I willingly consent to look back on the past, but it must be through a good bottle of wine and seated in a comfortable chair.
Henri Murger, The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter1
Aki Kaurismäki’s life and cinema find a source in bohemia. In the Kaurismäki discourse and films, the director and his characters often appear to opt out of their society, refuse many of its values, affirm itinerancy, disregard the mores and aspirations of the middle class, and inhabit and embrace the demimonde with its wild characters. Evidence of bohemia turns up throughout Kaurismäki’s career. Most obviously, the director adapted a principal text of literary Bohemia, Henri Murger’s The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter from 1852. Bohemian elements can also be seen in the itinerant ‘losers’, tricksters, and artists that make up the dramatis personae of Kaurismäki’s films. Kaurismäki’s musical choices also bear the mark of bohemia in their eccentricity, as is evident in the concert footage of The Saimaa Gesture, Harri Marstio’s dissonant rendition of Schubert’s ‘Ständchen’ at the opening of Crime and Punishment, the Leningrad Cowboys’ gigs, or Elina Salo’s sound performance of ‘Les temps du cerises’ in Juha.
Kaurismäki also tells the story of his life with bohemian tropes. He emphasises his itinerancy, he presents himself as an outsider, he expresses solidarity with the dislocated and marginalised (just as in his films), and he mocks the conventions and norms of middle-class society. Kaurismäki states his bohemian position in a polemical remark about Finland. ‘It’s a country in which silence and good manners conceal criminality, corruption, and violence. Its government is old, ossified, and outdated. There’s not vigor, life force, or enthusiasm, and if there were someone would be sure to smother it’ (in Anon. 1990). The state and middle-class conformity block any initiative. The only way out is exile in the demimonde or abroad. (Kaurismäki has lived part of the year near Porto since the 1980s.) The anecdotes and statements that fill out Kaurismäki’s biographical arc show many features of bohemia.
The problem with the bohemian dimension of Kaurismäki’s films and biographical narrative is that bohemia was already a cliché by Murger’s time in the 1840s. Bohemia is largely a sentimental ‘myth about the artist’s life invented by artists and mediated, perpetuated, and reinvented by popular culture’, writes historian and literary scholar Mary Gluck (2005: 15). The myth of the bohemian artist also touches the cinema. As ‘cultural hero’, the auteur often opposes the commercial cinema and confirms his membership in the cultural system, argues Thomas Elsaesser. ‘Those who belong to a national cinema must strive after a certain status … which is to say as either “artists”, “bohemians”, or “dissidents”’ (2005: 48). What then is the relationship between the sentimental myth of bohemia and the many bohemian elements in Kaurismäki’s films and biographical narrative? My answer to that question involves positioning Kaurismäki and his films in relation to what Gluck has called the sentimental and ironic traditions in bohemianism. Kaurismäki has been understood as a sentimental bohemian, and while elements of sentimental bohemia do figure in his cinema and biographical narrative, it is more productive to understand him as an ironic bohemian. When we understand Kaurismäki in terms of ironic bohemia, we can begin to see a gradual transformation of the films’ aesthetic and political-economic dimensions over his career, which we can theorise as a staging of different identities and attitudes in critical dialogue with each other and their broader society. Further, approaching Kaurismäki in this way allows us to see the films and the authorship in relationship to political and popular culture, and to see this relationship as replenishing, provocative, and important to Kaurismäki’s contribution to European cinema. Rather than seeing Kaurismäki as an exceptional figure, operating as a sentimental bohemian in a transcendent and autonomous artistic space, closer analysis of the bohemian aspects of his career and films allow us to see him in dialogue with political, economic, and popular cultural discourses, engaged in social struggle on many fronts.
Sentimental and Ironic Bohemia
The film scholar Satu Kyösola has placed emphasis on the sentimental bohemian dimensions of Kaurismäki’s cinema, including a definitive article in the eleven-volume Finnish National Filmography, ‘A Lost Par(ad)is(e), or Bohemia in Aki Kaurismäki’s Cinema’ (2004a). Kyösola argues that bohemianism in the films is built around an uncompromising opposition to bourgeois conventions and attitudes, equating Kaurismäki’s position with a statement he made in an analysis of Luis Buñuel’s filmmaking, entitled ‘Luis Buñuel and the Death of God’ (1979):
The morality of the bourgeoisie is anti-moral, because it is founded upon the most unjust of institutions: religion, country, family, and the other pillars of society. I have always followed the advice of the Surrealists: the obligation to eat does not include the right to prostitute art. I oppose conventional morality, traditional ideals, society’s entire moral malignance. (In Kyösola 2004a: 144)
According to Kyösola, the opposition to which Kaurismäki adheres finds its source in the work and lives of bohemian figures, in particular Henri Murger and Charles Baudelaire. They inspire an anti-conformist, creative energy in Kaurismäki, suggests Kyösola, which show him how cinema must liberate society from its middleclass perspective (2004a: 145). In this account, bohemia is a space in which art can be created whose energy overwhelms the philosophical, aesthetic, and commercial categories of Western middle-class culture. Kyösola sees this bohemian position most fully expressed in the adaptation of The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, pointing out that Kaurismäki’s largely faithful adaptation omits the last chapter of the novel. That chapter describes the four bohemians’ successes: the painter Marcel has entered the salon and sold a painting to ‘a rich Englishman’, Rodolphe and Schaunard have become rich and famous, and Colline has come ‘into an inheritance’ and made an advantageous marriage’ (Murger 2004: 390). The chapter concludes with a dialogue between Rodolphe and Marcel; Rodolphe observes to Marcel, that he has conceded his idealism. ‘We have closed up, old man. We are dead and buried. Youth has but one time. Where do you dine tonight?’ Rodolphe proposes eating at a bohemian café, to which Marcel replies.
Not I. No … I willingly consent to look back on the past, but it must be through a good bottle of wine and seated in a comfortable chair. Ah, what do you want to say? That I am corrupted? I no longer care for anything but what is good and comfortable. (2004: 392)
In Kaurismäki’s adaptation, the film ends a year before these sentiments are expressed, with Rodolfo leaving the hospital after his lover Mimi’s death. For Kyösola, the omission of Marcel’s sentiment in Murger’s novel expresses an affirmation of the myth of bohemia as ‘a utopia and a dream, an indivisible product of the imagination, a notion that requires speaking in the past tense’ (Kyösola 2004a: 149). In this view, the film represents bohemia as an autonomous alternative that lies outside middle-class conventions and values.
This argument about sentimental bohemia belongs to the tradition of aesthetics dating back to Kant’s philosophy, which regards art as the transcendent object of its own discourse. Mary Gluck (2005) points to three strands of this tradition. There is an argument that regards art, and in particular modernist art, in terms of its adversarial relationship to political and economic life. The artist is an oppositional figure. A second line of argument is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field (1996). Bourdieu maintains that art produces its autonomy by defining and operating according to a distinct set of symbolic practices, which distinguish the artist as a professional and furnish the context for his career. Finally, suggests Gluck, there is a psychological argument, that maintains that the artist turns away from the material world and into the psyche and subjectivity to produce his art – a notion familiar from fin de siècle decadence and symbolist art movements (see Gluck 2005: 4–6). Arguments about Kaurismäki’s bohemia have tended to position him in interpretations of this sort.
In conceptualising Kaurismäki’s bohemian themes as primarily an expression of opposition to convention, the middle-classes, commercialism, and bourgeois art, Kyösola’s argument situates bohemia as a place outside space and time, a nostalgia for an earlier moment of bohemia articulated in Murger’s writings. Her idealist emphasis resonates in many ways with Murger’s account. His texts were set in the 1830s; Murger was already regarded as ‘sentimental’ and ‘outdated’ in his own time (Gluck 2005: 65). Looking back in time, Murger idealised bygone experiences just as, according to Kyösola, Kaurismäki idealises Murger a century-and-a-half later. Kyösola’s argument makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Kaurismäki’s cinema in demonstrating the significance of the history of Parisian bohemia for the filmmaker, yet her argument can be advanced even further by recognising another strand of bohemia.
An ironic attitude towards bohemia is also present in Kaurismäki’s cinema and biographical narrative, which is evident in The Bohemian Life. The film begins with an overhead long shot of the philosopher Marcel scrounging in garbage to find enough to buy a glass of wine measuring … five millilitres. He then shows the bartender the two-thousand-page manuscript on which he has been labouring. This scene is Kaurismäki’s invention, and it is excessive in all its dimensions. Marcel’s desperate scrounging, his miniscule portion of wine, and the small boulder of a manuscript are all exaggerations. The excess alerts us to the film’s absurd and ironic humour. As viewers, we see the exaggeration, as does the bartender who serves Marcel, but Marcel himself does not, or ignores it out of pride. In this dramatic irony, Kaurismäki prompts spectators to think carefully about the appearances and experiences of bohemia. Indeed, one critic writes that Kaurismäki’s adaptation of Murger is entirely ironic, except for its depiction of Mimi’s death (see Taubin 1992: 11).
Irony causes the viewer to question the bohemians’ self-understanding, and hence their perception of their relationship to the bourgeoisie. This is not the certain anti-conformism analysed by Kyösola, but a fluid, probing kind. The irony and related questions are unmistakable when Marcel is invited to become editor-in-chief of the fashion magazine The Girdle of Iris by its publisher Gassot (film director Samuel Fuller in a cameo appearance). Schaunard points out to Marcel that Gassot is a political reactionary. Taking money saturated with worker’s sweat would contradict your moral and political ideals, asserts Schaunard. After some casuistry about Gassot’s politics, Marcel points out that his employment by Gassot will also bring commissions for Schaunard and Rodolfo. Soon we see Gassot writing a cheque to the eager Marcel. What we witness is not a rejection of the attitudes and practices of middle-class society but rather a narrative that uses indirection (Marcel’s pragmatism) to probe the conflict between such ideals and the appeal of middle-class financial stability and position. The combination of bohemian appearance and bourgeois expediency raises questions about the status of bohemia in The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter, and Kaurismäki’s cinema as a whole.
