Peter von Bagh's production is the history of everyday Finnish life: images of details conveying something of what the life of the Finns has been like. The films Vuosi 1952 ("The Year 1952", 1980), Viimeinen kesä 1944 ("The Last Summer 1944", 1992), Helsinki, Forever (2008) and Splinters – A Century of an Artistic Family (2011) provide a magnifying glass for peeking at history, defined by a certain moment in time, location, or an artistic family. In a Letter to the Director published in the Pordenone Silent Film Festival catalogue 2008, Chris Marker wrote about von Bagh's film Helsinki, Forever: "'Few movies may boast a stronger opening sequence, and few movies offer such an extraordinary finale. And in-between I guess what I admire most is the fluidity of the editing, your way to play with time in a manner that comes at once as always surprising and perfectly natural. HELSINKI deserves its rank among the great "city-poems", and I'd rate it above Ruttmann, for instance, for one reason: if I read in his BERLIN the social commitment and the aesthetic maestria, I don't feel the personal acquaintance with the city, its history, its ghosts, that I found in yours. Also something that many have a tendency to underestimate but which for me is crucial: the music. The Zeppelin sequence by itself carries a haunting beauty, akin to Fellini's liner, but I don't think it would attain this climax of emotion if at that moment the music didn't bring the perfect tune of melancholia. So with the choice of incredible documents and the unfailing mixture of both musical items, editing and score, you made an unforgettable film." Von Bagh made dozens of films for television, including portraits of prominent Finns from different fields (Tapio Rautavaara in Tapsa – Slashes from a Rover's Life, 1980; Paavo Nurmi, 1978; Otto Ville Kuusinen in Mies varjossa, 1994), musicians (Olavi Virta, 1972; Suomi Pop, 1984), actors (Tauno Palo, 1981) and film directors (Edvin Laine, 2006; Mikko Niskanen, 2010). Von Bagh's fiction films are often documentary in their own way: the main character of The Count (1971) is Pertti Ylermi Lindgren, a con man elevated to nobility by the tabloid papers. Pockpicket (1968) is a variation on Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959). In it, an estranged young man attempts to instil tension into his life by slipping banknotes into the wallets of the city-dwellers. As a scriptwriter, Von