In this article, I look at three early films that Aki and Mika Kaurismäki produced in intense collaboration - Valehtelija (The Liar, 1981), Saimaa-Ilmiö (The Saimaa-phenomenon, 1981) and Arvottomat (The Worthless, 1982). While both brothers have since gone on to have separate, varied careers both in Finland and abroad, it is interesting to note how these early collaborative films set a template for several of the key themes that were to feature in both Aki and Mika Kaurismäki’s subsequent films. These three ‘template’ films will be contextualised in the ‘historical moment’ of their conception – Finland undergoing significant changes in the wake of increasing globalisation.

The Kaurismäkis’ films are explicitly concerned with the notion that, in times of increasing globalisation, redefinitions of existing identity formations both cause insecurity and widen the horizons within which one imagines one’s cultural belonging. The films question and subvert conventional definitions of the nation through a pervading sense of scepticism towards the national and an increased openness to transnational flows of culture. They create an impression of Finnish society coming to terms with its part in the global puzzle – the national in the Kaurismäkis’ films is a topic of constant negotiation, not a self-evident fact.

I will look at the socio-political and representational template set by the first three of the Kaurismäkis’ films – I am not, however, analysing Jackpot 2 in this article. The films’ aesthetic and ideological strategies do not aspire to strict verisimilitude in their representation of society, but rather create ambiguous metaphorical visions of societal existence. The Kaurismäkis’ films aspire to a state where nothing is certain and everything is open to re-interpretation, where all conventional definitions of the nation are re-examined.

I will focus firstly on the way the films view contemporary Finnish society and the importance of national culture, secondly, on how they engage in dialogue with transnational modes of culture, thirdly, on how they reflect the post-modern condition and, fourthly, on the way in which the ‘transcendent’ thematics of the films were received. These films provide the template for a variety of ways in which the Kaurismäkis’ subsequent films challenge the ‘cultural nation’. Thus, Valehtelija proposes a post-national mode of existence, Saimaa-ilmiö fractures the conventional spatio-temporality of the nation and Arvottomat chronicles the increasing globalisation of Finnish culture by showing us the promise contained in the creation of transnational imaginaries.

In this section I will outline the ways in which Valehtelija, Saimaa-ilmiö and Arvottomat were distributed and exhibited in Finland and the critical reception they received, in order to provide a general sense of their cultural status. Valehtelija was a distinctly art-house piece of film-making with a running-time of 52 minutes. It won instant critical acclaim and the top award at the Tampere Short Film Festival and was subsequently released on a single print that attracted just 1,153 viewers.(1) Valehtelija premiered at Helsinki´s art-house cinema Illusion, where it played for just over a week and was subsequently shown briefly at various cities across Finland. It won the Jury´s Prize at the Henri Langlois Festival in Tours, France, which was covered in detail in the Finnish press. Jackpot 2, a short film, never received a commercial release, which is hardly surprising considering its 35-minute running time. The feature-length music documentary Saimaa-ilmiö, however, was shown commercially on 6 prints and for the most part in mainstream cinemas, receiving a modest 51,493 viewers.

Despite the limited viewing figures, they received favourable critical reception and Saimaa-ilmiö drew attention as the first Finnish documentary on the emerging music scene. By the time of the release of Arvottomat, the Kaurismäkis had built a substantial reputation and an aura of expectation was forming around their work. Alongside the high-profile releases of Tapio Suominen’s Täältä tullaan elämä (Right on, man! 1980) and Mikko Niskanen´s Ajolähtö (Take-off, 1982), the Kaurismäkis´ films were seen as "signs of a new generation of film-makers and the possibilities of Finnish cinema" (2) (Salmela 1982).

Arvottomat was a relative success on its theatrical release (11 prints, 70,188 viewers) and was commended for its novelty and entertainment value and its deviation from the norms of contemporary Finnish cinema. Tapani Maskula described Arvottomat as "an existential protest-film against the straight-faced quasi-philosophy and nitpicking of Finnish cinema" (Maskula 1982), highlighting both the entertainment qualities and the art-house thematics and aesthetics of the film, which were a continuation of those in Valehtelija and Jackpot 2. Despite the positive critical reaction, however, Arvottomat´s viewing figures pale in comparison to the other high-profile youth-films of the period: Täältä tullaan elämä was a cultural phenomenon with over 400,000 viewers and Ajolähtö received a very impressive 175,000+ viewers. The Kaurismäkis’ films were from the outset niche products.

Before looking at the ‘template films’ in detail, I will briefly outline the general theoretical framework from where I am working. I will examine the Kaurismäkis’ films by drawing on the arguments of Henry Bacon and Andrew Nestingen. While the work of these two scholars is explicitly concerned with Aki Kaurismäki’s films, I will extend their arguments to cover these films directed by Mika Kaurismäki. After all, the films I look at here are collaborative efforts, which exhibit numerous thematic similarities with both brothers’ subsequent films, but also reflect their eventually very different approaches to the dynamics of the national and the global.

Henry Bacon takes the notion of metaphor as a key issue in explaining Aki Kaurismäki´s films. He sees Aki Kaurismäki´s representation of the Finnish context as being governed by ‘displacement poetics’, where "the metaphoric structure [of the texts] allows Kaurismäki’s films, even at their strangest and most caricatured, to be about an authentic Finnish reality" (Bacon, 2003, 94). Bacon´s insistence on the metaphoric structure of Aki Kaurismäki’s films frees them, analytically speaking, from the strict Finnish confines that previous critical visions of the films had emphasised (see, for example, Toiviainen 2002b, Von Bagh 2002).

