f Suburban landscape and the painterly screen in Kurkvaara’s Open Secret

The article examines the constructions of space in Maunu Kurkvaara’s 1962 film Open Secret. This early Finnish New Wave film was the first to explicitly deal with the newly emerging suburban landscape around Helsinki. The theme of architecture and design, however, is not only a superficial one, but one that resonates throughout the film’s cinematic style. Kurkvaara explores the leap from architectural planned space to a physical built environment by rendering the cinematic screen into a two-dimensional canvas. The way the film plays with dimensions, shadows and uses the screen as canvas creates a painterly flatness to the film, accentuating the planned quality of the cinematic spaces. This article examines the way Open Secret uses the screen as an intersection of drawn canvas, built environment and cinematic space.