The Bottle Collector (2018)
The Bottle Collector (2018)
(English subtitles)
The short film Bottle Collector (2018) began as a final project for the Voionmaa Institute's Film and TV Department. I was responsible for the screenplay, editing and direction. The text on which the film is based was created during the early winter.
Valtteri Kokko, one of our teachers, helped the students to polish their unfinished screenplays. He suggested leaving out the exposition from my text, i.e. the sequence that was included in the first draft, which explained how and why the gang members originally ended up making their videos. Without the backstory being bluntly spelled out, now we get straight to the point, and, through a narrative ellipsis, the viewer will figure out what it is all about. Hopefully.
We started shooting the film in April. The short was filmed in the Hiedanranta area of Tampere's Lielahti district. Lielahti Pulp Mill had previously been in operation there, factory having had closed in 2008. Our locations were the courtyard area in front of Lielahti Manor and the graffiti gallery in the alley between Kuivaamo (“Drying Plant”) and Hiedanrannan Paja (which houses several studios and workshops that are home to craftspeople and artists from various fields).
The Pulp Mill's former Kuivaamo building, with its large factory halls, served at the time as the venue for techno music events organised by Tampere’s Swäg Society. The previous January, another student and I had completed a half-hour interview documentary about Joonas Toivonen, the leader of Swäg, whom I had known for years. In addition to the Kuivaamo premises, the documentary travelled throughout the Hiedanranta area. There, before starting studies at Voionmaa Institute, I also attended a media workshop that operated from the premises of Lielahti Manor, established in 1872 by the Von Nottbeck family, the proprietors of Tampere's Finlayson industries.
Knowing the area in advance certainly inspired the choice of it as a location for a short film. In addition to Hiedanranta, in Tampere’s neighbouring municipality Kangasala we also filmed in an apartment that belonged to the grandparents of one of the film’s cast. There was a doorway in the apartment in the shape of an arch. It was used as if to frame Toivo's character in the scene where he puts on his coat before going out. To me, the arch reminded me of a coffin with Toivo ("Hope" in Finnish) in the middle.
The cast consisted of students from the Acting Department at Voionmaa Institute. They were rehearsed at the school for a couple of weeks before filming. Shooting the film mostly took place at night. Occasionally, filming in the graffiti alley between old factory buildings felt like having been in the middle of a guerrilla theatre's performance. The spotlight high on the wall of the building would turn on and off at its own pace, which brought its own headaches when setting up and adjusting the lighting.
We had a smoke machine with us, for which we had requested official permission to use it in the factory area. However, the smoke was not needed in the end. In the evening, fog rose, enveloping the buildings in the area. We got some nice-looking shots of Toivo walking his bicycle amidst the massive buildings. Visually, I am pleased with the urban imagery and atmosphere that we managed to capture in the footage. The impression of a police car driving by was created by waving “flags”, large cardboard sheets in front of the filming lights covered with blue gels. The flickering lights were then flashed on the actors playing Toivo and Tuuli.
The film crew and the acting students entertained themselves as best they could during the filming breaks, while the cameras and lights were being set up. During the long hours of the night, the energy had to be kept up. There was endless banter. Sometimes the actors sang together. In the courtyard of the Lielahti Manor, among other things, there was a demonstration of how to make and blow saliva bubbles with your mouth. Balancing on the railings, a rhythmically coordinated dance performance was held between the film crew members and the acting students. In a break room arranged for us by Swäg, opposite the graffiti gallery, the actors told each other saucy stories that weren't exactly suitable for the whole family.
Resembling a complex assembly kit that consisted of the filming and lighting gear, from the school’s equipment storage we had brought along with us whatever was needed, further supplemented from the vast arsenal of Bottomland Productions film studio that was housed in a warehouse at Tampere’s Hyhky district. All that stuff was then brought to the filming location every evening in the actors' own cars.
On the floor of our break room, or a space which was used also as a temporary dressing room, there was assembled a long row of cast iron equipment: various camera and lighting tripods, stands and racks, Fresnel and LED lights. The equipment was carried, assembled and reassembled, sometimes with curses and four-letter words exchanged, and at the end of the evening we dismantled the gear again, packed it into cars and transported back to Hyhky studio.
I had received the soundtrack music for the film from Jani Hellén, who lives in Tammela, a neighbouring municipality of Forssa, and records under the alias Sonic Temple Assassins. I had maintained a discography and information page about Jani's recordings and we had also collaborated on some music before. The soundtrack to The Bottle Collector consisted of analogue electronic music produced by Jani, which I really liked.
Do you even have a whiff of what you're doing?