Instead of viewing the films as more or less realist depictions of Finnish society, Bacon argues that the films create complex, ambivalent structures that cannot be tied down to any simplistic conceptions of realism. He points out, somewhat cryptically, that the "Helsinki-milieus in Aki Kaurismäki’s films are in a metaphorical relation to the ‘real’ Helsinki: the fictional world in the films both is and is not that city" (Bacon 2003, 92). What Bacon is getting at is that while Helsinki is identifiable as the location of the films, this is not the Helsinki seen in traditional Finnish cinema or even in contemporary depictions of urban existence such as Täältä tullaan elämä. Rather, Helsinki in Aki Kaurismäki’s films is conveyed as an impressionistic snapshot of the way his displaced protagonists view the city.

This emphasis on the films’ metaphoric structure allows for a wider understanding of the multifaceted way in which Aki Kaurismäki´s films deal with Finnish society - analysing his films on a strictly surface-based, realist level only allows access to a fraction of their content. Indeed, both Aki and Mika Kaurismäki’s films – and their collaborative efforts – remain realist in the sense that the contemporary nation is often present in the frame – indeed, this is a crucial part of the films’ chronicling of the changing conceptions of Finnishness in times of increasing globalisation. But crucially, this realist streak – and by extension Finnish society, the Kaurismäkis seem to be suggesting – is compromised by the plethora of almost surrealistic elements denoting the transnational flows of culture that exist within the worlds of the films.

American scholar Andrew Nestingen proposes that Aki Kaurismäki´s films do not offer an essentialist conception of national identity, but are rather based on disjunction, where "the national is one layer in a composite that situates the film in a broad field of cultural meaning making" (Nestingen 2005, s. 298). The ambiguity of the films allows them to transcend any essentialist, simplified readings that call attention to the films’ transnational dimensions:

"Kaurismäki´s films bristle with global elements that cannot be understood as national: global circulation of capital and people pervade his films, time and space are shaped by transnational interconnections and exchanges, and the films cue the viewer to attend to their transnational sources and hybrid forms" (Nestingen 2004, 96).

Nestingen’s point here is that while the films do on one level reflect a sociological vision of Finland, this vision is immersed in transnational flows of cultures and situates Finland as a part of the global ‘world of nations’. As such, Nestingen proposes that this is the most productive way of seeing Aki Kaurismäki´s films – both in the context of Finnish cultural history and cinema, but also as part of a Nordic cinema in transition between the national and the global.

Following Nestingen, my analysis of the Kaurismäkis’ films, then, will read them as negotiations of identity in an increasingly fragmented nation-space, compromised by internal restructuring, the transnational circulation of cultural elements and international geo-politics. I will, however, see the cultural-political argumentation of the films as establishing a ‘post-national’ vision of social existence. In this post-national state, allegiances are formed on the basis of marginalisation from the dominant national norms and these allegiances in turn form to criticise the previously hegemonic conceptions of national existence.

Valehtelija was written by Pauli Pentti and Aki Kaurismäki, who also played the leading role of Ville Alfa. Mika Kaurismäki directed the film as a part of his final dissertation for the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen München. The film follows the daily life of Ville Alfa, an urban wanderer, and a love-child of 1960s radicalism. He strives to be a cosmopolitan intellectual, endlessly watching Godard and Truffaut films and quoting Brecht. The only problem is that radicalism and anarchism are dead and society is moving towards a capitalist welfare state. As critic Tommi Aitio puts it, Ville Alfa is "an objection to the demand on the usefulness of an individual" (Aitio 2000, s. 46). What can Ville Alfa, whose ideals are outmoded and in conflict with dominant norms, do in a world suffocating in its complacency?

Valehtelija was a critical success that elevated these first-time film-makers to the forefront of the ‘Finnish New Wave’. The film’s unconventional Nouvelle Vague-inspired approach was seen as an antidote to the current slump in the Finnish film industry, which was heavily compromised by internal policy struggles and plagued, for the Kaurismäkis at least, by social-realist dramas and national epics that failed to engage the audience.

Mikko Montonen emphasises this aspect in his review: "In Valehtelija, one can see a breath of fresh air in Finnish national cinema circles...[the film] takes flight via the liberated style of the French New Wave" (Toiviainen 1982). Sakari Toiviainen reflects upon Valehtelija´s difference from the majority of Finnish cinema: "It refuses to submit to the familiar one-track-mind of Finnish film, where we either make ‘farcical film’…or we strive for ‘serious‘ cinema with bared teeth" (Toiviainen 1982).

The enthusiastic reception of the Kaurismäkis’ cosmopolitanism indicates the extent to which Finnish cinema was seen negatively at the time as enclosed and congenital. In the view of these critics, Valehtelija heralded a significant change to the constitution of Finnish cinema, an opening of the closely guarded cultural gates to a more flexible stance – towards becoming a part of European cinema.

Valehtelija set a template for the Kaurismäkis’ subsequent films in numerous ways. Not only was it made as an international co-production with funding from Finland and Germany, but it also takes place in a world that seems credible, even realistic, yet which does not resemble any conventional sense of reality. The setting of the film is arguably Helsinki in the early 1980s, though the film’s representation of the national space transcends any adherence to conventional socio-realist examinations of the national condition. Valehtelija engages directly with the national construct from a position in between the national and the transnational, where traditional social identities are in a constant state of flux due to the challenges posed by economic, cultural and political changes and increasing globalisation.

