MARKKU LEHMUSKALLIO, ANASTASIA LAPSUI, SAKARI TOIVIAINEN

Publication of Sakari Toiviainen's book in Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 4 Feb 2009. With presentations by Sakari Toiviainen and Markku Lehmuskallio.
We celebrate the 70th anniversary of Markku Lehmuskallio with a complete retrospective of the feature films of Markku Lehmuskallio and Anastasia Lapsui and their carte blanche series. Today, Sakari Toiviainen's book Kadonnutta paratiisia etsimässä (In Search of Paradise Lost) was published, with exquisite illustrations edited by Kai Vase in collaboration with Markku Lehmuskallio.
Markku Lehmuskallio is a great artist of both documentary and fiction films. Their common subject is the life of the Northern peoples in Lapland, Siberia, and Canada. What Robert Flaherty started in Nanook of the North, Lehmuskallio has done during his whole film career, rescuing the vanishing, primordial cultures of the Sami, the Nenets, the Nganasan, the Selkup, the Inuit, and so on, for instance in his great I Am, the history of the art of the people in the tundra.
He is the documentarian of immemorial tradition and man on the last threshold of survival.
He is also a poet of the forest and of nature. He is an ecological visionary.
Since 1992, Lehmuskallio has made his films with Anastasia Lapsui, a Nenets who belongs to a family of shamans.

Anna (1997)

A-27780 / G / FI / 1997 / Lehmuskallio, Markku & Lapsui, Anastasia / documentary

Anna. PC: Jörn Donner Productions. D: Markku Lehmuskallio, Anastasia Lapsui. FEATURING: Anna Aleksevna Momde. Location: Taimyr - the city of Dudinka at the Jenisei. 58’. 1,85. Shot in 16mm, viewed in 35mm at VET, Helsinki, Monday, 29 September, 1997. Spoken in Russian, with Finnish commentary, and English subtitles by Merja Talvela and Leslie Hyde. ** A requiem for the lost culture of the Nganasan, the second most northern people in the world. Anna Aleksevna Momde belongs to the Loon Clan, which believe that the loons created the world. She went to school, became a Pioneer, a Komsomolets, and a Party Secretary. ”I called my tribal folk to a new life. They were invited from the tundra to the village. I committed a fatal mistake. We deprived them of their traditional life and gave nothing instead. They were proud, strong, brave, unbowed, invincible, rulers of their own land. We ruined everything. My soul was thrown into turmoil, my heart cast into dirt before my very eyes”. The grim confession is accompanied with images of decay in the Taimyr, underlined with ugly lighting, ugly set-ups, and ugly camera angles. The sacred sledges and the beautiful traditional costumes have been left to rot. The only beautiful modern images are those from the traditional Loon Dance. In striking contrast to the misery of the present 1954 documentary footage shows the traditional ways of the Nganasan with classic dignity worthy of Flaherty. Even the Communist footage displays pride and confidence, in contrast to the desillusion of the present. Anna is a great and eloquent central subject, but the film is marred by lack of focus and depressing ugliness of the visuals.