the post-war world on extended travels, visiting Cinecittà and the Cannes Film Festival for the first time at age 21, learning to know Luchino Visconti and Michelangelo Antonioni in Rome, and photographing Vittorio De Sica, Olivia De Havilland, Kirk Douglas, Walt Disney, Jean Cocteau and Howard Hawks in Cannes. In the following year in Helsinki he meets Ingmar Bergman and Harriet Andersson for the first time.

Speaking about his world view Donner quotes Bertolt Brecht's poem "An die Nachgeborenen" (1939). The dark times of the Nazi expansion, during which Brecht wrote his poem, are over, and new challenges are faced in the age of post-war liberation, reconstruction and the Cold War. Donner spends time in the divided Berlin before the building of the wall and embarks on one of his careers as a journalist with a wide international perspective.

"Chasing after the wind" is Donner's resume of his public career, quoting the Bible.*

For his mass media presence Donner became a "media whore" who created an outlandish public persona that had little in common with his private behaviour. Outside the spotlight of media attention Donner was in a more felicitious way a zoon politikon, a social animal, good company, with an appealing presence.

A big part of Donner's publications fell in the domain of autofiction, and he was famous as an author who started everything with the word "I". But that "I" was also to a great extent fictional.

There was a more secret Jörn Donner of which this film gives some clues. I would guess that there were three key secrets.

The first one was the family romance of his childhood. Jörn never got to know his father Kai Donner (1888–1935) who died when Jörn was two years old. But also his mother, Baroness Margareta von Bonsdorff (1890–1955), remained distant. Jörn was warmly taken care of as a child, but not by his parents.

The second one was political. In contrast to his father Kai Donner, who was an activist of the extreme Right, Jörn as a teenager became a Marxist, to the left from Social Democrats, but he hated dogmatism and condemned Soviet imperialism. He was active in politics, switching membership between the Swedish People's Party and the Social Democratic Party in the later decades, but essentially he was a free thinker. To the end he shared the motto of Karl Marx: "Doubt everything".

The third one was sexual. We live in an age when we are learning better than ever that differences in sexuality between people are enormous, and this can cause huge misunderstandings. Jörn Donner's sexuality was exceptionally high. He did not repress it, but he was able to channel it into his creativity. There is an interesting remark by Donner about Urho Kekkonen in Esa Saarinen's book (and also in Donner's novels Father and Son and The President) that I think is a confession.

Jörn's final words in the movie are about the private self beyond the private self.

"Nu skall man komma ihåg, att det finns ett privat jag, som är bortom det privata jaget. Det är så att säga onämnbart. Det är inte mitt äktenskap, mina barn, min familj, min släkt, det är inte Europa, det är inte världen, det är inte Finland. Det är något privat som jag behåller för mig själv. Med vad som är innerst inne, det kommer ingen utomstående åt någonsin. Det här behåller jag för mig själv."

"We must now remember that there is a private self beyond the private self. It is in a way inexpressible. It's not my marriage, my children, my family, it's not Europe, it's not the world, it's not Finland. It is something private that I keep for myself. What is innermost, no outsider can ever reach. I keep it for myself."

...
"Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun." (The Bible : Ecclesiastes : 2)