Theodor Antonius Tugai (23 August 1912 – 8 June 2000), better known as Teuvo Tulio, was a Finnish film director and actor. Beginning his career as an actor at the end of the

silent era A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound (or more generally, no audible dialogue). Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements (such as a setting or era) or key lines of dialogue may, when ...

, Tulio turned to directing and producing in the 1930s. His films are noted for their extremely

melodrama A modern melodrama is a dramatic work in which the plot, typically sensationalized and for a strong emotional appeal, takes precedence over detailed characterization. Melodramas typically concentrate on dialogue that is often bombastic or exce ...

tic style.Village Voice: BAM Samples Finland's Teuvo Tulio
/ref>"How did Theodor Tugai turn into Teuvo Tulio?" at Embassy of Finland, Riga
/ref>The Auteurs: The Strange Loves of Teuvo Tulio
/ref>

Biography

Tulio was born as Theodor Antonius Tugai to a Turkish- Polish father named Aleksander Tugai and a Persian- Latvian mother named Helena Garschin in Rēzekne, in the

Vitebsk Governorate Vitebsk Governorate (russian: Витебская губерния, ) was an administrative unit ( guberniya) of the Russian Empire, with the seat of governorship in Vitebsk. It was established in 1802 by splitting the Byelorussia Governorate an ...

of the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War ...

(present-day Latvia). His mother was an 18-year-old aspiring ballerina when he was born. His parents' marriage was brief, and he spent the early part of his childhood in rural Latvia with his grandparents while his mother pursued a career as a ballerina in St. Petersburg. After his mother married a Finnish man named Alarik Rönnqvist, she sent for him to move to Helsinki in 1922, when he was ten years old. The family settled in the

Katajanokka Katajanokka ( sv, Skatudden) is a neighbourhood of Helsinki, Finland, with around 4000 inhabitants in 2005. The district is located adjacent to the immediate downtown area, though in the first major town plan for Helsinki from the mid-18th cent ...

neighborhood of

Helsinki Helsinki ( or ; ; sv, Helsingfors, ) is the Capital city, capital, primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Finland, most populous city of Finland. Located on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, it is the seat of the region of U ...

. The move was not easy, however, for a boy accustomed to rural life. Theodor spoke Latvian, Russian and German, but was unable to speak Finnish and Swedish, which were spoken in Helsinki. Other children taunted him for his appearance, due to his mixed-ethnic heritage, and he later recalled that was involved in many physical altercations. In his teens, he befriended Valentin Vaala, three years older, after they met at an ice rink. Both were students at Helsinki's Russian-language Tabunov School and both were avid cinema goers who were fans of

Charlie Chaplin Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. (16 April 188925 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is conside ...

and adventure films. At age fourteen, Tugai was the star of his Vaala's film ''Mustat silmät'' (Black Eyes), which was completed in 1929. Due to his "exotic" appearance, the young Tugai was sometimes referred to as Finland's answer to

Rudolph Valentino Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla (May 6, 1895 – August 23, 1926), known professionally as Rudolph Valentino and nicknamed The Latin Lover, was an Italian actor based in the United States who starred ...

. In 1936 he changed his name to the more Finnish Teuvo Tulio. His first work as director was the 1936 film ''Taistelu Heikkilän talosta'' (Fight over the Heikkila Mansion), starring Regina Linnanheimo. Linnanheimo would become Tulio's lifelong companion, though the two were never married. She acted as the leading lady in many of his films and co-wrote the screenplays for six of his features, including his last film, 1973's ''

Sensuela ''Sensuela'' is a 1973 Finnish drama film directed and written by Teuvo Tulio. The film is based on Tulio's 1946 film ''Rakkauden risti'' which itself was based on ''The Stationmaster'', a short story written by Alexander Pushkin. ''Sensuela'' wa ...

''. Linnanheimo wrote the screenplay to ''Rikollinen nainen'' (The Crooked Woman) and to ''Olet mennyt minun vereeni'' (You've Gone in My Blood). Altogether, Tulio directed 15 feature films, three of which were destroyed in a fire in 1959. Parts of two of the films have been found in 2007 and in 2015.

Later influence and reputation

Tulio's films were an influence on the Finnish filmmaker

Aki Kaurismäki Aki Olavi Kaurismäki (; born 4 April 1957) is a Finnish film director and screenwriter. He is best known for the award-winning '' Drifting Clouds'' (1996), ''The Man Without a Past'' (2002), ''Le Havre'' (2011) and ''The Other Side of Hope'' (20 ...

, whose admiration brought the filmmaker international attention later in his life. In 2008 and 2009, short retrospectives of his work were held in the United States at the

Brooklyn Academy of Music The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is a performing arts venue in Brooklyn, New York City, known as a center for progressive and avant-garde performance. It presented its first performance in 1861 and began operations in its present location in ...

and the Pacific Film Archive. Covering the former for the ''

Village Voice ''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the ''Voice'' began as a platform for the cr ...

