From television genre to film genre: Finnish Schlager music on small and big screens

Abstract

Schlager shows were one of the main attractions on early Finnish television. Featuring a popular music genre, the shows were soon followed by a wave of Schlager films. In this article, I discuss Schlager film as an intermedial genre that sheds light on the early forms of cooperation between television, film and record industries. Focusing on the Schlager film Hit parade (1959), I suggest that while television was often seen merely as a competitor of the film industry, contributing to the crisis of Finnish film production, the relation between the two was more ambiguous than that: the case of Hit parade indicates that the film industry was also interested in the potential provided by the new medium.