World Film Locations: Helsinki

World Film Locations: Helsinki is elegantly designed and packed with evocative film stills, location info, and maps. It is both affordable and collectable. This is the first English language book on the cinematic Helsinki, providing an accessible look at the historical scope of representing the city. It addresses the multiple ways it is depicted in contemporary cinema.

The book works both as a guidebook for tourists and a critical intervention for academics studying the cinematic city. It features a diverse mix of contributors, including leading scholars and film critics. As part of Intellect's exciting book series "World Film Locations", this volume on Europe's northernmost capital, Helsinki, explores the relationship between the city and cinema alongside Finnish cultural history.

Cinematic representations of Helsinki range from depictions of a northern periphery to a space of cosmopolitanism, from a touristic destination to a substitute for Moscow/St. Petersburg during the Cold War. The city looks different depending on one's perspective, and the book illustrates this complexity by providing a visual collection of cinematic views of Helsinki.

The cinematic city is a collective work where individual pieces construct a whole. Each representation provides a set of particular insights into the constantly in-construction archive that is the cinematic city, which we, as viewers, then shape according to our perspectives. This collection provides an instance of precisely such an archive as a collective effort to understand Finnish culture and its part in the world.

To achieve this sense of relevance, the contributors emphasize the role of the city in identity and cultural politics throughout Finnish film history and its central role as the locus for negotiating Finland's globalization.