The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki: Contrarian Stories

By Andrew Nestingen

Aki Kaurismäki is an enigma, an eminent auteur who claims his films are a joke. Since 1983, Kaurismäki has produced classically-styled films filled with cinephilic references to film history. He has earned an international art-house audience and many prizes, influencing such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Wes Anderson. Yet Kaurismäki is often depicted as the loneliest, most nostalgic of Finns (except when he promotes his films, makes political statements, and runs his many businesses). He is also depicted as a bohemian known for outlandish actions and statements. The Cinema of Aki Kaurismäki is the first comprehensive English-language study of this eccentric director. Drawing on revisionist approaches to film authorship, the text links the filmmaker and his films to the stories and issues animating film aesthetics and history, nostalgia, late modernity, politics, commerce, film festivals, and national cinema.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9780231850414

Andrew Nestingen

Andrew Nestingen is Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

‘Who the Hell Are You?’: Aki Kaurismäki’s Cinema

Am I not that dissonant chord in the divine symphony, thanks to the insatiable irony that mauls and savages me? That spitfire irony is in my voice and all my blood is her black poison. I am the sinister glass in which she looks on herself.

I am the wound and the knife, I am the blow and the cheek, the limbs and the rack, the victim and the executioner.

Charles Baudelaire¹

Film critic Andrew Mann relates an anecdote about Aki Kaurismäki in his review of Mies vailla menneisyyttä (The Man Without a Past, 2002) for the LA Weekly. He tells of an incident that occurred at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 2002. It makes evident four stories that are ever present in Kaurismäki’s filmmaking and films, as well as in the discourse that comprises the filmmaker as a public figure – Kaurismäki the auteur, Kaurismäki the bohemian, Kaurismäki the nostalgic, and Kaurismäki the Finn.

When Kaurismäki took the stage at Cannes in May to receive his Grand Jury Prize, aka ‘second place’, he stopped first by jury president David Lynch and whispered something that put a look of alarm on the director’s face. The most consistent story is that Kaurismäki muttered, ‘As Hitchcock said, "Who the hell are you?"’ Many, apparently Kaurismäki included, thought he would be taking the Palme d’Or. (Mann 2003)

Apocryphal or not, this anecdote helps us see the four stories. While Kaurismäki is often thought to be a retiring and quiet personality (a stereotypical Finn), in this story he plays the brash auteur performing for the media at the most important and heavily covered film festival in the world (see Valck 2007). Yet such a performance contrasts with the bookish, nostalgic remark about Alfred Hitchcock, a key figure in the history of Hollywood cinema and auteurism. Taken from another angle, we may see the incident as a case of Kaurismäki playing the bohemian, true to the art, disdainful of convention and the bourgeois aspiration to sophistication. Another incident at Cannes in 2002 provides further material for the bohemian story: Kaurismäki spontaneously twisted down the red carpet and into the theatre at the gala screening of The Man Without a Past, embarrassing Finnish Minister of Culture Suvi Lindén and her entourage, who were accompanying the director. The next day, Lindén was quoted as saying that public drunkenness was not appropriate for a representative of Finland on the international stage (see Tainola 2002).² Lindén rebuked Kaurismäki with an invocation of national culture. And yet Kaurismäki has long responded ambivalently to national culture, as he made evident in one interview:

This nation is so insecure that it’s just the greatest thing ever if some foreigner says something nice about Finland, or some Finn jumps or hops or bounces farther than anybody else. In that sense, when you have some success internationally, then that success is accepted here, too. Before that, my films were part of the freak show. (In Nestingen 2007)³

Kaurismäki twisting on the red carpet as he arrives at the Palais des festivals to attend the screening of The Man Without a Past during the 55th Cannes Film Festival, 22 May 2002 (photo: Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP/Getty Images)

The small nation sees Kaurismäki’s success as Finnish success, but Kaurismäki criticises such national enthusiasm. In the events at Cannes, paradoxes are clear when we analyse the anecdote in such terms as art and commerce, bohemianism and conservatism, nostalgia and scepticism, nation and cosmopolitanism. Tensions among these terms figure throughout Kaurismäki’s cinema, and indeed in the art film as a worldwide phenomenon.

