Films Second World War

The rules of the game were clear when the credits for the soundtrack of Aki Kaurismäki's debut film Crime and Punishment gave the names Franz Schubert, Dmitri Shostakovich, Olavi Virta, the Renegades, Harri Marstio and Billie Holiday. Dostoevskian to say the least! Added to these as Kaurismaki’s career progressed were Tchaikovsky (the Pathetique Symphony a dozen or so times!), Shostakovich, Chuck Berry, the great Estonian Georg Ots, rhythm & blues, Finnish rock’n’roll (Melrose, with Tokela in the vocal lead), Jussi Bjorling, and Toshitake Shinohara - the Japanese composer of a host of beautiful scores now settled permanently in Karkkila, home of Kaurismäki himself. Not all are familiar to a non-Finnish audience. Yet Finn and foreigner, familiar and unfamiliar are as such one seamless entity, their associations equally fascinating. The director himself says he grabs armfuls of discs off his shelf at home before setting off for the editing room.

The National Film Board started film research for Canada At War in December l958, and for three years, the NFB's Donald Brittain and his associates went through 10,000,000 feet of film taken during the Second World War in an effort to present Canada's role in the war. It took the NFB crew 2,000 hours to look at all the film in order to extract the six hours of prime material they wanted.