What then is the difference between sentimental and ironic bohemia?
‘Sentimental bohemia’ … was associated with realistic tales about the lives and tribulations of artists and tended to appeal to middle-class literary sensibilities. The second, less familiar version, I have called ‘ironic bohemia’, since it was concerned with the parodic gestures and ironic public performances of experimental artists and aimed to differentiate the artist of modernity from his middle-class counterparts. (Gluck 2005: 15)
The difference between sentimental and ironic bohemia involves divergent assumptions. Sentimental bohemianism assumes the autonomy of the bohemian identity, whereas ironic bohemia assumes that the bohemian identity is problematic and so requires continual reiteration. This continual reiteration destabilises both bohemia and terms related to it, for it troubles a notion of stable identity. If any identity can be performed in ways that question its premises and certainty, then even the most apparently stable identity can be seen as so many costumes, poses, and affectations, however naturally worn. Such an outlook does not see bohemia as a phase of life, the artist as a young person in bohemia, as Murger emphasises, but rather as a contingent identity, dependent on presentation, reception, and negotiation of perception and meaning. Premised on a notion of unstable identity, ironic bohemia sees identity as a series of disguises or masks and bohemia as one stance among others.
Gluck also suggests that the flâneur is a figure of ironic bohemia, and is typified by Charles Baudelaire, among others. The flâneur was the Parisian aesthetic participant, who took part in city life as he walked the city, read the newspaper, perceived and absorbed the people and images around him, engaging in many topics, entertaining many ideas and arguments, absorbed in the serial nature of modern life. The contrast to sentimental bohemia lies in a key assumption about the objectivity of social reality, and its availability to representation, as Baudelaire suggests in The Painter of Modern Life (1845). In his capacity to take on different perspectives as he moves through the modern city, the flâneur can imagine the city in divergent ways and see its many component parts in their changing relation to one another. It is not an objective reality that shapes the city, but a mediation of the flâneur’s imagination and a shifting perspective playing across changing urban space (see Gluck 2005: 102). In this view, the flâneur’s perspective intersects with ironic bohemia.
Gluck’s argument about ironic bohemia also shares a good deal with Jerrold Seigel’s definition of bohemia in his study Bohemian Paris (1986). The bohemian acts out ‘the conflicts inherent in the bourgeois character’, writes Seigel. Bohemia is the ‘appropriation of marginal life styles by young and not-so-young bourgeois for the dramatization of ambivalence towards their own social identities and destinies’, he continues (1986: 11). While Seigel’s argument rests on a more stable notion of identity, like Gluck he posits that bohemia and its cultural production form a struggle within modernity, rather than a separate area of artistic life with their root in the Kantian tradition. The bohemian is the perceiver, participant and interpreter of modern life, in its political, economic, and cultural manifestations. He does not go outside modern life, but inhabits it, assumes diverse lifestyles, making them the medium of his art. This combination of ephemerality and embeddedness is evident in the bohemian elements in Kaurismäki’s films and career, which show themselves to be a means of responding to the transformations of late modernity that have characterised Kaurismäki’s lifetime.
The ironic dimensions of Kaurismäki’s bohemianism are evident in remarks the director made in May 2008, when he accepted the title Artist of the Academy from Finnish President Tarja Halonen. Kaurismäki said: ‘Only one sentence comes to mind. It’s from the end of Henri Murger’s book: “Youth has but one time”’ (in Luukka 2008) – a sentence from the last chapter of The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter. This sentence is not a concession of having come in from the outside, or having ‘sold out’, but marks a shift in perspective, engagement of a different outlook. For if Kaurismäki has joined his heroes in a soft chair with a good bottle of wine, he also continues to see the world from the perspective of an itinerant. The film subsequent to the 2008 award, Le Havre (2011), tells the story of an immigrant boy helped by a shoe shiner in the French port city of Le Havre. The city provides the ubiquitous harbour of Kaurismäki’s films, and also figured in many of the French poetic realist films of the 1930s – for example, Carné’s Port of Shadows and Renoir’s La bête humaine (The Human Beast, 1937). Youth may come but once, but the terrain mapped by Jean Renoir, Jean Gabin, and Jacques Prevert, all of whose work in Le Havre inspired Kaurismäki, provides another perspective. Let us examine the ironic and sentimental bohemian elements that give shape to the biographical narrative and cinematic work of Kaurismäki’s career.
Ironic and sentimental bohemia are evident in Kaurismäki’s biography, which the first part of this chapter explores. Ironic bohemia also helps us see more fully a dialectical shift that occurs in Kaurismäki’s filmmaking; he begins with political critique of the Finnish state, but that gradually becomes an economic critique, as the Finnish state and Europe transform in the 1990s. An especially useful example of this shift is provided by the representation of alcohol consumption in the films. The chapter concludes by analysing the shifting economic dimensions of Kaurismäki’s cinema, evident in analysis of his self-reflexive use of festival and awards-ceremony visibility.
Dislodged by Destruction
Aki Kaurismäki’s account of his childhood furnishes a rich context for understanding the arc of the director’s career and the films he has made in terms of bohemian tropes. In recounting his early life, Kaurismäki situates himself as a young witness to moral and material destruction wrought by the politically orchestrated modernisation and urbanisation of Finland. Bohemia becomes a means of critiquing this modernisation, as well as a means of situating oneself as its opponent. The story he tells about his youth recurs in different forms throughout his career. Kaurismäki describes himself as a nomad who affirms his dislocation as a social perspective – not unlike the characters in his films.
Kaurismäki grew up in many places. He was born in 1957 in Orimattila in south-central Finland – although in some interviews he has said he was born in Hyvinkää (see Nikkilä-Kiiski 1999; von Bagh 2006: 10). The Kaurismäkis lived in Orimattila at the time because of Kaurismäki’s father’s career, which caused the family to move frequently. Jorma Kaurismäki (1931–1991) earned a degree in business (ekonomi) and spent his career in sales and management in the textile industry of southern Finland. His mother Leena trained as a cosmetologist. In Orimattila, Jorma Kaurismäki worked in the financial offices of the textile company Villayhtymä. Later, the family relocated to Lahti, where Aki Kaurismäki began school. They then lived in Toijala and Kuusankoski, after which they moved several hundred kilometres northwest to Kankaanpää. Kaurismäki completed secondary school there in 1976 (see Leppä 1996; Pouta 2003).2 The family also travelled outside Finland a good deal, which was exceptional for Finnish families during the 1960s. On one summer trip they drove through the USSR from Leningrad to Odessa. On another they drove from Finland to Spain (see Pouta 2003). Kaurismäki’s recounting of his childhood underscores itinerancy. In a 1984 interview, for example, he sums things up by listing the places he lived as a young person: ‘Hyvinkää, Orimattila, Lahti, Toijala, Kuusankoski, Kouvola, Kankaanpää, Helsinki, Tampere, Helsinki, Tampere, Helsinki…’ (von Bagh 1984: 8).
Kaurismäki’s memories also resonate with the fracture and change present in the national narrative, in which sacrifice and migration are common. The filmmaker’s grandparents and his father were evacuated from the municipality of Lumivaara in Viipuri County in March 1940. They were among 420,000 citizens – 12 per cent of the nation’s population at the time – evacuated from the Karelian Isthmus (see Nikkilä-Kiiski 1999; Soila 2003; Koivunen 2006). This evacuation of Karelia followed Finland’s armistice with the Soviet Union, which ended the Winter War but cost Finland 10 per cent of her landmass, the city of Viipuri, and led to what Finns call the Continuation War (1941–44). The war exacted a contribution from Kaurismäki’s family through his grandfather Petter Kaurismäki’s service at the front (see Nikkilä-Kiiski 1999). Although Petter Kaurismäki survived, between 1939 and 1945 approximately 85,000 Finns died. The experiences of dislocation and sacrifice the Kaurismäkis underwent were thus part of a defining national experience. In contrast to such relocation and sacrifice, Kaurismäki’s paternal grandparents’ post-war home in Hyvinkää was an idyllic setting. Petter and Hilma Kaurismäki owned and operated a garden and nursery, where Aki Kaurismäki, and his brother and sisters spent weekends and several summers (see Nikkilä-Kiiski 1999; Pouta 2003).
Kaurismäki’s anecdotes about his childhood usually connect it to his adulthood by characterising himself as witness to material and moral destruction set in train by politically guided modernisation. ‘I am a defender of old Finland, the place where neighbours helped each other push-start their cars. I got the chance to live that time, but my sister, who is five years younger than I, did not. She was born too late’ (in Leppä 1996: 10). Kaurismäki asserts that a change in moral outlook followed from the modernisation and urbanisation of the 1960s and 1970s, leaving ‘smoking ruins’ behind (ibid.). In 1945 about 65 per cent of Finland’s population lived in rural settings and worked in agrarian occupations; by the 1990s, some 65 per cent of the population was urban. We will return to these changes in talking about Second and Third Republic Finland.