Anecdotes like these play an indispensable role in any critical analysis of auteur cinema. Critical writing, biographical narratives, interviews, and anecdotes – authorship discourse – shape our expectations, responses to, and understanding of a filmmaker and his body of work. By approaching Kaurismäki through analysis of the discourse around the films and filmmaker, along with analysis of the films, this volume seeks to offer a rich and variegated perspective on the director’s films and career. No accessible English-language study of this noteworthy filmmaker’s work is available.⁴

This study’s methodology also seeks to extend revisionist authorship studies (see Koskinen 2002, 2009; Gerstner and Staiger 2003; Wexman 2003). Such studies have fruitfully built upon star studies’ theories and methods (see Dyer 1979; Gledhill 1991), and also on earlier poststructuralist studies of authorship, which approached authorship as a textual effect (see Wollen 1998 [1969]; Wood (2008 [1977]). In this theoretical context, when we look at Kaurismäki’s films at the same time as we turn his question to Lynch upon him – ‘Who the hell are you?’ – we are able to see the ways the films and authorship fit into a conjuncture defined by the rise of the film festival circuit, the globalisation of cinema and popular culture, the end of the Cold War, and the crisis of national welfare-state.

Before turning to the four stories, it is helpful to clarify what story means here. Story designates the organisation of events into a linked series. This correlates with narratologist Gerard Genette’s notion of narrative as ‘discourse which seeks to relate an event or a series of events’ (1980: 25). Story or narrative are relative and vague terms, because their meaning depends on the institutional contexts in which they function, as Marie-Laure Ryan has argued (2007). Story and narrative here – as well as the term scenario, which refers to a rough amalgamation of story material – presume the argument that a scholarly study of an authorship discourse can intervene in the authorship discourse to make evident recurrent patterns of commentary and interpretation that organise relevant events into meaningful combinations. These overlap with the films, in many cases, attributing meaning to the films and the authorship. In examining the archive of material compiled on Kaurismäki and his films at the Finnish Audio Visual Archives, as well as the abundant popular and critical literature, it is plain that narratives have formed and are in circulation about his life and work. These inflect assumptions, expectations, and responses to his films. Closer analysis of these narratives allows us to see Kaurismäki’s work in a more nuanced and plural way than we would if we were to bracket or ignore the authorship narratives, and focus only on the texts, understood as autonomous objects. In some contexts it certainly makes sense to adhere to a narrow, formalist definition of narrative as a cause-and-effect chain that is specific to cinematic or literary fiction, as some theorists of narrative do (see Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1985; Bordwell 1985; Bacon 2004). Yet the broader notion of narrative invoked here has provided enormous analytical value to cultural analysis. An example of such a narrative, highly relevant to Kaurismäki, is the national narrative, compellingly and critically theorised by Benedict Anderson (1991) and Homi Bhabha (1990).⁵ Narrow and broad notions of narrative and story can coexist in cultural analysis, and do not threaten to erode concepts of narrative. Let us turn then to the predominant stories in Aki Kaurismäki’s cinema, after which we will examine Kaurismäki’s career in a brief overview.

The Auteur

The Cannes anecdote is at its most obvious the story of a professional clash, a contest of auteurs. A jilted Kaurismäki snubs Lynch by asserting a superior knowledge of film history. The insult’s power comes from a cinephilic source, Kaurismäki’s knowledge of Hitchcock’s biography and films, but also his implicit familiarity with Lynch’s cinema. Lynch’s best known films – Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) – are arguably a postmodernist interpretation of Hitchcock’s auteur legacy. Hitchcock and Lynch share a fascination with psychoanalytically derived character psychology, which they use to create narrative suspense. To the auteur Lynch, Hitchcock’s aspirant heir, Kaurismäki growls, ‘you don’t know your Hitchcock’.

Such a remark stings because Kaurismäki claims a proprietary relationship to Hitchcock, a central figure in the politique des auteurs elaborated by Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, André Bazin, and other Cahiers du cinéma figures who argued that Hitchcock and some other prolific directors in the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s–50s fashioned their industrial products into personal expressions, meriting their recognition as the authors of their work. They also found auteurs in the European cinema, arguing that personal expression was also salient in the work of Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Roberto Rossellini, Ingmar Bergman, and others. As a consequence, auteur film since the politique des auteurs has meant both a canon of Hollywood and European films and bodies of work, as well as films displaying a definitive personal element. Kaurismäki asserts his own status as an auteur by reclaiming the Hollywood side, in Hitchcock, and the European side, in his learned self-assertion.

There is another dimension of this contestation of authorship in Mann’s account of Kaurismäki’s insult, however, which is the story of a Hollywood outsider affirming his status as an outsider by thumbing his nose at the American pretender. This dimension correlates with the tried-and-true account of auteurism as an aesthetic discourse of modernist art, in contrast to the culture industry in southern California. In this view, the European auteur’s cinephilia is understood in terms of modernism and the autonomous art object, which locate him in the high-cultural tradition of film art and distinguish him from the American auteur’s financial concerns, which are relegated to the low end of the cultural continuum. This dimension of the auteur story tacitly places Kaurismäki in such a modernist account of European auteur cinema. Yet at the same time, the haunting presence of Theodor Adorno’s culture industry argument and its many accompanying ghosts warn us of the paucity such binary accounts of auteurism can entail.

