A Sense of Time and Place: Peter von Bagh

Scholar, author, teacher, critic, commentator, and remarkably prolific filmmaker Peter von Bagh (b. 1943) holds legendary status in his native Finland and in the world of cinema at large. Famous for writings that embrace film studies (his texts on filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki are especially well known), Von Bagh has also published nearly forty works about his homeland undefined including Song of Finland, awarded a Finlandia Prize for nonfiction. Using mostly archival materials, his layered films construct a social landscape that is local and specific, yet somehow universal and timeless, and his impassioned work for the preservation of film culture is renowned (he serves as artistic director for two unique annual film forums undefined one in the north of Finland, and the other in Bologna, Italy). The series is a collaboration with the Finnish Film Foundation, Finnish Film Archive, Embassy of Finland, and the National Portrait Gallery.

Helsinki, Forever

September 7 at 4:30
McEvoy Auditorium, National Portrait Gallery

An exquisite collage portrait of Finland’s capital as captured by the country’s leading feature and documentary makers over a period of one hundred years, Helsinki, Forever is also an essay on Finnish culture in a broader sense, following an emotional logic that questions the ephemeral nature of historical episodes in a search for the heart and soul of the city. “Helsinki deserves its rank among the great city-poems and I’d rate it above Ruttmann’s Berlin: if I read in Berlin the social commitment and the aesthetic maestria, I don’t feel the personal acquaintance that I find in this”undefinedChris Marker.  (Peter von Bagh, 2008, 35 mm, 74 minutes)

Place 
McEvoy Auditorium, National Portrait Gallery

Street address 
8th and F St. Washington DC

Links 
National Gallery of Art