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Jörn Donner (1933–2020). Photo from: Elonet / National Audiovisual Institute (KAVI).
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Harriet Andersson and Jörn Donner in Stockholm, 1964. Photo: Gösta Glase.
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De omnibus dubitandum est (Doubt everything)
– the motto of Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, and Jörn Donner*
Jörn Donner (1933–2020) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, director, producer, journalist, critic, politician, and diplomat, a man of the world, a man of letters, and a man of the cinema. He was a co-founder of the Finnish Film Archive, and, at various times, CEO of the Swedish Film Institute, chairman of the board of the Finnish Film Foundation, a Member of Parliament, a Member of the European Parliament, chairman of the culture committee of Helsinki, and Consul General of Finland in Los Angeles. Donner was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and co-founder of the European Film Academy. He served as a jury member and chairman at several film festivals, wrote more than 60 books and 4,000 articles, financed or produced over 60 films, and directed 35 films, television series, and documentaries.
With Aito Mäkinen, Donner founded the Finnish Film Archive in 1957 and brought it into the FIAF community. He became a friend of Henri Langlois and his team; Langlois mounted the first Donner retrospective at the Cinémathèque française. He was close to Marion Michelle, the FIAF secretary, in part through their mutual friend Joris Ivens. He knew FIAF president Jerzy Toeplitz well: in Warsaw on All Souls’ Day 1957 they jointly lit a candle in memory of the dead, and Donner also contributed to Toeplitz’s journal Kwartalnik Filmowy.
At the 1958 FIAF Congress in Prague, Donner not only applied for membership for the Helsinki archive, but became popular as the owner of the sole international plug at the Hotel Alcron where wall sockets dated from the Habsburg era. Donner represented Finland at the meeting of the Nordic film archives in Oslo in May 1959, and during that year’s FIAF crisis involving Langlois and Michelle, Finland’s role was conciliatory.
Donner returned to the FIAF community as the head of the cultural sector at the Swedish Film Institute from 1972 to 1974. It was a ghostly experience for him at the Ottawa Congress to see mostly faces familiar from Prague. When the status of the Swedish archive changed in 1964 (the collections held by the Filmhistoriska samlingarna – the Film Historic Collections – were handed over to the newly-established Svenska Filminstitutet), Donner renegotiated its FIAF membership; he did not interfere with Anna-Lena Wibom’s visionary work at the cinémathèque, instead focusing on cultural exchange.
Donner also launched the exemplary Swedish national filmography, Svensk filmografi, later repeating the trick in his homeland with Suomen kansallisfilmografia, the Finnish filmography, both of which are now incorporated into their digital descendants, Svensk filmdatabas and Elonet. Between 1978 and 1982 Donner was the CEO of the Swedish Film Institute and the producer of Ingmar Bergman’s farewell film Fanny and Alexander (1982). He admitted in an article he wrote for Svenska Dagbladet that he had “obviously exceeded [his] authority as CEO of the Swedish Film Institute” in financing the most expensive Swedish film ever, but the risk paid off. Of its four Academy Awards, Donner, as producer, received the one for Best Foreign Film.
The Donner family, originating from Lübeck, has been prominent in Finnish business and culture for over 250 years. Like a Thomas Mann hero, the young Jörn Donner went against the grain, active in circles of radical authors and modernist poets, including his 1949 schoolmates in Stockholm, Sven Lindqvist and Tomas Tranströmer. At the age of 18, he published his first work of fiction (in Swedish) Välsignade liv (Blessed Lives, a collection of short stories) and founded the cultural magazine Arena.
By 1951, he was on his way into the inner circle of Swedish culture, befriending Olof Lagercrantz, future editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter (DN), and Åke Runnquist, editor of Bonniers litterära magasin (BLM) and future Bonnier manager. Later Donner became the main film critic for both BLM and DN; it was his colleague critic and close friend Harry Schein who founded the Swedish Film Institute in 1963.
Seeing Ingmar Bergman’s Prison in Stockholm in 1949, was, for Donner, the revelation of cinema as modern art. In 1953, he met both Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, his two greatest cinematic inspirations, in 1962 writing the first book-length study of Bergman’s films, Djävulens ansikte – Ingmar Bergmans filmer, translated as The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman. Donner’s five documentaries on the Swedish director (1975–2018) offer privileged insights into the great spirit of Nordic culture.
Donner directed his first (short) films in 1954, and soon became a key figure in Finnish film modernism and new waves as producer, financer, or advisor to Mikko Niskanen, Rauni Mollberg, Peter von Bagh, and the Kaurismäki brothers. He was also an early champion of women directors such as Pirjo Honkasalo.
Known as “the Antonioni of the North” for his cycle of five films starring Harriet Andersson, Donner won the Opera Prima prize for best directorial debut at the Venice Film Festival with the first of these, A Sunday in September (1963). Antonioni and Bergman told him that his films needed work, but Donner ignored their advice and changed tack instead. Starting with Black on White (1967), he broke the sex wall in four loose and irreverent films. A nonchalant satire of an alienated way of life secured them a cult status.
Back on a serious note, Men Can’t Be Raped (1978), based on the novel by feminist author Märta Tikkanen, was ahead of its time. In Donner's late period, two powerful historical dramas, both starring Minna Haapkylä, stand out: The Border 1918 (2007), produced by Donner and detailing some of his father’s post-war experiences, and The Interrogation (2009). Donner also directed the Brechtian biopic Armi Lives! (2015) about his good friend Armi Ratia, the formidable co-founder of the Marimekko textile company, again starring Haapkylä.
Donner was also an award-winning documentary filmmaker. With his two Perkele!** films he captured Finland in periods of crisis: Perkele! Images from Finland (1971) on the so-called “big move” of migration from the countryside to the cities, and Perkele! 2 Images from Finland (2017), about the European refugee crisis, while Nine Ways to Approach Helsinki (1982) is one of the finest filmed accounts of Finland’s capital.
As a man of letters, “it always pays to read” and “nulla dies sine linea” (“not a day without a line”) were among Donner’s mottos. He wrote a series of 14 novels on a Swedish-Finnish industrialist family (1955–2001), and started a distinguished line of reportage books with Report from Berlin (1958) (English translation 1961) and Report from the Danube (1962), his sources including Bertolt Brecht, Willy Brandt, Georg Lukács, and Marlene Dietrich.
Donner was a public intellectual who thrived on debate. Besides, around 1968 he launched a shocking public persona in talk shows and tabloids. Though in private he was polite, even shy, he deliberately constructed a Mr Hyde side as a “media whore” to garner publicity for non-commercial projects such as the 1100-page Dadaist anti-memoir Mammoth (2013), a display of his late style.
Donner made public his struggle with cancer, and had his cardiac surgery filmed for Perkele! II. At the 2019 Helsinki Book Fair, there was standing room only when the wheelchair-bound Donner met his audience in a mood of cheerful irony. He took a line from poet Edith Södergran, “Here is the coast of eternity”, as the motto of his last film The Memory of Ingmar Bergman (2018).
Like Langlois and Toeplitz, Donner believed that cinema is an essential part of history, society and culture, and without film archives it is impossible to make full sense of them. He accumulated one of the most remarkable private libraries in Finland, the bulk of which has been divided between four institutions. His voluminous correspondence is archived at Åbo Akademi.
Antti Alanen
Journal of Film Preservation 103 (October 2020)
Published by the kind permission of FIAF (Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film)
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* All inspired, of course, by the doctrine of methodical doubt by René Descartes.
** "Perkele" is a powerful Finnish curse. It is the name of an ancient thunder god. "Donner" means "thunder" in German.
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