In Kaurismäki’s polemic, objects and spaces that symbolise a moral ‘old’ stand in contrast to an amoral ‘new’. We see this in the example of push-starting the car: people who help their neighbours share a moral outlook; but as people have followed work to the city and moved into urban apartment blocks, they have lost contact with their neighbours. Now you call the tow truck. This notion figures in the films as well. We often see alienated characters in the city, who discover that trusting others will harm them, as happens to Taisto when he arrives in Helsinki at the beginning of Ariel or Koistinen when he trusts Mirja in Lights in the Dusk. A similar narrative turn occurs in The Man Without a Past, when M arrives in Helsinki and is beaten. In each case, but especially the latter two, these characters suffer harm in a context of triumphant modernity. In Lights in the Dusk, Koistinen works, and meets Mirja in the Ruoholahti quarter, the old industrial West Harbour area that has been gentrified since the 1980s. In The Man Without a Past, the glass Sanomatalo building looms in the background as M is beaten by thugs; the large glass building is home to the tabloid Ilta-Sanomat and Finland’s largest-circulation daily Helsingin Sanomat, both now part of a multinational media corporation. These milieus embody the smoking ruins mentioned by Kaurismäki. He asserts that when the moral framework in which objects existed is destroyed, the objects can no longer represent that framework, and the people that inhabit them lose their connection to one another. Ruoholahti and the Sanomatalo stand for moral lack.
In speaking of smoking ruins and other examples, Kaurismäki tells the story of his childhood and youth as one of moral erosion, in which the places and relationships that sustained people who helped one another out gradually fall apart, forcing people to fend for themselves in the amoral city. It is no surprise that the primary narrative of Kaurismäki’s films is one in which the protagonist finds himself dislocated and alone, looking to put together a life, as we saw in chapter one.
On the Doormat: Entry into Filmmaking
Kaurismäki came to filmmaking after ceasing compulsory service in the army and breaking off his studies at the university. He recalled this period in his life in a 1982 interview he ‘fled the army’ in 1977 and ‘went to sit around the university and figure out what to do’, before moving back to Kankaanpää to work as a sandblaster (see Keskimäki 1982).3 By contrast, successful completion of compulsory service in the army and voluntary enrolment in the officer corps traditionally provided young men legitimacy, reputation, contacts, and thus social mobility in post-war Finland. After the army, Kaurismäki studied journalism at the University of Tampere between 1977 and 1980. The university in working-class Tampere is the most politicised and leftist of Finland’s universities. Kaurismäki also worked as an intern at the tabloid Ilta-Sanomat during summer 1978. He was still working as a student journalist in 1979 when he served as public relations representative for the Tampere Shorts Festival, a job that was traditionally given to students in the journalism department at the university (see Myllyoja 2007). Kaurismäki never completed the degree (see Leppä 1996). Since then, in his anecdotes the army, the university, and mainstream journalism have been associated with middle-class hegemony. His encounters with these institutions become moments of moral self-definition. Rejecting the status, relationships, and credentials provided by completion of army service and a post-secondary education, Kaurismäki finds a moral position in his departure from these institutions. Taking up a series of jobs ‘was the act of a … morally uncompromising person’, he says (in Keskimäki 1982). And that morally uncompromising person tells of these experiences as moments in which he embraced bohemian impoverishment: ‘When I was removed from the army and left in front of the Lasipalatsi in the fall of 1976, I began a noteworthy phase of my life. Since I was homeless and penniless, I glommed on to an old friend, who let me live on his doormat’ (in von Bagh 2006: 18).4 Implicit in this narrative as well is a moral and ethical link that holds Kaurismäki and his impoverished friends together. Their unstable lives bring continual change, which they handle by bonding together.
Between 1977 and 1981, says Kaurismäki, ‘I worked for the most part in a variety of menial construction jobs, but also as a sandblaster, on a paper machine, as a hospital orderly, in a warehouse, as a painter, a reporter, and the like … I also worked in Stockholm for about four months as a dishwasher…’ (in von Bagh 2006: 18). These many jobs, Kaurismäki suggests, gave him the requisite diversity of experience to make films. As for George Orwell, impoverishment and comradeship on the margins evidently deepened Kaurismäki’s commitment to those on the margins, and sharpened his critical perspective on society’s function.
Living on the margins also integrated Kaurismäki into a group that shared a passion for the cinema and envisioned themselves as cultural heroes, not unlike the notion described by Elsaesser. Kaurismäki says:
I got interested in making films in the spring of 1977. Pauli Pentti and Veikko Aaltonen were part of my crowd at the time. One Sunday afternoon we were walking down Mannherheimintie hungry and penniless. Somewhere around Erottaja we decided, let’s make a goddamn movie about it all, since life was so miserable. (In Hämäläinen 1984)5
Kaurismäki’s account of his entry into filmmaking turns on a cliché of sentimental bohemia, but this narrative also works to position him as cultural hero. He is at home with empty-pocketed deprivation; indeed it is the source of his creative energy. Yet while such an anecdote contributes to the myth of a cultural hero by echoing notions of sentimental bohemia, it would also seem to involve ironic bohemia. The clichés are so exaggerated that the reader wonders about their meaning.
Even if Kaurismäki characterises his entry into filmmaking in the clichés of sentimental bohemia, he also sought to follow a conventional institutional route into film. Yet again, his failure to follow such a path became a means of positioning himself as an outsider. Kaurismäki applied to the Helsinki School of Art and Design’s Film School, then located at the Ateneum Museum. He also benefitted from his brother Mika’s studies in Munich at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film (University of Television and Film) from 1977 to 1981.
Kaurismäki’s application to film school was rejected. Admissions committee member Professsor Juha Rosma says: ‘I got the impression that Aki had a good imagination, but that he was an introverted personality. He managed as a writer, but fared more poorly with cinema’s visual elements and in working with actors’ (in Hyvönen 1990: 21). Kaurismäki explains the rejection differently. ‘I was so cynical and arrogant, and emotionally immature that they didn’t want me there. It’s of course true. The worst thing is to realise it yourself ’ (in Hämäläinen 1981). Once again, Kaurismäki’s overstatement suggests a satirical tone that conveys a realisation about the institution’s unnecessary role in his decision to become a filmmaker. Kaurismäki implies that it was good fortune to have been rejected from film school, for it placed him outside the institution of Finnish cinema.
A second and more important element in Kaurismäki’s entry into professional filmmaking was his brother Mika. Aki visited Mika in Munich, acquainting himself with cultural and cinematic life there. Mika’s studies in Munich also introduced him to figures of the New German Cinema, such as Wim Wenders, as well as rising names in German cinema, such as Toni Sulzman, who served as cinematographer for The Liar and later went on to work in Hollywood. These acquaintances helped develop a model for connecting with filmmakers abroad without the assistance of an official Finnish network. They also established a set of contacts who would be helpful in establishing the brothers commercially outside Finland later in their careers. Mika’s studies also provided Aki with an opportunity to pursue filmmaking.
Mika’s final project required help. He invited his brother, Pauli Pentti, and others in the Kaurismäki crowd in Helsinki to make The Liar with him during the summer of 1980. Mika returned to Helsinki to make the film, and shooting was completed in fifteen days during June that year (see Suvanto 1981). Aki co-wrote the screenplay with Pentti; Veikko Aaltonen is also credited in the Finnish Film Archives’ database, although critics at the time only mention Aki and Pentti as screenwriters. The film also included Matti Pellonpää and Markku Peltola, who would later play leading roles in Aki’s films.
The Liar was made on a small budget, with a small crew, following an impulsive Godardian production style and aesthetic. When it premiered in February 1981 at the Tampere Shorts Festival, it won the 50,000 Finnish-mark Risto Jarva prize for best film (see Hohtokari 1981). It later received 40,000 Finnish marks of post-production ‘quality support’ from the Finnish Film Foundation, money awarded by a committee decision based on institutionally defined criteria.
The Liar was received as a film that ‘laughs at fundamental values’ (Hämäläinen 1984: 52). It was almost universally seen as indebted to the early films of Godard, such as À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), but also Godard’s first short Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s’appellent Patrick (All the Boys are Called Patrick, 1959),6 as well as Bande à part.
Bohemianism is the key topos in The Liar: Ville Alfa (Aki Kaurismäki) is a down-and-out writer who lies about everything, mocking the polite intentions of his family and friends, and ceaselessly taking advantage of them. Critic Antti Lindqvist writes:
You might call Ville a bohemian, if the term had not been debased by so many misuses. Living counter to all norms, he continually rattles off puckish aphorisms about supposedly fundamental experiences: life, love, death. Beneath the amusing appearance of this philosophical impertinence, however, resides a serious vision of an anguished humanity trapped in a cement dystopia, which continually grinds down the only thing that matters, dignity. (1982)
Lindqvist argues that The Liar is premised on a bohemianism that entails a philosophical position. His review stands in contrast to the twenty other reviews of the film published during the year that followed its release.7 Every critic writing on the film likened it to the films of Godard and the French New Wave, and many differentiated The Liar from the intellectually serious, aesthetically ambitious, nationally oriented Finnish films of the 1970s; only Lindqvist put emphasis on the bohemian trope in the film. Lindqvist sees a twofold moral affirmation and repudiation in the film. In this The Liar calls to mind the poetic realist films of the 1930s, which presented the alienated and fatigued protagonist – often played by Jean Gabin – as advocating an alternative moral vision that also critiqued the moral devolution brought about by capitalist modernity, but also by other forces, as can be seen in the naturalism of La bête humaine, adapted as it was from Emile Zola. The Liar affirms Ville Alfa’s pursuit of dignity, isolated and alone though he may be, and in doing so also rejects institutionally, politically, and aesthetically much of the Finnish culture of the 1970s from which the film emerged, thereby suggesting its ideological rot. Positioning this bohemianism will help account for the alienated relationship of Kaurismäki’s cinema to the Finland of the 1970s and 1980s, from which it emerged.