At the same time as Kaurismäki derides cinema as commerce, his films have embraced elements of the same commercial cinema, with their B-movie look, sentimental themes and expressions, and many allusions to popular music and culture – which resonate with a notion of personal taste in authorship like that popularised by Andrew Sarris in 1962. The ‘rock-n-roll’ music and motif are in every film. Ariel (1988), Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989), Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses (1994) and Kaurismäki’s music-video shorts are pastiches including plenty of Hollywood cliché. What is more, Kaurismäki has also proven himself a deft hand in the black arts of commerce, an owner not only of the rights to all his films, but also an operator of bars, restaurants, distribution companies and production companies, and also a sometime hotelier.

Kaurismäki’s cinema prods us to rethink the fundamental categories and binary oppositions that often structure popular and scholarly discussions of film authorship. In this way, his work is highly relevant to revisionist approaches to European cinema (see Elsaesser 2005; Hjort 2005; Hjort and Petrie 2008), the art film and auteur cinema (see Galt and Schoonover 2010), world cinema (see Ďurovičová and Newman 2009), and authorship (see Gerstner and Staiger 2003; Wexman 2003). At the same time, an introduction to his cinema requires an approach that makes evident the problems raised by his films. Chapter one of this volume takes such an approach by understanding his cinema as an engagement with ‘the archive’. It surveys Kaurismäki’s feature production, suggesting that an important theme in his body of work is a tactics of disruption, in which the films inject alterity into familiar systems to suggest the relevance of a divergent socio-political ethos. This survey also works to provide an introduction to Kaurismäki’s filmmaking, to place it in Finnish, European, and world-cinema contexts, as well as to sketch out some of the key interpretive frameworks within which it can be understood. In doing so the chapter also provides a background and set of references for the book.

The Bohemian

Another way to comprehend the remarks and twisting at Cannes is to understand them as part of a performance of bohemian identity. In this view, Kaurismäki’s clash with Lynch and twist down the red carpet look like efforts to distinguish the artist symbolically from the commercial festival and state agendas, which would seek to stage-manage Kaurismäki’s participation. The bohemian ridicules the commercial agendas that are part of the Cannes Festival and the state agendas that drive the attendance of Ministry of Culture officials. Kaurismäki has long presented himself as a bohemian filmmaker, and indeed his abiding interest in the theme is indicated as clearly as can be by his 1992 La vie de Bohème (The Bohemian Life), an adaptation of Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, 2004 [1852]), the basis for Puccini’s La Bohème. From the beginning of his career, Kaurismäki’s work has exhibited fascination with bohemian characters, whether the absurd author Ville Alfa in his screenplay for Valehtelija (The Liar, 1981), the unconventional artists of Calamari Union (1985), the criminals that surround Taisto in Ariel, Henri in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990), or the homeless characters in The Man Without a Past. What is more, Kaurismäki has often told the story of his entry into filmmaking and his subsequent career with bohemian tropes: kicked out of the army, homeless, scores of jobs, poor, devoted to his art, an underground filmmaker, micro-budgeted productions, and so on (see von Bagh 2006: 18).⁶

The term bohemianism has its roots in 1830’s Paris, in which the modern bohemians defined themselves against an arriviste bourgeoisie who embraced conservative aesthetic tastes (see Seigel 1986; Gluck 2005). Naming themselves after the Roma people, or ‘gypsies’, whose home was reputedly in Bohemia, the bohemians adopted outlandish historical dress, theatrical modes of protest, and heightened rhetoric to make clear their distinction from the bourgeoisie, of whom they were in many ways also a part and upon whom the artists and writers among them depended for their market.

Bohemian in this book draws on historical scholarship concerning bohemianism that came down from Parisian bohemia of the 1830s and 1840s, rather than the myth of the rebellious, hungry, greasy-haired artist who lives only for his art and wholly rejects the middle classes and their values. Scholars have defined bohemianism as an ambivalent, self-reflexive relationship of the bourgeoisie to itself. Describing nineteenth-century Paris, intellectual historian Jerrold Seigel writes: ‘Bohemia was not a realm outside bourgeois life but the expression of a conflict that arose at its very heart … It was the appropriation of marginal lifestyles among the young and not-so-young bourgeois, for the dramatisation of their ambivalence toward their social identities and destinies’ (1986: 11–12). Building on Seigel’s study, historian Mary Gluck has expanded a point about the cultural economics of bohemianism. Artists and intellectuals associated with bohemianism, emerged within post-revolutionary France, in which the patronage system had given way to an art market, making the constraints and excesses of both evident. Bohemian artists sought to link social, aesthetic, and economic contexts in dissent against the art market of what they saw as an insipid middle class, whose conservative aesthetic tastes and economic power they resented (see Gluck 2005). Yet these same bohemians’ literature, theatre, and style also addressed the middle class, and depended upon it economically. The ambivalence Seigel and Gluck identify derives from the conflicted requirements and attitudes towards the economy of an art market, which opened up the arts to the historically new figure of the autonomous artist, at the same time as that artist was compelled to distinguish his art in an art market in which many others offered their work.