The key themes of Valehtelija – the fragmentation of the individual, urbanisation, the erasure of old identity formations and boundaries, and the role of increasing globalisation in all this - are part of what cultural commentators such as David Harvey (1990) and Frederic Jameson (1991) see as post-modernism. Ville Alfa is a prototypical example of the post-modern condition, exemplifying the "fleeting, the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent" identity of post-modern life (Harvey 1990, 171). Ville exhibits a great sense of dissatisfaction with the soullessness of capitalist society: he is at home nowhere and nothing can provide him with a sense of stability.

Ville sees a possibility of redemption in his prospective girlfriend, Tuula (Pirkko Hämäläinen). She works at an amusement park shooting gallery as a ‘mermaid’, whose function is to serve as an object of ridicule, plunging into a pool of water upon a customer hitting a target. She is a caricatured victim of the service-based society, the incorporation of the human body into the merciless dehumanisation of capitalism, at least in Ville´s eyes. Ville thinks that by rescuing her from this dehumanised condition he can make sense of how the contemporary world works, but the question lingers: where does this rescue take them? After all, Ville’s unemployed, fragmented reality is not a feasible option either.

The constant juxtaposition of the national and the foreign, the indigenous and the exotic, in inquisitive, ironic collages designed to challenge any essentialist conceptions of nationhood further links Valehtelija to postmodernist ideologies. This transcendental quality is best illustrated by theorising the uses of space in the film. I call the spaces of the Kaurismäkis’ films ‘heterotopias’ drawing on Michel Foucault’s terminology.

Foucault defines heterotopias as "counter-sites… in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (Foucault 1967). By ‘real sites’, I take Foucault to mean lived spaces that have a normalising, banal function within a cultural formation. For my purposes, such spaces are ones used in the cultural nation discourse to connote a sense of stability, tradition and national identity – traditional rural landscapes, traditionally designed homes, places of political and cultural interaction such as city halls and squares, and banal contemporary and historical cityscapes.

While Foucault’s heterotopias are concrete spaces within society – cemeteries, museums, libraries, prisons – the heterotopias in the Kaurismäkis’ films take multiple forms. The heterotopias of these films are either concrete spaces situated in a cultural no-man’s-land - the outskirts of the city, harbours, the road, nameless bars; or transformed versions of those spaces that have been central to the cultural nation discourse – both traditional and contemporary – which now function as ironic, subversive reflections of themselves. Here, the ‘authenticity’ of traditional spaces is compromised by injecting the image with alienating or foreign elements. And when something like the real world of contemporary Finland is depicted in the films, the vision with which we are presented will without fail be a skewed one. The use of these heterotopic spaces in the Kaurismäkis´ films is a way of visualising the heterogeneity and multidimensionality of the contemporary Finnish nation in the wake of increasing globalisation.

What Valehtelija is criticising is ‘ethno-symbolic’ national discourses, which highlight "the role of various ethnic elements – myths, symbols, traditions and memories – in the formation of nations and in the shaping of national identities" (Smith 2000, 57). Such ethno-symbolic narratives of nationhood contrast with the realities of Finland merging with the rest of Europe and signpost a step backwards into a homogeneously imagined nation. Valehtelija, however, moves in the other direction.

In a telling scene, Ville takes Tuula on a romantic nature excursion, perhaps striving to re-enact similar scenes from the canonic examples of Finnish cinema in order to satisfy, through illusory escape, the need for authenticity in a meaningless world. Whereas in films such as Valentin Vaala’s Koskenlaskijan morsian (The logger`s bride, 1937) and Mikko Niskanen´s Käpy selän alla (Skin, skin, 1966), the romantic couple are seen surrounded by nature and idyllic lake settings, Valehtelija shows the contemporary impossibility of such idealised thinking. The natural space visited by Ville and Tuula at first seems to encapsulate ethno-symbolic notions of authenticity, but soon a jarring cut to a long shot dispels this idyll, transforming the space into a heterotopia that is designed to question the notion of authenticity in contemporary society. The couple are on a hill-top, apparently surrounded by nature, but this natural space is surrounded by the encroaching signs of urbanity, where looming homogeneous apartment blocks encircle and enclose the space, shattering any sense of idyll that could have been gained. In such a society, even the last havens of authenticity are not safe from the fragmentive ideologies of urbanisation and the capitalist striving for profit.

Valehtelija’s depiction of the urban landscape further underlines Ville’s post-modern identity crisis. He inhabits transitory spaces such as bars and backrooms, which seem to provide only temporary relief from or contribute to the fragmentation of the self. The places where Ville seems most comfortable – cinemas and the apartments of his friends - provide a further dimension to the sense of displacement and disorientation, since the majority of the cultural activities that take place in these spaces have a foreign origin: Ville Alfa watches Godard’s Bande à Part (Laittomat, 1964) in a cinema and re-enacts Arthur’s (Claude Brasser) death scene on an icy beach and a house-party turns into a debating match on the respective virtues of Bergson and Proust, with the rest of the heated conversation revolving around the finer points of Chrysler cars and the possibilities of Brechtian theatre and cinema.

Valehtelija is positively teeming with references from classic films and novels of the past, crucially from non-Finnish contexts. The debt the film owes to Godard in particular is sizable. Of course, Godard’s films are infused with similar methods of ironic quotation, often from American film noir. The Kaurismäkis take this one step further in a truly hyper-real form of representation by quoting the quotations, so bringing a further degree of irony to the already ironic tone. The Kaurismäkis are very much aware of the extent of these quotations: "We have separated from a realistic tradition of story-telling and tell American stories, or French…life is comprised of such discrepant ingredients" (Mika Kaurismäki quoted in Dubrinea 1982). The realist heritage here refers to the ‘national realism’ of contemporary Finnish cinema, which is a template that the Kaurismäkis set out to avoid.