The Bottle Collector was finished at the end of May. I was responsible for the editing, sound work and other post-production myself. A fellow student did the colour grading.
The finished works were viewed in class between students and teachers, and feedback was given. Throughout the semester, the operating technology teacher's standard question to the students had been: "Do you even have a whiff of what you're doing?" In addition to pointing out technical errors, this teacher criticised my work and said that he didn't like it. According to him, the film was ”not believable”. However, the part of the film where the lights of a passing police car hit Toivo and Tuuli seemed to be the only one that received the approval of the operating technology teacher. Afterwards, those pointed errors that could be corrected were corrected, and it’s this version that is now available to watch on YouTube.
However, the feedback was such that I decided not to attend Voionmaa’s annual Voitsi Gala, where the best student works were awarded. After such crushing criticism, I was surprised to find out that The Bottle Collector had received the Award for Best Editing. The winners were chosen that year by documentary film director Joonas Berghäll. I also heard from the acting students that their teacher Pauli Poranen had praised the film’s screenplay, even comparing it to the best short films made in Europe.
The origins of The Bottle Collector
As an early teenager, on vacation in the countryside, I found a pile of old magazines in a cupboard. One of these publications, the name of which I regretfully cannot remember, contained a series of causeries about film-making and its backgrounds. The texts were written by the film director, producer and screenwriter Aarne Tarkas (1923 - 1976). Tarkas, who has sometimes been called “Finland’s Roger Corman”, was known as an extremely prolific author of comedies and crime films. Gradually, however, Tarkas’s work slowed down when television began to take viewers away from Finnish cinema by the mid-1960s. Tarkas himself tried his hand at television at the end of the decade, but gradually became an alcoholic and spent his last years in Spain, where he died of a heart attack at the age of only 52.
Aarne Tarkas’ causeries were in any case the first time I remember actually reading about everything that goes into making a film. The most important thing I remember from these texts was Tarkas’ advice to aspiring screenwriters. He emphasised how important it is to write about the world and environment in which one has lived and which one knows best.
According to Tarkas, the best starting point for a screenplay is to draw from one's own experiences, one's own place of residence and social background, from people one has lived and worked with. If one tries to write an entertaining suspense story set abroad in the upper-class world, very few Finns have ever lived in such an environment, and therefore the story will inevitably become a fantasy.
(I am not going to argue here the fact that by doing thorough background research, a diligent writer can to some extent make up for what is missing from one's own personal experience.)
Tarkas' advice was to some extent in my mind when I was writing The Bottle Collector, when I was choosing the subject and thinking about the story. Of course, the storyteller is always also a fabricator, meaning that the starting point can in itself be "true", but the writer then adds the rest from his or her imagination, after which it can be argued whether the end result is believable or not.
It is not really simple to define why and how a certain film has its origins and is ultimately shaped into the finished work it is. The Bottle Collector and its screenplay had their own process of germination. It combined a wide variety of experiences and observations over a long period of time.
I once read a news story about how some teenagers had bullied and abused other school students and filmed those incidents on video. They had then been shared on social media.
When I was walking around the city on weekend nights, I had noticed that, in addition to the usual partygoers, there were always bottle collectors on the move, on foot or by bicycle, who would, as they came across them, pick up into their bags bottles or cans that had been thrown to the side of the street.
Some of the bottle collectors were equipped with large black garbage bags. When travelling by bicycle, a diligent collector could make quite a nice profit from bottle returns after a busy evening. Of course, there were a lot of bottle collectors on the move, so the competition was also fierce for the best sites with a large amount of bottles and cans.
I noticed that bottle collectors were usually quiet and modest people, probably invisible to those focused on their own merrymaking, that wild party night out. The bottle collectors comprised the unemployed, pensioners, poor. I don't really believe that people with a good monthly salary would go out on their free evening to collect bottles from drunken crowds just for the sake of exercise and sportsmanship, to collect a few meager coins, which are usually the final balance of the average collector.
I began to wonder how much of society is ultimately made up of such invisible people, who live their entire lives as if in the shadows and away from the gaze of others, in a society that is nevertheless obsessed with publicity. What happens when such a person is forced into the spotlight, when she receives attention she doesn't want?
Years ago, one evening I was waiting in Kaukajärvi district for a bus back to midtown where I lived. Three young people, a boy and two girls, arrived at the bus stop. It seemed that they were drunk. The boy seemed aggressive and glared at me, threatening to beat me up. The first girl shared the sentiment and told the others to whack me. The second girl seemed the smartest of the bunch, calmed the others down and told them in a good-natured way that I looked like a quite sympathetic guy. The situation seems to have de-escalated after that and nothing more came out of it, as I recall.
