The Films of Aki Kaurismäki

Ludic Engagements

Thomas Austin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501325403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Despite creating an extensive and innovative body of work over the last 30 years, Aki Kaurismäki remains relatively neglected in Anglophone scholarship. This international collection of original essays aims to redress such neglect by assembling diverse critical inquiries into Kaurismäki's oeuvre. The first anthology on Kaurismäki to be published in English, it offers a range of voices responding to his politically and aesthetically compelling cinema. Deploying various methodologies to explore multiple facets of his work, The Films of Aki Kaurismäki will come to be seen as the definitive book on Kaurismäki.

Part I

TIME AND SPACE

Chapter 1

TEMPORALITY IN KAURISMÄKI: ANACHRONISM, ALLUSION, TABLEAU

Thomas Austin

In Aki Kaurismäki’s short film Dogs Have No Hell (2002),¹ a small businessman just released from jail has 10 minutes to find the woman he loves and persuade her to take the train to Siberia with him. Initially, it appears that the film may have been made in ‘real time’ so that a 10-minute running time will match 10 minutes of story time. But this fit can only be achieved by a series of impossible ellipses, allowing the characters to move from scene to scene across Helsinki (prison, workshop, restaurant, station) in a matter of seconds. Rather than frustrating the viewer as a cheat, Dogs Have No Hell plays with dominant conventions of film narration to foreground cinema’s function as a time machine. In this ludic exercise in temporal compression, Kaurismäki peppers the mise en scène with shots of clock faces, including a huge one on the wall of the jewellers where the couple buy their wedding rings. The film also offers a concise summation of his signature style, including deadpan performances of melodramatic scenarios, predominantly static framing with short track-ins used at key moments, appearances by regular collaborators (Kati Outinen and Markku Peltola) and the diegetic presence of a retro rock band (Marko Haavisto & Poutahaukat).² Because of its form, theme and brevity Dogs Have No Hell offers a striking instance of Kaurismäki’s engagement with the politics of time in the social sphere and his exploration of the representational strategies through which such an engagement might be pursued. Dreams of change, urgency and departure, familiar from the generic clichés of popular cinema, are simultaneously queried and affirmed in the couple’s race to catch the train.³ The tedium and repetition of the quotidian working time which they hope to escape is encoded in the mise en scène of costumes and settings (the uniform of a cook, the space of an underground garage). So too is a complex sense of nostalgia, spatialized in ‘outmoded’ objects such as clothing (the man’s pork pie hat, the woman’s bobby socks) and the train itself.⁴ Moreover, by holding in tension a self-conscious aesthetic and a generic but nonetheless emotionally engaging narrative, the short attests to its fabrication without sacrificing affect.

What renders the film – and Kaurismäki’s work more broadly – both affective and political (indeed, affective because political), rather than a series of clever formal experiments, is the classed location of the lead characters. The working-class female protagonist, played as so often in his films by Outinen, is a cook. Peltola’s character co-owns a small tyre business, presumably having realized the ambition expressed by several of Kaurismäki’s male characters of becoming his own boss. They are here united in the kind of optimistic romantic trajectory that is not usually made available to characters from their class, in scenes typically reserved for normatively ‘beautiful’ leads in Hollywood and its imitators. Instead, two ordinary-looking working-class protagonists in their forties⁵ are dignified and made beautiful in an exchange of looks and granted the filmic attention often reserved for middle-class characters.

When the pair catch sight of each other in the restaurant where the woman works, the use of lighting and the only tracking shots in the film call attention to the moment as both event and representation. The camera moves in to a medium close-up of her and then of him. Each remains silent, expressionless and very nearly static, framed frontally and gazing intently just past the camera, while the band plays a song called ‘Thunder and Lightning’.⁶ Traditional glamour lighting imparts a movie star glow to her blue eyes, blonde hair and white hairnet (narratively appropriate but incongruous in the romantic rhetoric of the scene).