The influx of foreign imagery pervades the mise-en-scène to the extent that the film takes place in a hyperreal filmic space, suffused with images from Finnish cinema, but even more from films from other cultural contexts. Ville Alfa inhabits a sort of bohemian sub-reality that seems to be set in the smoky backrooms of Godard´s Paris, with small, isolated fragments of contemporary Helsinki diffusing the image, whose national authenticity is called into question by their constant juxtaposition with images from other cultural contexts.

Cultural hybridity, a key theme of the majority of the Kaurismäkis’ films, is nowhere more present than in the character of Ville Alfa himself, who is modelled after the stoic, inexpressive characters played by Jean-Pierre Leaud. Ville´s aloof personality is a continuation of the alienated protagonists of Godard´s films. He struts the side-streets of Helsinki in a manner that evokes Lemmy Caution, Godard´s futuristic facsimile of Humphrey Bogart, in Alphaville (Lemmy Caution, piru mieheksi, 1966). The protagonist of Godard´s Pierrot Le Fou (Hullu Pierot, 1965), Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is another kindred spirit of Ville Alfa. They share a mutual distaste for the impersonalised capitalist bourgeois society, where everyone is reduced to quantities, not qualities. In a society where everyone and everything is no more than an object, with no inner qualities, life has no meaning as there is no struggle. Ferdinand, the three main characters of Bande à Part, Lemmy Caution and Ville Alfa are poetic wanderers, who see little of value in contemporary society.

Of course, in the diegesis of Valehtelija, Ferdinand and Lemmy are fictional, while Ville is real. But the excessive presence of homages in the world inhabited by Ville and in his own identity propose that his character is a fusion of filmic images, a simulacrum identity hiding beneath nothing but references to other images. This is made abundantly clear when Ville is shot at the climax of the film, evoking Godard´s A Bout de Souffle (Viimeiseen hengenvetoon, 1959). However, this is only a ‘film death’, with Ville opening his eyes and winking at the mourning Tuula, another sign of the composite of reality and hyper-reality. In the film world, Tuula´s tears are real, whilst Ville only plays games of post-modern irony with emotions, making him the titular liar, not on account of what he says, but through the notion that his whole existence is a façade, a simulacrum of collected images with no authenticity or truth beneath the surface.

Even his name refers to his peculiar liminal position between the obsolete traditions of Finnishness and the cataclysmic changes of modernisation: Ville is a typical Finnish name, but in Valehtelija the name loses its purely Finnish connections and becomes a part of the film’s intertextual play with transnational cultural elements by evoking the French word ‘ville’, his whole name reversing the title of Alphaville. In becoming another one of Ville’s collected images, Finnishness loses any sense of authenticity it may have had and is relegated to the status of another confusing signpost in Ville’s futile navigations through the concrete jungle.

We are once again reminded of Ville and Tuula’s nature excursion, which provides another example of Ville’s falsified, simulated identity. In his striving for an authentic experience, he sees authenticity as composed of recreated images, this time from the canonic examples of national authenticity in the films of Vaala and Niskanen. Interestingly, Ville´s friend Juuso remarks that his relationship with women is characterised by an unreal, crazy gloom, an approximation of a filmic love affair, hiding no real essence beneath. Accordingly, the nature excursion functions as Ville’s attempt to bridge his fragmented urbanised identity and to undo the symptoms of the confusing cultural vertigo he suffers in contemporary society. But again, the excursion is only a self-reflexive simulated quest for meaning, which holds no particular truth or access to the ‘real’ for Ville. Ville, then, is an idealised epitomy of the marginalised, transcendent post-modern subject, lost in a society going through fundamental changes towards an inhuman condition, a character lost in the promised land of existential crisis.

Ville´s identity crisis is a part of a wider set of challenges that increasing globalisation proposes for contemporary social formations and for the people that inhabit them. One result of increasing globalisation is what Arjun Appadurai sees as "diasporic public spheres", where "neither images nor viewers fit into circuits or audiences that are easily bound within local, national, or regional spaces" (Appadurai 1996, 4). In his view, the immense transnational flows of culture and the globalised forms of political and economic change create disjunctures in the global order. These disjunctures challenge conventional definitions of individual and collective social identities to the extent that such identities cease to correspond to strict local or national categories. In such instances, identities can transcend the concrete and ideological confines of the nation.

Appadurai argues that these new identity-categorisations are not only created through diasporic experiences, but also by the pre-eminent status that the work of the imagination holds. The transnational flows of cultures and peoples allow an individual the opportunity to identify with ideas and cultural models from other national contexts. Such an individual inhabits a privileged

position where they can transcend the cultural confines of the nation by gathering an identity for themselves from the multitude of cultural options presented to them. Such mental mindscapes, created out of images either mediated or experienced first-hand, "tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places" (Appadurai 1996, 35).

Ville´s desperate search for a stable identity results in a collage of images from both within and beyond national borders, an imaginary self that has little authentic meaning. He epitomises the notion that in a global society, of which the nation-state forms only a part, one is engaged in "a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes…[which] is characterised by a new role for the imagination in social life" (Appadurai 1996, 31). However, whereas Appadurai´s conception of these cultural imaginaries is somewhat celebratory, Ville´s experience is a more disorientated one, mirroring the unstable status of the emerging generation trying to find its feet in a world in constant flux. Ville´s use of hybrid cultural elements from a variety of sources in creating his imaginary is out of necessity not only to counteract the domestic societal changes such as the Great Migration, but also the wider challenges that increasing political, economic and cultural globalisation present for contemporary society and the lost souls trying to make sense of it all.