Against the Paternalistic State
The importance of the moral critique in the Kaurismäki brothers’ The Liar becomes apparent when we connect it to Aki Kaurismäki’s anecdotes about witnessing material and moral destruction, and then situate that critique and The Liar in the Finland of the 1960s to the 1980s. Kaurismäki’s critique emerges from a broad anti-institutional cultural politics of the late 1970s, which attacked state bureaucracies, party politics, and institutionalised organisation. These cultural politics affirmed vitality in social and cultural life, and were underpinned by an ethics of the kind we see in the nascent environmental and peace movements of the time. These movements rebelled against a period of deeply politicised daily life, and no less a politicised cultural life. Strikingly, Kaurismäki’s recollections, and the early films, ally themselves with these anti-political movements, omitting discussion of political difference or struggle. The Liar’s casual regard for ‘truth’ mocks political orthodoxy and embraces a vague anarchism. Kaurismäki’s trajectory differs from that of the radical left and the Social-Democratic mainstream, as well as from the national discourse that figured centrally in Finnish culture into the late twentieth century. Kaurismäki’s anti-institutional intellectual lineage is best located in the emergence of anarchistic cultural and social movements that rejected the orthodox left that had dominated intellectual life during the 1970s.
The Finnish 1970s were shaped by political parties whose activities took place in co-ops with their retail outlets, unions, sports clubs, student groups, theatres, and other voluntary organisations – as was also the case in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, France, and the UK. In Finland the Marxist-Leninist ‘class reform’ movement, generally known as the ‘Taistolaisuus’ (Militancy) movement, figured especially prominently in the Finnish Communist Party and more broadly in Finnish intellectual life. While it did not take up the extralegal tactics of the left in Germany or Italy, its radicalism sought to revise political, economic, and cultural life. The movement attacked the parliamentarian compromises of the Finnish Communist Party and sought to reinvigorate proletarian internationalism and commitment to Marxist-Leninist dogma as promulgated by Moscow. The movement attracted devoted students, intellectuals, and young people, gaining a foothold in the university system, the national broadcast service, and many other cultural institutions. The class-reform movement also figured in the film clubs in which Kaurismäki got his cinematic education. For example, Tampere’s Monroe Film Club led a group of 74 students on a trip to Lenifilm Studios in Leningrad during 1974, a common type of pilgrimage for clubs and groups of the time.8 Yet Kaurismäki’s comments never explicitly engage the legacy of these radical politics, even though his films’ moral positions entail leftist political convictions.
Filmmakers of the left and associated with the Taistolaisuus movement predominated in 1970s’ Finnish cinema, exemplified by such directors as Jörn Donner, Mikko Niskanen, Risto Jarva, Jaakko Pakkasvirta, and Pirjo Honkasalo. Their films drew on Marxist aesthetics, were often anti-narrative in form, recuperated class struggle as the predominant force in Finnish history, and engaged in a serious, even humourless, examination of prominent figures in the national history (see Toiviainen 1981; Ylänen 2000). Film critic Helena Ylänen sums up the period in the words of influential film producer Jaakko Talaskivi – production manager of eight Aki Kaurismäki films: ‘The hallmark of Finnish cinema is that it was made by communists, not gays and lesbians’ (Ylänen 2000). In other words, according to Talaskivi, the minority position that defined the national cinema was dictated by ideological conformity and piety, rather than non-normative heterogeneity.
Kaurismäki’s position distances him from the communist left, and also differentiates him from the mainstream of Finland’s social democratic and national discourse, which have defined the centre-left and the right of Finnish intellectual and political life. Kaurismäki’s embrace of narrative cinema differentiated him aesthetically from the filmmakers of the 1970s. His anarchistic politics positioned him in opposition to political parties. Kaurismäki’s bohemianism is hard to reconcile with the institutional means used to execute consensus-based policy-making in Finnish institutions in general. Kaurismäki underscores his oppositional stance in interviews of the time: ‘One of our aims in The Liar was to ridicule the social-democratic spirit and worldview. The film mocked norms of behaviour and constructive participation in general’ (in von Bagh 1984: 6). This hostility to involvement in institutional action also distances Kaurismäki from nationalism, Finnish in particular.
Finnish national self-understanding places great emphasis on institutional action, the root of which can be traced to the philosophy of J.V. Snellman (1806–1881). Snellman’s neo-Hegelian philosophical writings of the mid-nineteenth century delineated Finnish national identity in terms that remained definitive into the late twentieth century. For Snellman, the construction of state institutions created the sites in which the community in action could recognise itself as an expression of an indivisible, national spirit. Snellman’s emphasis on institutional action and national identity differs sharply from Kaurismäki’s position, whose anti-institutionalism and hostility towards identification with the mainstream or middle class distinguish him from the Snellmanian tradition. Kaurismäki has often spoken of the ambivalence of nation. ‘I have a love-hate relationship with Finns, to whom I feel like I belong but don’t belong’ (in Alapuro 1983). The thorough influence of political and cultural institutions in Finnish history offer no place to an anti-conformist like Kaurismäki. ‘The double standard in Finnish society is most evident in the highest ranks of its political and institutional culture. First politicians and officials screw everything up and lose everyone’s jobs and homes, and then they take away any means of consolation or recuperation’ (in Riihiranta 1982: 214). Institutional action, suggests Kaurismäki, is another word for cronyism. This observation is the premise of Hamlet Goes Business, in which a powerful family corporation enjoys shelter from the law. Because the state represents the interests of the few while speaking in the name of the many, it requires opposition in Kaurismäki’s view. One never finds a positive representation of a state official in Kaurismäki’s films, from the lowly police officer, to the presumptuous tax inspector, to the indifferent bureaucrats of the unemployment office. This view places Kaurismäki outside the main historical currents of national discourse in Finland.
Bohemians and Punks
Participants in the social movements of the late 1970s organised themselves outside the party infrastructure, embracing smaller-scale social forms instead. They focused on changing individual’s attitudes and practices. This shift also impacted the arts, as can be seen in popular music and theatre, for example. Punk rock emerged as a movement in the late 1970s. Punk sought to maximise the energy in the rock-n-roll tradition through attacks on conformity and convention, stripping production values and tradition to yield a small band of three or four, playing short songs in the fastest possible time. Punks took pride in their do-it-yourself attitude, which encompassed everything from learning to play their instruments without training, rejection of musical convention or regard for skill to fashioning their own clothes. The same kind of critique is also evident in the theatre, where attacks on both tradition and the politicised theatre of the 1970s became prominent. Kaurismäki’s entry into film took place in collaboration with musicians and actors involved in these movements.
The theatre of the early and mid-1970s was a fellow traveller with the class reform movement. Political commitment was evident in the Finnish National Theatre and the Helsinki Theatre, but also in explicitly political theatre led by such directors as Kalle Holmberg and Ralf Långbacka in Turku. Many productions took a revisionist approach to classical texts in Finnish literature. Plays by canonical authors such as Aleksis Kivi, Minna Canth, Teuvo Pakkala, and Maria Joutuni had been staged in ways that idealised the rural peasantry, a venerable mode in Finnish culture; but the political theatre of the 1970s shifted the idealisation, redescribing conflicts in class terms rather than in the idiom of an idealised and romanticised nationality. In a production of Kivi’s Seven Brothers directed by Kalle Holmberg in 1974, for example, academic uniforms were used to distinguish between the brothers and their rivals from another village, making the uneducated brothers’ struggle against their society a class struggle (see Paavolainen and Kukkonen 2005: 154).
This politicised theatre, and the culture it represented, was the target of a transformational critique in 1978 articulated through a production entitled Nuorallatanssijan kuolema eli kuinka Pete Q sai siivet (Pete Q., or the Death of A Tightrope Walker), produced by a student theatre company who called themselves The Finnish People’s Theatre. This was a short-lived theatre, but the crew and actors were associated with the Ryhmäteatteri, which continued with similar projects. Actors from this theatre provided Kaurismäki with his casts. Casting for Calamari Union (1985), for example, involved Kaurismäki turning up at a rehearsal at Ryhmäteatteri and inviting everyone interested to shoot a film with him (see Kuosmanen 2007). In Pete Q. then, we find the lineage, and many of the intellectual and creative partners, around which Aki Kaurismäki’s cinema subsequently took shape. Pete Q. attacked political and aesthetic authoritarianism, while affirming a mysticised, anarchistic notion of art. A conspicuous symbol in the play is a silenced painter whose painting calls to mind the anti-representational style and mysticism of Piet Mondrian. Art in the play involves a moral act, which cannot be reduced to political statement. The play gave voice to a critique of the Finnish radical left, construing it as a movement whose dogma had obscured and repressed the vitality and liberty of artistic activity. Pete Q. embraced an anarchistic anti-conformity.
Like the bohemians of the Latin Quarter, the artists who created Pete Q. fashioned an identity through a social group of artists, students, and youth, many of whom had met one another as students at the College of the Performing Arts in Helsinki. They included such actors as Kari Väänänen, Vesa Vierikko, Markku Peltola, and Matti Pellonpää. Their broader group also included Veikko Aaltonen, Pauli Pentti, and Aki Kaurismäki himself. Bohemianism was inherent in the social life of this group, which sought to define itself in contrast to an older generation of artists and intellectuals.
