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The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki – The
Politics of Contradiction
During almost three decades as the enfant
terrible of the Finnish film industry, Aki Kaurismäki’s
films have been heavily debated in both cinephile and
academic circles. Many concepts have been evoked in
association with the name Kaurismäki – Finnish cinema,
art-house cinema, class politics, Marxism, gender
depictions, transnationalism, the post-national, just to
name a few.
Since the early projects produced in
collaboration with his brother Mika [e.g. The Worthless
(Arvottomat, 1982)], Aki Kaurismäki’s films have
become synonymous with an antagonistic stance against the
stilted forms of mainstream cinema – whether this is
understood as Finnish or contemporary Hollywood cinema.
From his 1983 adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and
Punishment to the Leningrad Cowboys films; from the
‘underground’ cinema of Calamari Union (1985)
to the prestige connotations of the Cannes Grand Prix –
winner The Man Without a Past (Mies vailla
menneisyyttä, 2002), Kaurismäki’s films gesture
towards multiple directions: they are simultaneously
national and international; they deal with Finnish
national myths alongside the globalisation of national
culture; the films blur the distinctions between high
culture and low culture both in terms of thematics and
aesthetics; they circulate the globe both in commercial
and festival releases, gaining widely discrepant critical
and commercial reception.
As the concept of national culture is
facing increasing challenges in the face of the complex
processes of increasing transnational flow of culture and
people and the economic and geo-political effects of
globalisation, it would be problematic to persist with
strict, traditional definitions of national identity and
culture. As many cultural historians have suggested,
Kaurismäki’s films deal with Finnish cultural history
in a way that complicates the understanding of them as the
products of a traditional homogeneous national culture.
Instead, they gesture towards the multiple directions in
which national cultural history is conceived ‘intranationally’
(Koivunen, 2005) or they deal with
the transnational interconnectivity of cultural
Finnishness (Nestingen, 2002).
Underlying these views is the
understanding that Kaurismäki’s films are part of the
complex negotiation and metamorphosis of national cultures
and identities in the wake of globalisation. But it would
also be clearly counter-productive to argue that the ‘national’
is facing total extinction. As several recent studies have
shown (for example, Hedetoft and Hjort,
2003, Nestingen and Elkington, 2005), the national
remains an essential facet of contemporary identity
formations, though the content and cultural status of
national identities are undoubtedly going through constant
metamorphosis. Kaurismäki’s films function in both ways
– as a set of challenges to traditional conceptions of
national identity; and as instances of this metamorphosis.
This collection of articles provides
five critical perspectives on Kaurismäki’s cinematic
work. The articles are organised in a loosely
chronological order to get a sense of not only the
procession of Kaurismäki’s career, but also how his
films deal with the socio-economic and geo-political
changes affecting Finnish culture and identity. By and
large, the contributors see Kaurismäki’s films as
dealing with a set of cultural elements conventionally
accepted as Finnish, but none of the contributors takes
the cultural constitution of these elements for granted.
Instead, they situate these elements into Kaurismäki’s
complex, multi-levelled plays with cultural meanings,
where the analytical focus moves beyond the reproduction
of national identity to questioning this very process.
Andrew Nestingen examines the
discontinuities and contradictions of the films as well as
the public discourses that surround Kaurismäki’s
auteurist persona. He suggests Kaurismäki’s films
create what he terms ‘contrarian cinema’ – that is,
cinema that cannot be clearly or comfortably equated into
any tradition, but which instead consists of ambivalent
structures and contradictory meanings. Nestingen’s
approach provides a key intervention into ‘Kaurismäki-studies’
by providing a model and a set of incisive terminology
that can allow us to think beyond strict dichotomies and
categorisations and attempt to navigate through the
multivalent structures of these films. The article
establishes the critical basis and impetus for the
articles in this collection in many ways.
Paul Newland examines the spatial
representation of London in Kaurismäki’s I Hired a
Contract Killer. He sees the film as exhibiting a
liminal sensibility, which reflects the metamorphosis of
society in the face of the challenges brought on by the
multi-faceted effects of late capitalism and globalisation.
The film’s depiction of London functions, according to
Newland, simultaneously in terms of ‘place and
displacement’ – an approach which gestures towards the
uncertain and fluctuating life-styles of people situated
at the margins of contemporary society and at the heart of
social change. In creating this contradictory liminality,
the film plays with a wide range of cultural issues (including
cinematic intertextuality), which provides the film with a
means to negotiate for socio-cultural stability.
Pietari Kääpä’s article examines
the relationship between Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad
Cowboys trilogy and Finland’s geo-political
metamorphosis during the late 1980s and early 90s. The
nation’s geo-political and cultural history and
especially her relationship with the neighbouring Soviet
Union are metaphorically and even directly explored in
these films. Kääpä suggests that these films illuminate
the complexities involved in the geo-political
negotiations of Finland during this uncertain era. The
narrative and aesthetic choices of the films instigate a
politicised re-negotiation of Finland’s cultural
constitution under the changing geo-political situation of
Europe and gesture towards new ways of understanding the
role of national identity in contemporary Europe.
Drifting Clouds (Kauas pilvet
karkaavat, 1996) and The Man Without a Past (Mies
vailla menneisyyttä, 2002) are the focus of Kaisa
Toivonen’s article. She examines the issues that arise
out of Kaurismäki’s depictions of working class Finnish
males and the ways their bodies act as sites of
contestation for the films’ class and identity politics.
The intersections of Finnish masculinity and working class
communality function, suggests Toivonen, as sites of
re-negotiation of individual self-worth and identity, even
in the face of the social flux generated by neo-liberalist
processes of socio-economic reformation. Through these
re-negotiations, Kaurismäki is able to give a glimmer of
hope that penetrates the gloom of the cinematic world.
Sanna Peden examines the intertwined
discourses of identity and the nation in her article on The
Man Without a Past. The contrasts between the roles of
the Salvation Army and religion, on one hand, and the
secular society and national history on the other, awakens
a set of negotiations that sees the role of the nation
improve from a marginal concern to a primary role. This,
she suggests, functions as an instance of ‘national
convalescence’. This is in sharp contrast to the
antagonism of many of Kaurismäki’s previous films –
which often famously conclude with the protagonists
leaving the confines of Finland. This suggests fundamental
changes in the imaginaries of the socially marginalized
protagonists (and by extension Kaurismäki). The
reaffirmed role of the secular nation, effectively,
indicates the need to adapt to the changing
socio-historical conditions in the face of the challenges
of globalisation.
Through such critical perspectives, the
contributors indicate a wide variety of ways in which
Kaurismäki’s cinema is symptomatic of post-modern,
globalising culture. From this perspective, it is
thoroughly impossible to conceive of the process of
cultural production as a reflection of traditional or
homogeneous national culture. Rather, the focus becomes
the films’ politics of contradiction – the multiple,
contradictory directions in which Kaurismäki’s cinema
gestures.
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