The filmic diegesis of Valehtelija assumes Ville´s perspective, where the film’s social space becomes a reflection of the mindscape of the outsider Ville. Helsinki is transformed into a destabilised, fragmented sphere, where ‘authentic’ Finnishness is only another illusion amongst a mesh of cultural images from various cultural sources. Ville is marginalised from conventional society by a nation that is struggling with its ambiguous existence as a sovereign welfare state and a piece of the global puzzle. To Ville, the national condition appears restrictive and as something to rebel against and he subsequently fall into the gaps in the nation-state structure. For him, the national signifies rejection or incarceration and this exclusion from the homogeneous promise of the nation forces him to imagine, and often act upon, life outside or beyond the nation.

It is perhaps therefore more appropriate to see Ville’s imaginary as a post-national one, rather than a purely transnational one. After all, his intention is not to appropriate these hybrid, exotic cultural elements into the Finnish cultural sphere, but is rather being challenged by the influx of these elements to think beyond the nation. In other words, by standing outside the conventional national society and being immersed in the transnational flows of culture, Ville transcends the nation to a state where the nation holds little meaning for him. The world of Valehtelija is infused with change, instability and displacement, where conventional definitions of the national sphere as a haven of stability have lost their meaning and are supplanted by a constantly in-flux post-national cultural imaginary.

Saimaa-ilmiö, directed by both brothers, continues the themes set up in Valehtelija by providing a collage of the national past and the present, with the action set in spaces that in conventional representations would represent stability, but here take on alternative connotations. The film features three bands, Eppu Normaali, Hassisen Kone and Juice Leskinen Grand Slam, all which enjoyed a dedicated cult following at the time. Their lyrics are often critical reflections on contemporary society, which makes the contrast with the traditional setting even sharper.

Saimaa-ilmiö follows these bands on a boat tour of the Finnish lake-district, which has long held a revered place in national literature and touristic marketing as a symbol of national authenticity. In traditional Finnish cinema, these settings were used as the background to festivities connoting tradition and stability such as the ‘tango-markkinat’ and the mid-summer holiday Juhannus. The idyllic lake setting allows the Kaurismäkis to juxtapose the visual symbolism of the setting with more anarchic forms of culture exemplified in the rock music.

Despite the anarchic connotations, reviewers were quick to point out the specifically Finnish roots of the film. In Helena Ylänen’s review, for example, she describes Saimaa-ilmiö as "the first ever Finnish rock-film" (Ylänen 1982), while Pertti Lumirae describes it as "the first Finnish film to seriously illuminate the essence of Finnish rock music" (Lumirae 1982). While the film undoubtedly deals with a specifically Finnish form of rock music, I would argue that it is also necessary to take into account how the film plays with and juxtaposes elements of traditional and anarchic Finnish culture. While Saimaa-ilmiö undoubtedly deals with specifically Finnish content and functions, to a degree, as a sociological critique of the state of contemporary national culture, the film’s use of space can lead us to draw more ironic conclusions about the film’s intent.

The coalescence of musical anarchism and the spaces of tradition evokes a sense of cultural displacement, where the conventional meanings of those spaces are questioned. In a similar way that the spaces of Helsinki were transformed to reflect Ville Alfa’s fragmented mindscape in Valehtelija, the spaces of Saimaa-ilmiö transcend and ironise the traditional connotations of the natural setting. Nowhere is this more evident than in the penultimate musical number of the film where the bands come together to perform a re-arranged version of the Finnish National Anthem Maamme. The anarchic re-arrangement of the national anthem performed in a concert-setting surrounded by the traditional iconography of Finnish landscapes with all their ethno-symbolic connotations carnivalises those spaces, undermining their traditional meanings.

These spaces thus function as temporary heterotopias, like the fairgrounds that Foucault speaks of or the carnivals of Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception (1984). These are spaces that temporarily exist amidst the ‘conventional’ spaces of society, but they simultaneously transgress the dominant society’s norms and work to undermine the established conventions and ‘truths’ of the society. Such temporary spaces fracture the concept of "time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect", establishing in its place "time in the mode of the festival", designed to instigate a re-appraisal of the dominant norms (Foucault 1967).

Whereas the conventional use of landscape iconography in Finnish cinema proposes a continuous national culture, where the nation is imagined as a homogeneous, primordial entity, the anarchic use of these spaces in Saimaa-ilmiö challenges this vision of the traditional nation. The rock-concerts create temporary spaces which attain a doubled status – they are both anarchic utopias of the contemporary generation and alternative versions of the traditional spaces. The concert grounds become heterotopic sites of questioning, which simultaneously ‘represent, contest and invert’ the traditional spaces and their cultural meanings. Such spaces reflect the traditional nation in a skewed way that questions the meanings of such forms of culture in the contemporary society. Here, the original cultural meanings are turned on their head, and tradition in its restricted use comes to signify stagnation. Instead of reaffirming a sense of the cultural nation, Saimaa-ilmiö’s cultural displacement offers difference and rebellion instead of conformity and narrates the multi-faceted nature of the national, even in spaces normally reserved for the re-creation of tradition.

Arvottomat, directed by Mika Kaurismäki with assistant director Aki Kaurismäki and written by both brothers, was the Kaurismäkis’ first full-length feature film. Arvottomat´s title sequence establishes a link with the end of Saimaa-ilmiö by opening with a re-orchestrated version of the national anthem with electric guitars and drums accompanying a helicopter shot over Helsinki. The opening sets up the theme of anarchic rebellion against the claustrophobic confines of the nation: the Finland of Arvottomat is not the traditional Finland of classical Finnish cinema.