Afterwards, I wondered how I would have defended myself if someone had actually tried to attack me. On the other hand, the boy seemed so drunk that maybe he wouldn't have even been able to throw a punch. So, was it all just an idle threat from some drunk teenagers, after all? Whatever the case, the incident stuck in my mind. This then led to The Bottle Collector scene, where the gang has surrounded Toivo and Jessica tells the others to beat him up.
The dynamics of bullying is fiendish. The bully drags others along. The bully’s personal status, charisma or fear prevent others from questioning the bully’s actions. The bullied are made to blame for their own plight, for being bullied in the first place. Teenagers are usually under a lot of peer pressure. In gangs, you go with the crowd.
Nico, the gang leader, sees himself as a kind of film director with a “vision”, as someone who leads his own film crew, other gang members. Humiliating, bullying and assaulting unsuspecting, lonely streetwalkers in front of the camera is part of Nico’s grand vision, which he perhaps even sees as a kind of art project. Perhaps his goal is to win some kind of Oscar for violence, but he can’t quite figure it out. Most likely, he just wants action, to escape his basic boredom, without thinking too much about the possible consequences. Beat them up first, think later.
Jessica is a diva who wants to be the queen of the gang and her goals for Nico are perhaps based more on pure personal ambition than on any romantic notions, but she hasn't thought about it that deeply either. In any case, there's no doubt that Nico and Jessica are kindred spirits, but too much similarity between people usually doesn't bring them together in the end, quite the opposite.
Jake sees himself as Nico's lieutenant and second-in-command, and tries to please him with ever more brazen tricks towards those bullied.
The mute Ida just makes do with filming the events with her cellphone camera and it's hard to know what's really going on in her mind.
Tuuli, who’s intelligent and empathetic, has, for some reason or another, only initially drifted into the gang, but day by day she sees herself more and more as an outsider in this group and can no longer justify to herself why she is really involved.
Tuuli decides that she no longer wants to be involved in an activity that may have started as some small, seemingly harmless teenage prank, but has become real violence against bystanders. She wants to break away from the gang.
Toivo, the bottle collector, just perseveres. His goal is only to survive from day to day. At the beginning of the film, we see him sitting in his kitchen, struggling with unpaid bills. The radio news again reports on new cuts to subsidies. In the end, the encounter with the gang members brings out all the despair that he has only wanted to hide from his conscious thoughts. He screams, begging the gang members to kill him. The police drive by and see what is happening, but they don't care.
Portraying young people and teenagers onscreen is extremely challenging. The cinematic depictions of youth are usually plagued by the same problems. The perspective taken to young people is usually from above, the actors also being too old for their roles.
Rather than living in the present, the filmmakers usually reminisce about their own youth, depicting a time in the past in which they themselves sometimes lived, without realising that things have changed in the meantime, that the world in which the teenager lives now is very different from what it was like in the filmmaker's own youth. A sense of merciless artificiality inevitably creeps into many fictional depictions of youth. The slang and manner of speech used by the teenager change all the time, inevitably escaping into the unreachable.
That restless state of mind and stream of consciousness of a teenager cannot really be captured, and anyway, this particular mindset begins to disappear once a person will reach their twenties. I once read that the human brain continues to undergo its final transformation until around the age of 25. Before that, for example, the ability to feel empathy is not yet very developed. Of course, there are always individual differences.
Depictions of marginalisation are always problematic unless the author has sufficient sensitivity in handling the subject and enough compassion for the characters.
Structural violence in society is a topic that has interested me for a long time, but depicting it without succumbing to a certain kind of cheap exploitation is difficult, and on the other hand, I do not consider myself a representative of any school of social realism.
When the maximum duration of these final project short films was given ten minutes, you also had to accept the fact that the whole thing would be just scratching the surface, no matter how big a story you wanted to tell.
The Bottle Collector does not try to be a documentary. When making a story like this, the film-maker is required to achieve that elusive verisimilitude. However, it is admitted that we are creating a stylised fiction, not pretending to be "authentic", not imagining that we totally mirror the so-called real world. What we can only try to achieve, perhaps, is some kind of inner truth of the story. Whether we avoid just reheating and stirring that porridge of clichés in this work, either, is ultimately up to the viewer.
The director references that were in mind when making the film are very vague: some inspiration has been provided by, for example, Akira Kurosawa, Aki Kaurismäki, Stanley Kubrick, Luis Buñuel, Vittorio De Sica, John Carpenter, and Walter Hill. If the viewer happens to find some references to their work in the film, fine. If not, that doesn't matter either.
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