'', film critic

J. Hoberman James Lewis Hoberman (born March 14, 1949) is an American film critic, journalist, author and academic. He began working at '' The Village Voice'' in the 1970s, became a full-time staff writer in 1983, and was the newspaper's senior film critic ...

wrote: "At once arty and artless, stark and fulsome, Cine Tulio is ''characterized'' by an exaggerated emotional intensity and an equally primal lack of self-consciousness ... His movies are desperate and insistent, sometimes clumsy but never less than forceful. Tulio's strenuous lyricism allows the objective correlative to run wild." In a brief essay on the filmmaker for the English-language film website The Auteurs, Anna Bak-Kvapil referred to Tulio's work as "spectacles of suffering and sex," writing: "His style can be Eisensteinian, with

expressionistic Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it r ...

montages of the shining faces of the

proletariat The proletariat (; ) is the social class of wage-earners, those members of a society whose only possession of significant economic value is their labour power (their capacity to work). A member of such a class is a proletarian. Marxist philo ...

intercut with kittens, crucifixes, or half-smoked cigarettes, but he adores

Hollywood Hollywood usually refers to: * Hollywood, Los Angeles, a neighborhood in California * Hollywood, a metonym for the cinema of the United States Hollywood may also refer to: Places United States * Hollywood District (disambiguation) * Hollywoo ...

, mimicking in his own over-enthusiastic way, Cukor, Lubitsch and

Von Sternberg Von Sternberg may refer to: * Constantin Ivanovich von Sternberg (1852–1924), composer * Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969), American film director * Kaspar Maria von Sternberg (1761–1838), Bohemian theologian and botanist * Richard M. von Ste ...

Filmography

Director

* ' (''Fight over the Heikkila Mansion'', 1936), a part of a copy found in 2007 * ' (''Silja – Fallen Asleep When Young'', 1937), a part of a copy found in the archives of La Cinémathèque Franҫaise in 2015 * ' (''Temptation'', 1938), all copies destroyed in fire in 1959 * '' The Song of the Scarlet Flower'' (''Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta'', 1938) * ' (''Victor and Clara'', based on the comic strip "Bringing up Father", 1939) * '' In the Fields of Dreams'' (''Unelma karjamajalla'', 1940) * ' (''Sellaisena kuin sinä minut halusit'', 1944) and its Swedish-language version '' Sådan du ville ha mig'' (1944) * '' Cross of Love'' (''Rakkauden risti'', 1946) and its Swedish-language version '' Kärlekens kors'' (1946) * '' Restless Bood'' (''Levoton veri'', 1946) and its Swedish-language version '' Oroligt blod'' (1946) * ' (''In the Grip of Passion'', 1947) and its Swedish-language version ''

Olof – forsfararen ''Olof – forsfararen'' is a 1947 Swedish-language Finnish drama film directed by Teuvo Tulio and starring Regina Linnanheimo, Kullervo Kalske and Eric Gustafson. The film was shot in parallel with the Finnish-language version '' Intohimo ...

'' (1947) * ' (''The Rapids of Hell'', 1949) and its Swedish-language version '' Forsfararna'' (1949); co-directed with Roland af Hällström * ' (''The Crooked Woman'', 1952) * '' Mustasukkaisuus'' (''Jealousy'', 1953) and its Swedish-language version '' Två kvinnor'' (alternatively ''Kvinnorna på forsgården'', 1953) * ' (''You've Gone into My Blood'', 1956) * ' (''In the Beginning Was an Apple'', 1962) * ''

'' (1973)

Actor

* ''Mustat silmät'' (1929) as Mustalaispäällikkö Eb-Anzio * ''Mustalaishurmaaja'' (1929) as Manjardo * ''Laveata tietä'' (1931) as Antti Larto alias Anton Lardozo * ''Erämaan turvissa'' (1931) as Lappalainen * ''Sininen varjo'' (1933) as Joel Orma, 'Sininen overall' * ''Fredløs'' (1935) as Paavo (final film role)

References

External links

* *
"How did Theodor Tugai turn into Teuvo Tulio?" at Embassy of Finland, Riga
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tulio, Teuvo 1912 births 2000 deaths People from Rēzekne People from Rezhitsky Uyezd Finnish film directors Finnish film editors Finnish film producers Finnish male film actors Finnish people of Iranian descent Finnish people of Latvian descent Finnish people of Polish descent Finnish people of Turkish descent Finnish screenwriters Latvian emigrants to Finland Latvian film directors Latvian film producers Latvian male actors Latvian people of Polish descent Latvian screenwriters 20th-century screenwriters 20th-century Finnish male actors 20th-century Latvian male actors