Manne (Matti Pellonpää), Harri (Juuso Hirvikangas) and Ville Alfa (Aki Kaurismäki) are cosmopolitans suffocating in the restrictive, traditional society surrounding them. They cannot identify with any of the norms and conventions by which the society around them is bound, rather preferring an outsider existence modelled on an approximation of the filmic lifestyles of gangsters and bohemians. The loose narrative revolves around a priceless painting, stolen by Manne from a group of petty criminals. Manne and Harri flee from the gangsters across Finland, while Ville goes to Paris. On the road they meet Veera (Pirkko Hämäläinen), an old girlfriend of Harri’s.

At this point, Arvottomat transforms from a city-bound gangster thriller into a road movie, a genre traditionally focused on outsiders who rebel against dominant norms. The film uses several road movie conventions to examine Finland from the marginalised perspective of the band of the worthless, such as sweeping landscape shots and travel montages. However, Arvottomat is not set in a conventional version of Finland, despite the presence of recognisable facets of Finnish culture and society. While ethno-symbolic elements infuse the frame, they are dealt with from the perspective of the marginalised, who see little of value in them.

Manne meets Harri at a village dance hall, where the camera assumes their disillusioned point of view and lingers on the performers and dancers of a traditional tango. Matti convinces Harri to leave behind his rural existence, to which Harri replies: "The most important thing is leaving". What matters to the worthless is not necessarily where they are going, but the very act of liberating oneself from the stagnant confines of the traditional nation. While "the death of tango-and-beer culture, when replaced by some discos and hamburger bars, is tragic" (Aki Kaurismäki in Immonen and Kaipainen 1982), Arvottomat does not brood in the stagnant melancholy omnipresent in the traditional films, but looks forward to the new invigorating challenges and possibilities that increasing transnational interaction provides.

The critical reception, more than ever before, emphasised what the critics saw as the distinct Finnish qualities of the film, reading it as a representation of the contemporary state of Finnish society. Sakari Toiviainen observed that Arvottomat focuses on "tacky bars and hotels, dance-halls and restaurants, service stations and city lights, abandoned houses and lakesides [which] convey a picture of Finland in a mode in which it is rarely presented" (Toiviainen 1982). Jarmo Lintala saw the film as a fresh and intense look at Finnish culture: "Dance-stages, beer-bars, gravel-pits, service-stations and characterless highways have been imbued with power. In this carefully designed milieu, the grey, flat monotony has been transformed into an interestingly traditional Finnish cultural landscape imbued with surrealistic characteristics" (Lintala 1982).

The film includes a number of elements from Finnish national culture of both the banal and the ethno-symbolic variety. ‘Classical’ Finnish cinema used such cultural signifiers - natural iconography, character types, forms of leisure (e.g. saunas, the excessive consumption of alcohol) and significant historical events - in a very conventional, yet self-aware manner to project a sense of ‘authentic’ Finnishness to a homogeneously-imagined national audience. On the other hand, the Komisario Palmu films and the Uuno Turhapuro series took place in ordinary and unremarkable urban spaces, where the homes, streets, restaurants and bars were captured in the ‘way they were’, and functioned as banal signifiers of the nation. Arvottomat works with a similar range of cultural signifiers, but takes a questioning stance, refusing to take these elements and their cultural connotations at face value, thereby producing a very different vision of contemporary Finland - Finland, in this version, becomes a series of heterotopic spaces.

A vital element in this re-visioning of Finland is the way in which the film chronicles the immersion of Finnish society in transnational flows of culture. The head of production on Arvottomat, Jaakko Talaskivi, saw the film in these terms: "The story, drawing on the heritage of the French New Wave and the American gangster film, returns us to the internationalism of the Czarist-period after the up-to-the-moment cultivation of Finnish national themes; to be sure, Finland is a part of the world" (Talaskivi in LeCorre 1982). The titles of some of the Finnish reviews for Arvottomat point out the cultural hybridity of the film, as in "Bonnie and Clyde in Finnish Forests" (Haavikko 1982), or "Raiders of the Lost Finland" (Avola 1982). Marja Welin, in an article entitled "Arvottomat – a Film about Modern Times", argues that the film "is about Finland, but not in a Finnish way" (Welin 1983).

The Finnish critical response, quite rightly, acknowledges that the presence of international thematics brings a new dimension to the examination of Finnish culture, but fails to take into account the extent to which the film is immersed in transnational flows of culture and the effects this has on the film’s vision of society. There is a tendency in the reviews to neutralise the foreign content by treating it as a mere side-effect of the ‘main theme’ of representing some sort of essentialist Finnishness.

For example, Matti Nummelin writes that: "The society of Arvottomat is more an American metropolis than Finland. That most likely is precisely the Kaurismäkis’ intention. They want to point out that similar laws abide with us….Money has dictated its terms in Finland too" (Nummelin 1982). In a particularly revealing analysis, Heikki Haavikko points out that "Arvottomat is bound up with the heritage of the American crime film...it is simultaneously a very Finnish film...the Finnish society is conveyed in the film as perhaps a bit strange, but undeniably familiar...it is precisely the strangeness of the characters that provides pertinent insights into the Finnish landscape and society...Arvottomat is perhaps the most surprising and self-contained Finnish film in years" (Haavikko 1982).