Kaurismäki’s conflicted relationship to the middle class concerns both the art market and the political economy of the Finnish welfare state since the 1970s. Mainstream cinema is a commercial form, says Kaurismäki: ‘I love the old Hollywood, but the modern one is just a dead rattlesnake … I am like a dog always barking about Hollywood because with its power, it could make some really good films. Instead, sixty-year-old men are creating boy-scout level – and boring – violence; crass commercialisation is killing the cinema’ (in Cardullo 2006: 8). Today ‘there’s no sense in mixing up Hollywood and cinema. They’re two different things. Hollywood is business, the entertainment business’ (in Nestingen 2007). Consequently, Kaurismäki must distinguish his work in non-economic terms in a market dominated by ‘Global Hollywood’ (see Miller et al. 2001). The national audience offers no succour, for the Finnish welfare state since the 1980s has come to equate consumerism and citizenship; this discourse is part of a longer post-war history, in which the Finnish welfare state sought to define itself around a middle-class consensus, in which labour is productive, capital grows, and the nation enriches itself (see Alasuutari 1996). Kaurismäki’s symbolic distinction is in part evident in the absence of promulgators of this discourse: officials, the wealthy, and the middle classes in general figure little in the films. ‘They’re completely irrelevant; at most they’re caricatures who play the fool for a maximum of thirty seconds … they’re just such dull characters, all of them’ (in Nestingen 2007). And yet, just as Kaurismäki’s cinema must distinguish itself in the context of Global Hollywood (see Miller et al. 2001) and a national context, so too his films belong to the period of the mature European welfare state, defined around the same middle-class perspective that is part of the Finnish welfare state, many differences between political systems notwithstanding. The ambivalence identified in nineteenth-century bohemians by Seigel and Gluck finds an equivalent in Kaurismäki’s filmmaking and autobiography, as he has struggled to distinguish his films at the same time as he depends on the economy and perspectives he assails. It should be no surprise that bohemian ambivalence figures in the anecdotes at Cannes, and Kaurismäki’s career.

Bohemianism ties into a broader problem in auteur cinema, for it too occupies a position of symbolic opposition to the mainstream, yet is also historically, institutionally, and economically entangled with it. The relevance of Seigel and Gluck’s analysis of bohemianism is evident in the collection Global Art Cinema, which departs from the claim that art cinema as a discourse ‘has provided an essential model for audiences, filmmakers, and critics to imagine cinema outside Hollywood’ (Galt and Schoonover 2010: 3). Art cinema’s identity also depends on non-economic distinctions on the cultural market. Yet as the editors point out, ‘outside’ does not entail a neat division, but many criss-crossing connections and dependencies, precisely the conflicting identifications that animated the bohemians.

Chapter two further develops a historical contextualisation of bohemianism in Kaurismäki’s cinema, while at the same time critically tracing the use of the bohemianism trope in the Kaurismäki discourse. The analysis also serves to introduce the director’s biographical narrative by tracing bohemianism as a trope within it.

The Nostalgic

There is another commonsensical, albeit equally ambivalent, narrative evident in the Cannes anecdote: a nostalgia story. Given the critique of capitalist modernity we identified in sketching Kaurismäki’s bohemianism, it is easy to see why his films might also be understood as the construction of an idealised past. Kaurismäki’s citation of Hitchcock could be seen as an expression of longing for a lost cinematic past and its great auteurs such as Hitchcock, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, and others. This longing can easily be related to the disenchantment with post-classical Hollywood, which we have also observed. Furthermore, Kaurismäki’s films offer much evidence of nostalgia in their aesthetics, mise-en-scène, and characters’ attitudes. What we have in the insult, then, is also a putative declaration of nostalgia for a bygone film culture.

