Throughout his career, both as an actor and a director, Teuvo Tulio worked outside of the big studios. Production-wise, this was a decisive factor that affected everything from the choice of subjects, actors and music to editing, distributing and marketing his films. Operating on the fringes of the film industry was, indeed, an essential part of Tulio's status as an outsider.

Finnish film production was, from the 1920s to the 1960s, dominated by a handful of companies, some of which concentrated on producing feature films, while others were fully integrated along the lines of the Hollywood majors. Three of the largest companies, Suomi-Filmi, Suomen Filmiteollisuus and Fennada-Filmi, produced almost 70 per cent of the whole output of domestic feature films between 1920 and 1963. The balance of power of this oligarchy changed during the studio era, but whether the field was dominated by one, two or all three companies at any one time, operating outside the majors was always challenging.

This chapter focuses on Tulio's life and career as an independent filmmaker, by first outlining the general structures of the Finnish studio system, against which Tulio's survival strategies are then discussed. Special attention is paid to the transnational dimensions of Tulio's cinema, especially his dual strategy of addressing national audiences on the one hand, and regional, Nordic markets on the other.

THE FINNISH STUDIO SYSTEM

Tulio is generally characterised as an independent filmmaker. Just what that meant varied from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, and these changes related closely to the general trends in Finnish feature-film production. Therefore, in order to understand the circumstances in which Tulio made his films, it is essential to contextualise them in relation to the ways the major production companies operated during these decades.

When Vaala and Tugai made their first films in the late 1920s, Finnish film production was all but dominated by one diversified company, Suomi-Filmi. There had been a three-year break in feature-film production between 1916 and 1919, first due to the prohibition of filming enacted by the authorities during the last years of the Russian rule, and then, after Finland had gained independence in 1917, due to the economically and politically unstable conditions during and after the harsh civil war of 1918. But by 1919 several new entrepreneurs advertised that they would soon be starting film production, typically on openly nationalistic lines through adaptations of established Finnish literature.