While these reviews do recognise the co-existence of Finnish and foreign forms of culture in a transnational form of interchange, they seem to me to be restricted in the sense that they propose an unchanging essential form of Finnishness that is merely being observed from a distanced outsider position. This is an approach that neglects the often intertwining nature of the cultural discourse that Arvottomat presents. I would argue that the transnational intertextuality of Arvottomat proposes more fundamental consequences for understanding the cultural potency of the film. While the film contains a definite Finnish connection, it is more concerned with questioning accepted norms and attempts to move beyond the ideological confines of the traditional nation by immersing itself in transnational flows of culture.

While Valehtelija focused on Ville Alfa´s post-national mindscapes with incidental references to national culture, and Saimaa-ilmiö displayed the national space as a fragmented heterotopia, Arvottomat is more adamant in showing the increasing transnational dimensions of Finnish culture. At the same time, the film reminds us that sometimes the results of intense transnationalisation may very well be the creation of a post-national imaginary, a time and space where the national no longer holds any significant meaning. Arvottomat shows us a heterotopic social space where the national is becoming antiquated and replaced by the creative potential of imagining new transnational worlds.

Helena Ylänen hints at this transnationalism: "Arvottomat takes place in a stylised Finland of dreams, where no one swears, where Calvados is served in Baaribaari located on Hämeentie, where two of the ‘lads’ present both understand French… and the land is as beautiful as conveyed by a great artist" (Ylänen 1982). Such cultural developments are precisely the result of crossborder flows of culture and their re-appropriation in the recipient cultural contexts. The use of such elements in Arvottomat is not to signify an Americanisation of Finland, but rather to indicate the increasing transnational nature of ‘national culture’.

The representation of space reveals the method by which Arvottomat creates a dialogue between Finnish ethno-symbolism and transnational flows of culture. The vision of Finland in the film is a reflection of the cosmopolitan, bohemian mindset of the protagonists, where conventional national iconography loses its ethno-symbolic meanings in a post-modernist collage of the national and the foreign. Manne´s flat, for example, is a sub-bohemian hideout, where a picture of President Urho Kekkonen hangs on the wall. The picture, with its connotations of formality, is out of place in Manne’s messy, casual, book-littered abode. Similarly, Manne´s favourite haunt, BaariBaari, a local seedy bar-cafeteria, serves Calvados in the morning whilst Shostakovich´s Symphony no. 7 plays in the background.

Helsinki may be portrayed in conventionally recognisable terms, but this mish-mash of cultural elements allows cosmopolitanism to seep into the frame through visual and narrative means. As Tommi Aitio puts it, this is "not about capturing the city in documentary terms, but about a type of urban consciousness, where the real milieu and staged fantasy can blend naturally" (Aitio 2000, 47). Such an urban consciousness cannot sit in harmony with the traditional nation, a theme already established in the beginning of the film in the discordant juxtaposition of the anarchic version of the national anthem and Helsinki. This is further underlined by the intertextual games the film plays with film noir and other genre conventions and the injection of foreign cultural elements into the seemingly banal urban mise-en-scène (cadillacs, cowboy hats, French and American film posters, foreign beverages). The cityscape becomes more a place of reciprocal cultural interaction, a heterotopia where the transnational imaginaries of the main characters transform the ethno-symbolic content, producing alternative layers of meaning.

The latter half of the film, where the road takes the band of the worthless on a trip showcasing the various iconographic elements of traditional Finnish culture, displays, somewhat paradoxically, the film’s discordant vision of the ethno-symbolic nation. Instead of creating the ironic and temporary heterotopias seen in Saimaa-Ilmiö, Arvottomat uses these spaces metaphorically to show the absence of meaning they hold for the protagonists. Aki Kaurismäki underlines this perception by pointing out that traditional notions of national culture have very little to offer the protagonists: "There is nothing to distance ourselves from as the traditional themes of Finnish cinema have never meant anything to us. We have just made what feels appropriate to us" (Aki Kaurismäki in Avola 1982). Even though Aki Kaurismäki´s statements should never be taken at face-value, his statements do always have a valuable point to make, and in the case of the statement above, it is that the cultural archive found in canonical Finnish films has different connotations for the contemporary outsider and that these films re-interpret that archive from an outsider perspective.

Intriguingly, Arvottomat captures the heartlands of Ostrobothnia in an almost fetishistic quality, but suddenly undermines these by introducing a circus called El Dorado, run by the vagrant Carlos, who we find out was born on the Oriental Express somewhere between Bombay and Delhi. The circus stands out amidst the surrounding ethno-symbolic landscape, giving these semi-nationalistic images an ironic dimension, a notion underlined by a group of Hell´s Angels arriving to attend the circus performance. El Dorado functions as another heterotopia, which momentarily transforms the surrounding landscape, challenging its ethno-symbolic connotations. Here, the post-national dimensions of this transformation are more explicit, with Arvottomat equating the band of the worthless with the vagrants of the circus and the Hell’s Angels gang, both groups which by definition have no stable home and indeed exist outside categorisations such as the national.

In a similar way to Valehtelija, Arvottomat assumes the characters’ subjective points of view and transforms the film´s diegesis to match their marginalised outlooks and ideologies, their mindscapes. Mika Kaurismäki underlines this perception: "Of those varying environments of the film, one could say that they are not only the landscapes of our Fatherland, but also soulscapes" (Kaurismäki in Tuomikoski 1982).

Following Appadurai, we can argue that these subjective imaginaries "are able to contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the entrepreneurial mentality that surround them" (Appadurai 1996, 33). A crucial part of this process of contesting and subverting is achieved by transcending the rules and the conventions of national representation. Tapani Maskula refers to a similar conception: "Even though the majority of the film takes place on Finnish soil, the characters of the film inhabit their own closed-off world, where completely different notions of honour, norms and relations function in contrast to the external world" (Maskula 1982).

