Did television kill cinema? Contemporary writings on film and early television in Finland

Abstract

The aim of this article is to survey and re-examine writings on the emergence of television in Finnish film journals and newspapers in the 1950s and early 1960s. While film history has typically pictured film and television mainly as rivals, here the relation is discussed in terms not only of competition but also of interaction and cooperation. I classify the early writings into three groups according to the mode with which the relations between television and cinema are discussed: separationist, protectionist and cooperative. Based on this classification, I argue that it was only after 1963 that the narrative about television taking over – or, indeed, killing – cinema was retroactively established.