A narrative of women and war: The Finnish silent era film ‘On the warpath’

Abstract

This article discusses the film Sotapolulla (‘On the warpath’) (1922), a pioneering work in the early years of Finnish cinema. By highlighting the role that women played during the Finnish Civil War (1918), scriptwriter and director Teuvo Pakkala, a well-known conservative writer, created a model of femininity for the post-war period. The construction of the female characters accords with the standards of femininity in Hollywood silent film, which featured strong, assertive women committed to the social order. Thus Pakkala’s film in significant ways follows the classical model that Noël Burch identifies as an institutional mode of representation.