Commentators have told the nostalgia story about Kaurismäki’s cinema innumerable times. Some have emphasised an emotional register, interpreting the films in terms of subjective melancholia (see Toiviainen 2002). Others have read the nostalgia as a moral critique that attacks winner-takes-all neoliberalism, affirming instead a disinterested solidarity of the past (see Timonen 2005; von Bagh 2006). Some have seen it as an aesthetic critique, Kaurismäki’s films using old objects and visual styles to disrupt the digitally seamless design principles of capitalist modernity’s visual culture (see Koski 2006). Another view understands the nostalgia as an archiving project, which seeks to conserve the past against a planned obsolescence engineered in contemporary objects and attitudes (see Kyösola 2004b). These arguments share the claim that the object of the director’s nostalgia is the Finnish past.

In making Kaurismäki’s nostalgia national, these arguments make him one more competitor for cultural and political power in a national context. In a sense, they argue that Kaurismäki’s cinema is a ‘musealizing’ discourse (see Huyssen 2001), whose importance lies in its access to the reservoir of authority held in the national past.

To put it another way, the nostalgia story likens Kaurismäki and his films to the historical museum. The historical museum as an institution makes an objective claim to authority over the past as curators collect, organise, and display objects that embody the past. In their status as representative, these objects instruct us about the value of the past, as we view them in a cultural context of rapid, broad, and destructive change. The nostalgia story, in contrast, does not make an objective claim, but rather a subjective one. It is not a scholarly, curatorial agenda but Kaurismäki’s sensibility and critics’ interpretations that establish the relationship to the past. The nostalgia story ascribes to Kaurismäki a symbolic opposition to economic and political power, but it also involves an aspiration to cultural power.

Such arguments about Kaurismäki’s nostalgia presume that the nostalgic expression in the films, and in the discourse, is emblematic of a larger cultural whole, for which it stands. The aged jukebox playing rockabilly, the crooner singing Finnish tango: these stand for a national past. But can we take such expressions as typical or paradigmatic? That is to say, should we understand these examples in terms of types, with a universal set of referents? Or are they particular, contingent images with a circumscribed representational scope? This question is raised by the photographer and theorist Allan Sekula in an essay on images of the criminal in mid-nineteenth-century photographic archives; the archive is both ‘abstract paradigmatic entity and concrete institution’, writes Sekula (2006: 73). On the one hand, the archive rests on an assumption of equivalence, in which its holdings can be organised to recognise types; on the other, it is contingency, the collection of a vast number of particulars. For Kaurismäki’s nostalgia, then, we must ask, does the nostalgia that arguably figures in his films conform with the realist logic of type, or with the nominalist logic of contingency?

Chapter three examines the realist varieties of nostalgia adduced to Kaurismäki, while also arguing for the significance of contingency in the nostalgia in his films. This argument draws on the work of Michel de Certeau to suggest that contingency makes evident a tactic of disruptive resistance in Kaurismäki’s cinema and authorship discourse, which introduces an alternative socio-political ethos into the market rationality of late capitalism, as it is a context for Kaurismäki’s career.

The Finn

There is a final story we could tell about Cannes, as we witnessed in Minister Lindén’s remarks: Kaurismäki was drunk. Kaurismäki’s thirst often figures in the story of Kaurismäki the Finn. In this story, the man’s national sensibility not only explains incidents like the one Andrew Mann recounts, but his entire work as a filmmaker. But as with the stories about authorship, bohemianism, and nostalgia, the story of Kaurismäki’s Finnishness conceals ambivalence. For the Finnish story is often an essentialist account, which reduces complexity to the expression of a national stereotype. Chapter four shows that in contrast to such stereotypes, the narrative of nationality in fact involves competing accounts of nation at work within and beyond the borders of Finland. Kaurismäki’s cinema helps us see the ‘multi-local’ and ‘multinational’ composition of a national cinema, that is the geographically and transnationally dispersed participants and audiences involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of Kaurismäki’s cinema. Such parsing helps develop the term small-nation cinema.

Incommensurable constructions of Kaurismäki as a Finnish filmmaker make him many things to many people. This contested status is visible in a comment made by eminent filmmaker, producer, and jack-of-all-trades Jörn Donner, entitled ‘Kännissä Cannesissa’ (‘Sauced at Cannes’):

Aki Kaurismäki is a shy and reticent person, not unlike the characters in his films, quiet but also well spoken. However, liquor makes him wild, as it does some other Finns. Surprising and puzzling sentences start flying, which the lemmings of the international press then collect. (2003)

Donner’s story of Cannes is not actually an explanation of the insult to Lynch, but of Kaurismäki’s twist with Suvi Lindén, and the competing narratives of nation it involves. Donner’s story helps us see the logic of the Kaurismäki the Finn story, and as such is a strand of Mann’s anecdote. The logic