Side-lit and seated against a wall in a black overcoat and dark grey hat, the man turns his head a little and moves his lower lip very slightly. The coup de foudre figured in an emotionally charged exchange of looks is of course a cliché of melodrama and romance, and its status as such is acknowledged here in the knowing tone generated by the dolly shots, lighting and the actors’ underplaying. The impact of such distanciation techniques should not be misconstrued, however. Kaurismäki’s films are designed to produce an emotional response in tandem with a political one, and the scene is not simply a genre pastiche drained of affect. Instead, it functions to move viewers towards a felt understanding of a transformative moment in the characters’ lives, even while it foregrounds its own artifice. The silent look that inaugurates the formation of the heterosexual couple is registered as hackneyed, but it is also portrayed as a gesture of reciprocity suffused with a timid longing and hope. It is as if the everyday world has fallen away into irrelevance, at least temporarily. Concurrent with this, the pointedly ostensive display of film style gestures to a supplementary temporality beyond that of the diegesis: the moment of registration. The familiarity of staging and shooting opens up time further by inviting the recall of countless similar scenes in the history of cinema and in each audience member’s particular viewing repertoire. But this temporal aperture is achieved without subverting the emotional drama.

In this chapter, I explore a nexus of issues around temporality, aesthetics, politics and affect in Kaurismäki’s oeuvre. I trace three sets of temporal interventions in his films that complicate social realism: first, the presence of anachronisms in the mise en scène; secondly, citations of film history via multiple intertextual references to other filmmakers, popular genres and narratological conventions; and thirdly, the use in some of his more recent feature films of a particular type of tableau or stilled life. This highly charged image briefly halts the flow of narrative progression in a composition which generates political and emotional impact while also emphasizing its own fabrication as a moment of display.

In using these strategies, Kaurismäki defies verisimilitude and thus confounds the familiar binarism that polarizes claims to veracity and an aesthetic play with signification. The two terms, pulling in opposite directions, coexist uneasily in the idea of ‘the representation of reality’, a notion which Frederic Jameson has called a ‘peculiarly unstable concept owing to its simultaneous, yet incompatible, aesthetic and epistemological claims’.⁷ In a dialectical move, Kaurismäki stages a productive collision between socio-economic referentiality (bearing witness to poverty, unemployment, homelessness, social exclusion, immigration) and a self-consciously artful, cinephilic and playful address. To borrow Lesley Stern’s terminology, his films can be seen as simultaneously quotidian and histrionic, in that they combine both mimetic and performative modes.⁸ In the process Kaurismäki refuses the conventional alignment of ‘serious’ content with realist form, preferring instead a register that repeatedly foregrounds its own construction while retaining a sense of social engagement. Persistent questions of class and history are inseparable from the political and affective dynamics of anachronism, allusion and tableau across this terrain.⁹

Anachronism

Many commentators have noted Kaurismäki’s recurrent deployment of ‘dated’ music, fashions, vehicles and everyday objects from the 1950s and 1960s in particular. In some of his films (Juha (1999), Pidä huivista kiini, Tatjana (Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana, 1994)), their presence is motivated by the historical setting of the narrative,¹⁰ but in others, such as Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past, 2002) and Le Havre (2011), they are signalled as anomalous and passé, aligned with characters who are out of touch with contemporary norms. While some such anachronisms – jukeboxes, selected furniture, vintage cars – have been designated as ‘classics’ via the retro market, this partial recovery of obsolescence is not acknowledged by Kaurismäki, even while his own films participate in a related process by conferring symbolic value upon them. (See, for instance, the jukebox and red sofa which Kaurismäki personally added to the production design of M’s converted sea container home in The Man Without a Past.) This rehabilitation is accompanied by a simultaneous devaluation, avoidance or expulsion of contemporary objects such as mobile phones, computers and modern architecture.¹¹ For example, in Kauas pilvet karkaavat (Drifting Clouds, 1996), the financial crisis faced by restaurant hostess Ilona and her tram-driver husband Lauri erupts shortly after his purchase of a Sony colour television on easy credit. After they have both been laid off, and the television and sofa have been reclaimed, their luck starts to turn when Ilona makes plans to open a new restaurant, accompanied by rock and roll playing on their unfashionably old, but presumably fully paid-for, record player.