The notion of Arvottomat working on a completely different level of reality is underlined by Manne’s point: "We should not think of reality as it is, but what it is like in our dreams". Indeed, the imagery of the film is not objective reality, but subjective reality, where established conventions and behavioural norms cease to matter. This is closely connected with the imaginaries that Appaurai talks of, as these subjective mindscapes "are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors" (Appadurai 1996, 33). This fantasised abandonment of strict notions of the truth and the real is a key factor in deciphering how the film appropriates the ideological mindscapes of the protagonists.

The characters often make seemingly irreverent comments that reflect their transnational imaginaries: in response to Harri´s question about where Manne and Veera met, Manne replies: "We met in Iceland". Ville Alfa tells Manne that he bought the painting in Istanbul, to which Manne replies that Ville has never been in Istanbul. Ville responds: "Exactly". Harri sings blues music at a country dance-hall and answers the phone by identifying himself as ‘American Express’. To further indicate Manne´s outsider imaginary, we might note that he responds to an accusation of running away from reality by stating that "Reality runs away from me". Instead of attempting to address a more or less homogeneous national audience, Arvottomat displays the nation as a multifaceted sphere, in which competing voices converge in disharmony. Here, discordant elements, such as traditional national culture, alternative heterotopias and foreign elements, converge in the film’s diegesis as a troubling, open-ended look at contemporary social existence – a sign of the changing status of the national in times of increasing globalisation.

Yet, Hannu Waarala reminds us that even such marginality with its transnational aspirations remains rooted in the national sphere: "the worthless live without the clear psychological framework provided by a settled life-style, adjacent to a Godardian speech-world", but they are still caught "in the vice of the Finnish milieu and mentality" (Waarala 1982). The creation of transnational imaginaries is not a one-way process, but is the result of a complex set of negotiations, where the local and the national function as necessary identity constituents, even if this is only on the level of something to rebel against.

But crucially, Arvottomat also hints at the increasing post-national aspirations of its protagonists by emphasising the loosening of the hold that the national has on them. For example, in Manne and company’s attempts to escape the police and the gangsters by hiding out in a cabin by an idyllic lake, Arvottomat reinterprets the traditional Finnish landscape. This is a prolific part of the national cultural imagery, but here it is presented as bankrupt and desolate, as the cabin inhabited by the protagonist-outlaws is a run-down shack with broken windows and punctured walls. For the protagonists, such idyllic scenarios hold no potency, but exist only as further signifiers of their isolation from the surrounding society.

The national remains the referential basis for the subjective imaginaries of the protagonists, yet their identities are bound neither by the geographical borders of the national space (they flee to Paris during the climax) nor by the ideological confines of the nation. The question, then, becomes; how long can the national hold any potency in the minds of people that have few connections to the traditional nation and identify with transnational flows of culture, before a post-national state is reached?

Arvottomat not only chronicles the changing cultural-political landscape of Finnish society, but, crucially, shows the increasingly widening transnational imaginaries of the emerging generation of directors – one that is increasingly suspicious of the fallacies in what is supposed to be a welfare state social system, but is in fact increasingly becoming a capitalist consumer society. This sets up a consistent theme in the Kaurismäkis’ work – a necessity for the audience to be aware of alternative ways of envisioning social existence and an openness to think beyond the homogeneously-imagined confines of the nation.

These three films, then, feature a number of the key themes that were to take an even more prominent status in the subsequent films of both Aki and Mika Kaurismäki. By transforming the cityscapes and the traditional ethno-symbolic landscapes into the post-national imaginary of Ville Alfa in Valehtelija, the temporary heterotopias of Saimaa-ilmiö and the transnational spheres of Arvottomat, a picture of Finland and Finnish culture as a constantly evolving bricolage emerges.

The Kaurismäkis’ multifaceted, open-ended texts, then, challenge the homogeneous nation and envision Finland as a part of a global society. While the films exhibit a distinct preference for the hybrid and the transnational over the national, they also show the negative effects that global capitalism has on the individual in welfare states on the brink of extinction. The Kaurismäkis’ films are critical of the Western nation-state system, which is shedding its original welfare state functions in favour of a neo-liberalist struggle for global markets, where traditional conceptions of community and belonging are left behind in favour of individualistic gain.

Instead of arguing for the abandonment of nation-states in favour of globalism, the Kaurismäkis’ films retain a sociological consciousness over the effects of global capitalism on both nation-states and the individuals who inhabit it. The films show that it is more productive to think of contemporary social existence in relation to its transnational dimensions, but neither do they forget that it is not only the nation-state that is the cause of the protagonists’ problems, but the role of the nation-state in the global markets.

The films reflect the notion that, in the wake of the unravelling of most conventional notions of national communality in favour of individualised or fragmented definitions of belonging, self-definitions on the basis of nationhood are often more appropriately characterised as post-national – "for substantial numbers of people, the world appears as complex, liminal, lacking in clearly demarcated borders and commonly accepted values" (Hedetoft & Hjort 2003). The post-national in the Kaurismäkis’ films, then, is aimed at showing the existence of individuals on the margins of conventional society, who form various sorts of communal affiliations on the basis of this marginalisation from both national society and the nation’s part in global capitalism - themes that would materialise in various guises in the Kaurismäkis’ separately produced subsequent works.

WiderScreen.fi 2/2006

© WiderScreen.fi 16.10.2006

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Arvottomat

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Arvottomat

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Valehtelija

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Valehtelija

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Valehtelija

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Saimaa-ilmiö

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Arvottomat

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Saimaa-ilmiö