The signature of this group turns up in the acronym SHS attached to credits in Kaurismäki’s early films. It stands for Suomen hanaseura, or Finland’s (Beer) Tap Society, according to the actor Vesa Vierikko (see Kuosmanen 2007). SHS was a collective organised on the principle that whoever had money contributed it to drinks for all. Many of the actors and musicians who belonged to the group also acted, performed or contributed their skills to the production of Kaurismäki’s films of the 1980s, expecting no pay for films that were made on a ‘zero budget’, as Vierikko points out. Vierikko does not recall being paid for his role as Aarne in The Match Factory Girl, although he does remember eating and drinking well during shooting (ibid.).
One way of getting a better sense of Pete Q.’s critique is by likening it to the emergence of punk as it impacted Finland and Western Europe during the late 1970s. The theatre and punk rock, which on the surface seemed to differ in their regard for institutions, shared a rebellious anti-institutional outlook. As Pete Q. sought to ‘explode its viewers’ consciousness’ (Siikala 1978), so too the impact of punk through Ramones’ gigs in Finland during spring 1977 and punk’s influence on Finnish rock proved explosive. The historian Juha Sihvola captures the impact of the Ramones’ arrival in Finland in a way that underscores its rebellious spirit:9
I encountered the Ramones for the first time in 1976. New Musical Express had already been spreading the word for some time that the next big thing in music was four guys playing guitars in their basement, giving the finger to the dinosaurs of stadium rock like Zeppelin and the self-regarding progressive giants like Pink Floyd … I found the Ramones’ Leave Home. I bought it, brought it home, played it (in my room, where I didn’t have much more than a turntable) at least eight times, and realised: this is it. (2008)
The Ramones’ first concert in Helsinki was 16 May 1977, the first spring in which Aki Kaurismäki was living in the city. As Sihvola recalls, punk stripped away pomposity and self-regard affirming vital musical expression, just as Pete Q. sought to strip away the pieties of the political theatre to liberate a similar spirit. The Kaurismäki brothers’ early films looked to do the same, although they came at it with different aesthetics than the punks and the thespians. But in each case, these expressions effectively ‘gave the finger’ to the lumbering political pieties and dogma of the 1970s, embracing instead condensed, vital, anarchistic forms of cultural expression. Sihvola’s comment also indicates the extent to which young intellectuals, such as Kaurismäki and others, brought the rebellious attitude of punk to Finland – Kaurismäki through the casting of punk-inspired musicians in his early films. Punk in Finland was an attack on institutions of the middle class, but in its early form it came from within the middle class, in contrast to the movement’s working-class constituency in England, for example. Nevertheless, a ‘punk’ attitude is clearly evident in films like The Liar, The Saimaa Gesture, The Worthless, and Calamari Union.
The Saimaa Gesture and Calamari Union, for instance, bear a strong connection to the Finnish punk movement. Eppu Normaali frontman Martti Syrjä appears in The Saimaa Gesture, Calamari Union, Mika Kaurismäki’s Jackpot 2 and Rosso (1985). Like Sihvola, Syrjä remarks that the Ramones’ tour in Finland during spring 1977 changed his view of music, inspiring Eppu Normaali to adapt a punk aesthetic (see Bruun et al. 1998: 282–3). The cast of Aki Kaurismäki’s Calamari Union is a combination of actors who played in Pete Q. and musicians playing in the rebellious Finnish rock scene of the time, including Syrjä, Juice Leskinen, and Tuomari Nurmio. Kaurismäki underscores the affiliation in a 1984 interview. ‘I am an anarchist because Finland, just like other countries, is led by a herd of idiots, who make life almost impossible. Regular people don’t have the opportunity to influence others, except by stabbing them at a midsummer celebration’ (in Hämäläinen 1984: 53). Anarchism, bohemianism, and punk help explain the self-reflexively careless style and rebellious spirit of films like The Liar and Calamari Union as much as Godard’s use of jump cuts and sloppy aesthetics.
In the avant-garde theatre and nascent punk movement that form the context of Kaurismäki’s emergence as a filmmaker in the 1970s and 1980s, we see the antipathy to bourgeois convention, the anti-conformity, the emphasis on vitality of artistic expression, and an affirmation of small-scale, do-it-yourself artistic production. The political critique that is part of Kaurismäki’s early career fits within this ethos, as well. At the same time, the do-it-yourself element of this context also figured in Kaurismäki’s approach to the business of filmmaking. His early collaboration with his brother Mika took place through their company Villealfa Filmproductions Ltd. – in a tribute to Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) – which helped define a business profile for Kaurismäki.
Kaurismäki Ltd.
When we see bohemianism as a contingent identity taking shape through participation in contemporary life, as Baudelaire does and Gluck and Seigel encourage us to do, then it makes sense to look at the way Kaurismäki participates in contemporary life. For example, is ironic bohemianism a relevant term in analysing Kaurismäki’s film business? Commentators have often remarked on the bohemian character of Kaurismäki’s business practice. Raimo Silius, the festival programmer for the Tampere Shorts Festival in 1979, recalls that ‘Kaurismäki left a positive and sympathetic impression on me, although he was a true personality and a bohemian, indeed a little too bohemian to be PR representative in the opinion of some’ (in Myllyoja 2007). The bohemian dynamics we have been tracing are also relevant to the business end of Kaurismäki’s career, for as Silius suggests they motivate a distinctive approach.
Aki and Mika Kaurismäki formed their own production company Villealfa Film-production Ltd. in January 1981. This allowed them to control all aspects of production, which provided a means of defining the terms of their business. Villealfa was a participant in Filmtotal, a film production collective operating in Helsinki in the early 1980s – which also included Anssi Mänttäri’s Reppufilmi and Markku Lehmuskallio’s Giron Film. In 1986, Mika and Aki Kaurismäki founded the Midnight Sun Film Festival, which continues as an annual event at the time of writing. The same year, they also established the film-distribution company Senso Films, which owned a share in Finland’s largest film distributor and exhibitor Finnkino. In 1987, the Kaurismäkis’ Senso Films opened the Andorra Movie Theatre in Helsinki. Aki Kaurismäki is also co-owner of the bar Corona, and the hole-in-the-wall bar Moscow next door, both located in the same building as the Andorra Theatre. The Andorra Theatre was remodelled in 2007, becoming part of the Andorra Cultural Centre, which includes Corona, a night club known as Dubrovnik (after the restaurant in Drifting Clouds) and a movie theatre. Kaurismäki is also co-owner of the bar and restaurant in the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art. He opened the Oiva Hotel in Karkkila outside Helsinki in 1999, but closed it in 2007 (see Ylänen 1987; Hirvikorpi 1999; Anon. 2007). Villealfa also transformed in 1991, when Aki concentrated his production activity in Sputnik Ltd and Mika in his company Marianna Ltd (see Räihä 1991). Sputnik is now Aki Kaurismäki’s production company. Villealfa continued until 1997, producing Veikko Aaltonen’s films and serving as one of a number of co-producers of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996). In all of Aki Kaurismäki’s businesses we see a rejection of winner-take-all dynamics, and Kaurismäki’s bohemianism: he describes his business as the mediation of an ethos of cooperation, which distinguishes it from other economic practice, calling to mind Gluck’s argument about ironic bohemia and symbolic distinction. To be sure, what looks like cooperation from one perspective can be seen as an internalisation by employees of the boss’s expectations from another perspective; incidents lending themselves to an autocratic picture of Kaurismäki have also been reported (see Hyvönen 1990).
Villealfa’s cooperation with Filmtotal impacted on Kaurismäki’s career by helping him establish a low-budget, quickly produced, do-it-yourself method as his production practice. Filmtotal was initiated by Anssi Mänttäri, a filmmaker a generation older than Kaurismäki who had grown frustrated with the Finnish Film Foundation. Without the financial support of the foundation, it had been practically impossible to produce and release feature films since the failure of Finland’s two main studios in the late 1960s. Filmtotal took the do-it-yourself, underground approach to filmmaking, its three companies producing a number of films without foundation support, including Kaurismäki’s Calamari Union. The three film companies shared office space and personnel as a cost-cutting measure, and also coordinated their production and release schedules to minimise competition for resources. Most of the films associated with Filmtotal were made in Helsinki on short shooting schedules as part of the same low-budget approach (see von Bagh 1984: 4–5). Filmtotal’s quick-and-cheap production method rejected the script development, storyboarding, shot-planning, and multiple-take shooting typical of mainstream cinema and required by the foundation, privileging instead on-the-spot scriptwriting, improvisation between director and actors, location shooting, and spontaneity in general. The production style became characteristic of Aki Kaurismäki’s approach to filmmaking, and has continued since. In this practice we see a connection to punk.
The films the Kaurismäki brothers made in the early 1980s have proved to be their most successful Finnish releases, as measured by box office. Crime and Punishment sold 68,000 tickets. Among Kaurismäki’s seventeen features, only the award-winning Man Without a Past at 176,000 theatre tickets eclipsed the sales for Crime and Punishment. In 1991, Villealfa publicist Erkki Astala said that the company’s productions of the early 1980s such as The Saimaa Gesture and The Worthless had sold between ‘60,000 to 90,000 tickets’ in Finland, before the company’s films’ sales figures dropped to ‘30,000 to 50,000 tickets sold’ in the late 1980s (see Räihä 1991). These numbers do not include audience for broadcast of the films by Finnish state television (YLE), which typically numbers in the hundreds of thousands to around half a million for Kaurismäki’s films.