In a Bourdieuian sense, Kaurismäki and his regular production designers Markku Pätilä and Jukka Salmi are in the relatively privileged position of unofficial arbiters in the exercise of taste, imparting a degree of cultural worth to objects that were once discarded or overlooked. (As Bourdieu asserts: ‘Nothing is more distinctive, more distinguished, than the capacity to confer aesthetic status on objects that are banal or even “common.”’)¹² However, the politics of such newly consecrated items becomes further complicated when one examines the class dimensions of their significatory functions. Kaurismäki’s anachronisms do not provide the scaffolding for a simple retreat into the past. In his contemporary-set films, they are not dispersed evenly throughout the mise en scène but are commonly distributed according to the classed locations and relations of his characters. For example, in Varjoja paratiisissa (Shadows in Paradise, 1986), dustman Nikander (Matti Pellonpää) greases his hair and drives an early 1970s Rover 2000. His rival for cashier Ilona’s love manages a clothing store, wears in-vogue baggy trousers and white shoes, and takes her out to a snobbish restaurant. At the film’s climax, Nikander rescues Ilona (Outinen) from selling contemporary menswear and takes her on a honeymoon cruise to Estonia. In Tulitikkutehtaan tyttö (The Match Factory Girl, 1990), Iiris’s melodramatically doomed attempt at cross-class love is in part prefigured by the fashionable forms and objects associated with Aarne, the supercilious middle-class object of her affections: modern dance music at the club where they meet, his modern sports car and his clothing (smart casual checked jacket, beige or grey suits). By contrast, her sympathetic brother, who works as a cook, dyes his hair black, drives a Ford Anglia and has installed a jukebox stocked with rock and roll in his flat. In Ariel (1988), unemployed miner Taisto wears a black leather jacket, greased hair, jeans and boots. Contemporary men’s fashion is relegated to a bland disguise, worn to fit in after he and his cellmate Mikkonen raid a shop window following their escape from prison. The film makes much of the fetishistic (and commercial) value of Taisto’s convertible white Cadillac with its red leather seats and spotless paintwork (Figure 1.1). But Taisto’s retention of the huge car while he sleeps in a hostel for the homeless gains its significance in the context of his poverty. The car is an exaggerated marker of both a pride that refuses to abandon dreams for despair and an impracticality that leads to his robbery and unjust imprisonment.¹³ This ambiguity is typical of much of Kaurismäki’s oeuvre in which rock and roll era stylings and objects are often presented as signs of a precarious and enforced existence on the periphery of contemporary consumer culture but are also recuperated as the trophies of an elective rejection of mainstream society.

Figure 1.1 Taisto (Turo Pajala) in the white Cadillac in Ariel (1988). © and courtesy Sputnik Ltd.

These films form what is commonly called the ‘proletariat trilogy’. But their lonely subjects are notably lacking in class consciousness, security or solidarity and might be better understood as members of what is now termed ‘the precariat’.¹⁴ Kaurismäki offers this definition: ‘One step under the proletariat, [people] who are not conscious enough to belong to [the working class]. They go in the union if somebody asks, tells them, but basically they don’t even know. So proletariat is the wrong word. Loser is better.’¹⁵ His focus throughout his career on characters from the working classes and below, the kind of people ignored or taken for granted in the social arena, and frequently marginalized or demonized in the representational sphere, offers a persistent reminder of power relations and a repudiation of the norms of dominant cinema:

I have absolutely no interest in making films about the family problems of the middleclass. Middle-class life just doesn’t interest me. Losers do, because I’m a middle-class loser myself. I spent a few years back in the 1970s, you know, when I too was hungry and homeless. […]

So your subject matter became the Finnish working class?

Yes. The people who are hidden, the ugly people, as some critics have called them. But then who is good-looking? I think many Hollywood stars are ugly, horribly ugly… Totally unable to act, these people,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Time and Space
• Part II: Tone and Point of View
• Part III: Performance
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint