ReFocus

Examines the work of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio who created his own aesthetics of melodramatic excess

• Offers the first English language study of this exceptional filmmaker
• Systematically explores both the stylistic features and the attitudes toward sexuality of an extreme form of film melodrama
• Analyses the options a highly individualistic filmmaker had in coping with the studio system and trying to survive as an independent producer-director
• Examines the strange career of an increasingly reclusive artist working within the most public of art forms

Teuvo Tulio (1912–2000) was one of the most obsessive directors in film history. As an independent producer and an increasingly reclusive personality he developed his own, excessive brand of melodrama, haunted by irresistible temptations, obsessive desires, mad jealousies and toxic moralism. All this has now been thoroughly explored by means of combining cultural and historical contextualisation with formalist analysis.

ReFocus: The Films of Teuvo Tulio: An Excessive Outsider is the first English-language study on this innovative director. Three internationally recognized scholars analyse the strange trajectory of his career through its impressive beginning within the Finnish studio system to becoming an outsider, an independent producer-director who could single-mindedly pursue his own, highly idiosyncratic line.