Another example of the ethos on which Villealfa operated is evident in the way in which Kaurismäki has handled the international rights sales of his films. World Sales’ Christa Saredi represented Aki Kaurismäki’s films outside the Nordic region between 1986 and 2002. The Swiss Saredi has also handled the rights of films by such directors as Michael Haneke, Jim Jarmusch, Ang Lee, Bakhtiyar Khudojnazarov, and Thomas Vinterberg. Saredi became involved with the Kaurismäkis’ distribution through Senso Films and the Andorra Theatre in Helsinki when Mika Kaurismäki contacted Saredi to acquire a print of Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986). Mika also used the discussion with Saredi to promote his and Aki’s films, according to journalist Eero Hyvönen; Saredi would go on to help Mika and Aki get further connected with eminent filmmakers and actors who later appeared in their films, contribute to the organisation of a Kaurismäki Brothers’ retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in January 1989, and establish festival premieres as a key tool in the international marketing of their films (see Hyvönen 1990: 23). Continuity in this relationship with Saredi helped Aki Kaurismäki establish a ‘brand’ in such important markets for his films as France and Germany. This branding is evident, for example, in the way in which the films have premiered and been marketed in these countries. Since 1990, four of Kaurismäki’s eight features have premiered at the New York, Toronto, or Berlin Film Festivals, and all of them have been screened at one of these festivals or at the Cannes International Film Festival. In all cases, the publicity material of the films remained consistent, with press packets printed in antiquated fonts, films often represented by a distinctive image painted by the visual artist Paula Oinonen, and cryptic, parodic blurbs written by the director featuring centrally in the advertising copy. Even in films with prominent cameos, by such figures as Jim Jarmusch, Samuel Fuller, and Joe Strummer, Kaurismäki has not allowed their names to be used in the marketing of the films (ibid.). International sales, particularly those in France, Germany, and Italy have provided audiences, and helped attract upfront financing from such sources as French and German television channels. In short, an ethos of collaboration served to open doors, build loyalty, define Kaurismäki’s films, and attract production funding. Foreign sales of Kaurismäki’s films make up a significant majority of their total sales, dwarfing the economic significance of the relatively small Finnish market for Kaurismäki.
In this business practice, we see the mark of ironic bohemia, insofar as Kaurismäki is working within the film business to maximise the impact of his films, but putting principles such as artistic control, loyalty, and collaboration above profitability. These afford the symbolic distinction analysed by Gluck.
From the Second to the Third Republic
While Kaurismäki’s early films and career take shape around a political critique of the nation-state, since the mid-1990s his films’ critique and, as a consequence, the bohemianism have shifted their focus to an economic critique. This shift is not a change in kind, but one of degree, for one of the abiding features of bohemia is its antipathy towards the ‘power of sheer wealth’ in politics no less than in culture (Seigel 1986: 394). And politics, as legislation of the economy and the channelling of resources, also involves economics. The reasons for the shift in Kaurismäki’s focus are interestingly evident in the representation of alcohol consumption in the films, the analysis of which helps create a picture of Kaurismäki’s transforming bohemianism. What we see is that Kaurismäki’s bohemianism does not transcend or create a position outside of the middle-class one he critiques, but rather contests and amplifies the conflicts and ambivalence within it – a view that echoes Jerrold Seigel’s argument about bohemianism (1986: 11). Sketching out this transformation requires outlining the transition from Finland’s Second to its Third Republic, and situating the representation of alcohol discourse in the films in relation to the transition.
Finland’s Second Republic designates the period in which the Paasikivi-Kekkonen foreign policy towards the Soviet Union predominated, which also correlated with a domestic-policy regime. The policy was named for the two presidents of Finland who ruled the country between 1946 and 1982. This period stretches from 1944, when Finland signed an armistice ending its war with the Soviet Union, to the dissolution of the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance (YYA-sopimus) in 1992, which had been put in place in 1948 and had governed Finnish-Soviet relations during the Cold War. The Third Republic can be said to be in place with Finland’s affirmative vote to join the European Union in 1994. Although these mileposts are concerned with foreign policy, the Second Republic also involves the modernisation, urbanisation, and the construction of the Finnish welfare state. This Second Republic is crucial to understanding Kaurismäki’s cinema, for the Second Republic established a middle-class perspective as fundamental in domestic politics, while linking this perspective to an acceptance of the state as a good actor working to better the lives of its citizens. Kaurismäki’s early cinema can be seen in large degree to be a sustained critique of this perspective; as the state’s role changes, his cinema also changes.
During the postwar period, Finland devoted itself to the production of industrial products for export – paper, metal, textiles – by which it could pay back its war debts, build a sustaining, non-agrarian economic infrastructure, and forge its five million citizens into a disciplined, productive, educated work force. In his book Toinen tasavalta (The Second Republic, 1996), the sociologist Pertti Alasuutari investigates the seminal discourses in the construction of the Finnish welfare state between 1946 and 1994. Alasuutari shows that a fundamental aim of Finnish post-war policy in a variety of areas was aligning ruling elites and the population around a middle-class vantage point (also, see Kosonen 1987). By elevating the population through education and well-paid work, an ideological unity was engendered, building on the unity forged in Finland’s wars with the USSR between 1939 and 1944.10 The Finnish state sought to universalise the benefits of this period of growth through the corporatist inclusion and egalitarian distribution policies that define the universal welfare state (see Esping-Andersen 1990). This project was also cultural, insofar as the state established an array of modernising and edifying projects aimed at moulding the population around a rational, cultured, self-reflexive perspective. Education, broadcasting, subsidisation of voluntary associations, and a state alcohol monopoly are areas where state control aimed to shape citizens into more enlightened, more productive, more capable, healthier workers. Alasuutari periodises this history into two phases. In the 1940s and 1950s, the state adhered to the moral task of national self-enlightenment, which dated to J.V. Snellman and his nineteenth-century national project. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the moral emphasis in the Snellman tradition gave way to a drive for rationalisation and planning, led by a state bureaucracy relying on the latest sociological and economic research. Alasuutari calls the first phase the moral economy and the second the economy of expertise. Both of these phases rested on the same foundational assumptions: the goodness of the state, the importance of a shared national perspective, the legitimacy of protectionism in domestic policy.
Kaurismäki’s ironic bohemianism gives voice to ambivalence about the Second Republic. Such early films as The Liar, The Worthless, The Saimaa Gesture, and Crime and Punishment put explicit criticism of this system in the foreground. This is nowhere more evident than in the ‘classless’ status of the films’ characters. They are below the working class, members of the lumpen-proletariat: they are symbolic outsiders in their own land, for they do not belong to the agrarian-, working-, and middle-class coalition that shaped post-war Finland. Such dissent is also explicit in the films. In The Saimaa Gesture, for example, the musicians interviewed mock symbolic national institutions such as the army and the state alcohol policy, drinking casually and happily. The Eppu Normaali frontman Matti Syrjä ridicules the Finnish army’s clichés about ‘making boys into men’, asserting the army makes the thoughtful and impressionable into dolts. Kaurismäki’s directorial debut Crime and Punishment articulates similar political criticism in Rahikainen’s altered motive for murder. The commercial and political connections of the character Kari Honkanen, who accidentally killed Rahikainen’s fiancée, implies a deep double standard in governance and law: the privileged may do as they wish without fear of consequences, while the masses must submit to the controls of the state. The film condemns the acceptance of state authority and ideological unity analysed by Alasuutari. Yet, as we will see, later films also embrace a middle-class perspective.
This embrace occurs as the Second Republic’s political project loses significance. A shift begins to be visible in 1988 with Ariel, and finds full expression in the films that have appeared since 1996. The political emphasis of the bohemianism loses its urgency as the Second Republic gives way to the Third Republic, Finland as a member of the European Union, pursuing economic growth in high-tech industries, and gradually embracing neoliberal economic policy that makes economic growth, rather than full employment, the primary measure of economic wellbeing. Kaurismäki’s bohemianism under the Third Republic takes on an economic dissent, and begins to challenge and work over the ideology and self-image of an arriviste consumer class. In a study of the shift from Second to Third Republic, Alasuutari and Petri Ruuska point out that referential Second-Republic categories such as ‘work’ and ‘citizenship’ are replaced by ‘market’ and ‘consumer’ in the Third Republic (1999). Beginning in the mid-1980s, Finland deregulated its economy, allowing direct foreign investment to pass in and out of the country, loosening banking regulations, and providing economic incentives aimed at diversifying the economy, so-called ‘structural adjustment’. Rapid growth in the 1980s, and a catastrophic recession in 1991–1993 further transformed the economy, contributing to its restructuring around the hi-tech sector and in particular the telecommunications business of Nokia. The educational and technological expertise required to bolster this high-tech economy put new emphasis on education and competitiveness in the global economy. The old model of a nation that needed to be raised up around a shared project gave way to a nation of highly educated consumers, working, buying, travelling, and competing (see Alasuutari and Ruuska 1999: 215–43). The impact of these changes is easily visible in broadcasting and the alcohol monopoly. The national channels must now compete with an array of national and international cable channels, which has diversified the nation’s audio-visual culture. The alcohol monopoly can no longer use tax and price controls to regulate consumption, for consumers simply import unrestricted amounts of less-expensive alcohol on trips to other EU countries.
The transition from the Second to the Third Republic has a large impact on Kaurismäki’s cinema, insofar as the films show increasing interest in the middle-class perspective promulgated by the Second-Republic Finnish state, presenting it as an opposition to the market orientation of the Third Republic. Paradoxically, the Third Republic has completed the project of the Second Republic, generating a population of educated, middle-class consumers. Yet Kaurismäki’s films remain bohemian insofar as they cast symbolic outsiders against this position by marking them with references to Second Republic Finland. The ambivalence of Kaurismäki’s bohemian position in the films since the mid-1990s is most evident in the representation of alcohol consumption.
Drunkenness, Manners, and Kaurismäki
Alcohol consumption was a site of enormous contestation in Finland during the twentieth century – a fight Kaurismäki’s cinema joins with relish. These struggles impacted Kaurismäki from his entry into filmmaking. In Mika’s The Worthless, written by Aki, Manne (Matti Pellonpää) orders a calvados: at the time of production in 1983, the French apple brandy was not imported into Finland by the alcohol monopoly, and so was notably unavailable to Finns. Mika and Aki Kaurismäki were forced to remove an image of the rock musician Juice Leskinen drinking vermouth from their early film The Saimaa Gesture. ‘When someone drinks stylishly, it’s unacceptable’ in the eyes of the state, said Kaurismäki about the censorship (in von Bagh 1984: 6). Kaurismäki’s characters always drink with a certain humorous style. Reino drinks the Finnish national spirit Koskenkorva with zest and immunity to alcohol’s effects in Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana. In Shadows in Paradise, Nikander seeks to initiate a romance with Ilona with carefully chosen wine. In Drifting Clouds, the alcoholic cook Lajunen (Markku Peltola) struggles with his disease, but does so with good humour and a sober outcome. These images differ strongly from the biological realism in such canonical national films as Mikko Niskanen’s depiction of an alcoholic farmer’s dissolution in Kahdeksan surmanluotia (Eight Deadly Shots, 1972), or the carnivalesque depiction of alcohol in such classic farces as Lampaansyöjät (Sheep Eaters, Seppo Huunonen, 1972). Such depictions circumscribe alcohol consumption within the disease model of alcoholism, or as an exceptional behaviour, which does not threaten the social order. Kaurismäki says: ‘Finns approve of people getting drunk in the sauna, puking and rolling around in the bushes, having sex with the neighbour’s wife. That’s totally fine. But if someone drinks with some style, that’s forbidden. It doesn’t belong to the Finnish way of life’ (in von Bagh 1984: 6). Drinking calvados sits disjunctively with the stereotypes that figure in the discursive history of Finnish drunkenness. ‘Choice of beverage is a significant … indicator of social status [and] imported or foreign drinks have a higher status than “local” beverages’ observes the Social Issues Research Council Report Social and Cultural Aspects of Drinking (1998: 32). In 1983, lack of availability may have sent a message; in the context of the de facto deregulation of Finnish alcohol retail, Kaurismäki’s message harmonises with Marcel’s preference for a comfortable chair and good bottle of wine at the conclusion of The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter.
Alcohol consmption, and especially rural drinking, have long been a focus of Finnish state action, dating to Snellman and the civic-nationalist Fennomani movement in the nineteenth century. From the 1880s until the 1960s there was a prohibition on the sale of spirits in Finland’s rural areas, as well as on beer from the 1900s to the 1960s (see Kuusi 1956; Alasuutari 1996). In the 1910s, prohibition movements began to advance biological and cultural theories of ‘Finnish Drunkenness’ (suomalainen viinapää), justifying state action to control and correct the problematic Finnish drinker, especially the putatively unsophisticated rural one (see Peltonen 1988; Alasuutari 1996; Apo 2001). National prohibition was legislated in 1917 and put into legal practice from 1919 to 1932. From 1932, local police and magistrates incarcerated problem drinkers routinely – as is evident in Niskanen’s Eight Deadly Shots. In 1969, limited retail beer sales were legalised, and a discourse of moderation encouraging wine and beer consumption took shape. Alcohol laws were liberalised in the 1990s, making strong beer available in grocery stores – previously only low-alcohol beer had been. Beginning in 1995, the open markets policy of the EU forced Finland to give up restrictions on the importation of alcohol, as well as to change tax policy governing sales of alcohol. Further, the problem drinker model was challenged by the new model of the citizen as consumer.
The discourse of Finnish drinking has been contested by different quarters in line with diverse political agendas. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservative elites construed drunkenness as symbolic evidence of the rural masses’ lack of development and sophistication, establishing drunkenness as a justification for coercive forms of social reform. Working-class movements affirmed similar theories of Finnish drunkenness, but formed their own prohibition movements to contest elite discourse and to take control of alcohol consumption. The working-class movement argued alcohol sales were a means of entrapping agrarian and factory workers and making them dependent on bourgeois purveyors. On both sides, however, a paternalistic relationship obtained between discursive actors and the objects of their discourse, the problematic masses. Consensus about Finnish drunkenness led to a policy emphasising restriction as a means of controlling consumption. A retail monopoly was put in place (Alko) in 1932, and a ration card system was used from the 1930s to the 1960s (see Alasuutari 1996).
Kaurismäki’s generally happy drinkers contest the premise of these discourses, rejecting the construction of alcohol consumption as lacking sophistication, self-control, and middle-class manners.11 Kaurismäki rejects the model of the problem drinker, replacing it instead with the stylish drinker. His characters drink in different ways, but alcohol is almost always represented as involving conventions of consumption and sociability that maintain control over alcohol intake – although Shadows in Paradise is one exception, involving a drunken outburst by Nikander after his colleague’s death. For example, the alcoholic cook Lajunen in Drifting Clouds loses control, but his colleagues look out for him and protect him from himself. These representations reject the problem drinker model of the Second Republic. The mocking order of calvados in The Worthless is another instance of ridicule directed at the restrictive alcohol discourse. Yet if there is some sentimental bohemianism in this position, there is also significant irony, inasmuch as Kaurismäki’s films in general, and especially since the mid-1990s, also affirm a bourgeois attitudes and settings.
Time and again, Kaurismäki’s films feature scenes in tastefully appointed restaurants, with white linen and designer glassware on the tables, exuding a smart ambience. We see such settings in The Worthless, Shadows in Pardise, The Bohemian Life, Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana, Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past, and Lights in the Dusk. In these representations, Kaurismäki finds himself positioned within a minority discourse that challenged the restriction and regulation approach in Finnish alcohol discourse, arguing instead for an incrementalist approach that sought to model bourgeois manners as an ideal for rural and working-class Finns. The premise of this approach is mimetic action, rather than biological expression. Alasuutari offers a fascinating summation of this policy in a passage citing Alko’s director from the 1930s to 1954, Arvo Linturi, who writes:
Control and monitoring of restaurant alcohol service is of enormous significance to Finnish alcohol policy, since for the majority of restaurant customers licensed restaurants are the only place that they encounter proper manners and learn how to behave in public when drinking strong beverages. For this reason restaurant service is extremely important to Finnish alcohol policy. Under the current policy regime governing strong beverages, licensed restaurants have come to be like a national school system, establishing and disseminating model practices of consumption and behaviour. These practices ought to be broadened throughout the population and made more effective by working intensively on enforcement and control of the service culture in licensed restaurants. (In Alasuutari 1996: 154)
The restaurant becomes a site of paedeia in Linturi’s view, an institution through which the agrarian and working classes can learn to view themselves as bourgeois subjects by engaging in the pleasures of restaurant service. This policy bleeds into the regulatory regime in many ways. For example, through the 1980s, customers who ordered strong beverages in tightly controlled licensed restaurants were required to order food along with their drinks – a legal requirement that in practice was often evaded through creative interpretation. Kaurismäki’s stylish restaurant drinking echoes Linturi’s perspective, valorising precisely the kind of institutions Linturi emphasises. In this sense, Kaurismäki’s cinema embraces a bygone middle-class institution as a means of affirming an alternative to the problem drinker, but also to the alcohol consumer of today, importing trailer-loads of beer and vodka by ferry from Estonia. This contrast is seminal in Drifting Clouds: the dignified, old Dubrovnik is purchased by a corporate chain, planning to put something new in the space. Stylish drinking affirms the middle-class perspective that Kaurismäki wishes to reject in many other places in his cinema.
While alcohol consumption continued to be discouraged by way of restriction through the 1960s, Linturi’s vision gained ground as the narrative of Finnish drunkeness as a class-based national phenomenon gave way to the disease model of alcoholism. Since the 1970s, moderate drinking of beer and wine has been promoted. Since 1995, however, neoliberal notions of the customer have displaced the subject of Finnish drunkenness, leading officials to worry that the Finnish customer is just too thirsty. Opinion makers and politicians still do not trust the Finnish drinker. The discourse of Finnish drunkenness continues to surface in panicky discussions of growing consumption, which call for new means of controlling drinking.
The representation of alcohol in the films shows a transition in the orientation of Kaurismäki’s bohemianism, while also showing its embeddedness in the political, economic, and cultural changes that have spanned Kaurismäki’s career.
Kaurismäki’s cinema also displays the ambivalence highlighted by Seigel: it mocks the discourse of regulation and restriction, while valorising strands of the Finnish drunkenness discourse entailing the model of bourgeois paedeia. Bohemianism is not a sentimental longing for a position outside of all discourse, but ambivalently shifts between diverse perspectives to engage in both ongoing and particular struggles. In this way, Kaurismäki’s ironic bohemianism is not outside of the middle-class perspective, but situated within it, delineating positions and distinctions within its premises and attitudes. As the middle-class perspective changes, from a politically defined notion to an economically defined one, the bohemianism in Kaurismäki’s cinema also changes.
Towards an Economic Critique
The shift in Kaurismäki’s cinema can also be theorised as a dialectical transition from politically inflected aesthetics to economically inflected aesthetics (see Jameson 1998). Since the 1990s, Kaurismäki’s cinema has become increasingly well-known and critically successful, as well as commercially so. Kaurismäki ascended to status of an internationally eminent auteur. This also made his cinema a model of ‘global cultural export’ within Finland’s export economy. Kaurismäki contested this economic status with theatrical disruptions of the commodification of his cinema, and by construing politics as dominated by neoliberal economic discourse. This critique continued to mock the state, but increasingly asserted its moral premise by arguing that the neoliberal welfare state had abandoned any moral commitments. Kaurismäki has thus come to defend the morally and politically normative discourse of social-democratic universalism, which he criticised during the 1980s, for this discourse provides a means of resistance against the redefinition of the state and the citizen as primarily economic actors. The anarchist finds that social democracy has dialectically shifted to become the equivalent to an earlier anarchism. While the anarchist Kaurismäki attacked the normative order of the paternalistic welfare state, since the 1990s anarchism has changed, coming to look like a form of libertarianism. In this context, affirming convention, regulation, and egalitarianism against arguments for an unconstrained economy becomes an oppositional position.
It is easy to overlook these dialectical shifts in the bohemian story. The grey areas of transformation are visible in the ways in which cinema as an institution has itself changed, as it has once again come to be defined primarily as an economic entity. Cinema is promoted as a source of jobs, an economic export, and it is reported in headlines for its celebrity interests. The interaction of these dimensions can be seen in the reception of Kaurismäki’s appointment as Artist of the Academy, as well as in the reception of The Man Without a Past at Cannes and its exposure at the Academy Awards.
When Kaurismäki received his title from President Halonen, one story about it was headlined ‘Artist of the Academy Kaurismäki’s Public Image Carefully Crafted’. The reporter pointed out the contradictions in the director’s public image: ‘In the course of his thirty year career Kaurismäki has given hundreds of interviews, ranging from Finnair’s in-flight magazine to the communist newspaper Tiedonantaja. Yet in the opinion of most people, he avoids publicity’ (Mäkinen 2008). Kaurismäki is a celebrity whose fame rests on his ostensible indifference to his status as a celebrity, which only makes his celebrity more valuable in a media context of ephemeral and empty fame vigorously pursued by everyone (see Nieminen 2007: D1). The real Kaurismäki is supposed to be a laconic, heavy smoking and drinking, left-wing intellectual, and friend of the poor, not a businessman who has skilfully tied together filmmaking and other enterprises in a savvy media strategy. The reporter’s response to the contradictions is to surmise that a stable and unchanging stance underpins the appearances. Beneath the public image, what is Kaurismäki really like, he asks. This response to contradictions overlooks the extent to which these contradictions are part of a changing attitude and response to the conditions and ideas in which Kaurismäki’s cinema and the discourse around it take shape. More broadly, the comparisons analysed by the reporter appear as contradictions when they presume that Kaurismäki is an outsider. When we take ambivalence as our premise and analyse Kaurismäki’s ironic bohemia, we see that the shift from mocking the putatively moral, rational welfare state to critiquing the amoral, neoliberal welfare state is part of a response to a transition in the dominant political-economic regime in Finland, the Nordic countries and the West, rather than a matter of the outsider coming in, or selling out. The conflicts against which Kaurismäki has turned his bohemian stance have simply shifted.
The rising significance of economic shifts is also evident in the predominance of economic allegories in Kaurismäki’s cinema, and especially in the films that have appeared since the late 1980s. Allegories of economic critique like the one we see in Ariel figure in the films after 1990, and centrally in Kaurismäki’s cinema since Drifting Clouds in 1996. Drifting Clouds itself narrates the consequences of the banking crisis and deep economic recession of 1991–93. The protagonist couple of Drifting Clouds lose their jobs, and cannot get started again, as they are refused credit by comically malevolent bankers. The moral act of a former employer finally provides the couple redemption from their misfortune. An allegory of economic destruction and moral redemption is also part of Kaurismäki’s Juha. The attraction of foreign wealth helps seduce the Finn into betraying her dignity. Economic downfall and redemption are also at the heart of The Man Without a Past. Unmerciful economic and state institutions ignore and persecute the protagonist. Only a non-economic and non-political actor, the Salvation Army, provides understanding and support capable of helping M. Lights in the Dusk also tells a story of economic exploitation. As in Juha, the protagonist betrays his dignity in pursuit of something too good to be true. As a night watchman, the protagonist also introduces a metaphor that has figured prominently in discussions of the rise of neoliberalism in Finland. The night watchman state’ is a model of small government, which provides only the security necessary to ensure social order (see Löppönen 2008). Koistinen’s occupation is no coincidence; the working title of the film was Yövartija, or The Night Watchman. His profession is also metonymic, in as much as security firms have taken over many police functions in Finland through subcontracting arrangements, for example maintaining order and enforcing laws in the Helsinki public transportation system. Each film can be read as an allegory of economic exploitation, in which the naïve and the vulnerable are exploited by the economically powerful, ignored and harassed by a ‘night watchman’ state, and only find redemption in relationships to others. The target of these films’ allegorical critique is the aggressive individualism, amoral market dynamics, and wilful blindness to suffering commonly associated with neoliberal political positions. Indeed, the ambitions of the night watchman Koistinen to establish a firm of his own sum up the critique. His desire to represent the neoliberal state as owner-operator of a private security firm is destroyed by criminal economic actors, who are allegorically construed as the true owners of the neoliberal system. The moral and rational regimes of the 1940s–70s described by Alasuutari look quaint in the winner-takes-all world of globalisation that is the background picture of Kaurismäki’s narratives of the 1990s and 2000s.
If the transformation of Kaurismäki’s bohemianism is evident in the films, it is also evident in a shift in his relationship to the cinema. As the economic definition of auteur cinema in Finland and Europe has become more prominent in political-economic discussions, the ironic bohemianism we have been tracing also becomes relevant to the institution of cinema itself.
A Rising Tide Floats All Boats
Kaurismäki’s breakthrough as an international auteur dates to the 1990s, as we noted in the Introduction, when his films reached new festival audiences, were programmed in prestigious institutions, reached a new popular audience in Europe, and received wide critical attention (see Connah 1991).12 ‘Kaurismäki’s Laidback Attitude Sells in Europe’ was the title of one reporter’s article, summing up the consensus (Raeste 1990). While a change in critical regard was part of the story, ‘selling well’ was too. The dynamics underpinning commercial success, and struggles over its significance and relevance to Kaurismäki’s cinema, have been a site of ambivalence in Kaurismäki’s bohemian story since the 1990s. Ironic bohemianism comes to involve intervening in and inflecting the status of the filmmaker and his cinema as media and commercial entities. It is in this way the contradictions and ambivalences of the cinema as an institution – an aesthetic, political, and commercial form – are explored and worked out.
Since 2000, a number of commentators have formed their view of the significance of Kaurismäki’s cinema by understanding it within the discourse of neoliberalism, construing Kaurismäki as a symbol of national success much like globetrotting Finnish sports celebrities. Kaurismäki’s cinema becomes a model of how Finnish film could emulate Swedish and Danish film, and become a small nation’s global export. For example, Kaurismäki figures in arguments about the export potential of Finnish cinema advanced by Director of the Finnish Film Foundation from 1996 to 2006, Jouni Mykkänen (2002, 2004). He argues that Kaurismäki is an example of skilfully and strategically produced Finnish film, which also involves an original interpretation of national culture. This combination helps Kaurismäki reach a global niche audience. For Mykkänen, originality is synonymous with a commodification of Finland as strange and exotic, that is to say, Finnish cinema is fetishised as different from European and American cinema and therefore as potentially appealing to film audiences. In Mykkänen’s argument we see the conventional narrative of Kaurismäki the bohemian – that is the original and dissident filmmaker – repurposed as an economic story. Kaurismäki’s cinema takes a critical distance from the aesthetic mainstream of European and American cinema, yet draws on these same cinematic traditions, making it comprehensible as an ‘export product.’ Kaurismäki’s rise to prominence becomes synonymous with success, but also stands as an economic model of niche marketing to global markets. Kaurismäki’s difference is the commodity value in his films, suggests Mykkänen.
But if Kaurismäki’s cinema has increased in prestige since the 1990s because of its economic success and global reach, the director and his champions expressed ambivalence towards the success story and the economic dynamics underpinning it, often by invoking a bohemian narrative. The central study of Kaurismäki’s films in Finnish by Lauri Timonen (2006) distances itself from any analysis of the economic dimensions of Kaurismäki’s cinema. In Timonen’s bohemian story, Kaurismäki is the sentimental bohemian, who rejects the bourgeois values of the market in affirmation of his art and moral purpose. Such a story overlooks the extent to which such definition is premised not on ambivalence, but on black-and-white distinctions between economic and aesthetic discourses. To be sure, Kaurismäki often sought to define the economic status of his cinema by theatrically disrupting the economic story told by figures like Mykkänen and the institutions they represent. Yet to engage in such theatrical contestation requires participating in a mass media environment structured by intense competition for ‘screen time’ and attention. In other words, such self-definition requires a paradoxical double movement: one must engage in attention-getting action within a media field defined by the economic forces one is seeking to critique. The theatrical contestation is reabsorbed by media representations of it, and the attention generated ends up bolstering the economic value of the figure or text in question. What we see is the embeddedness of Kaurismäki in the very economic discourse he critiques, which he does by way of parodical performance within it. Such performances, of course, only increase his celebrity and economic value.
This dialectic is not lost in the Kaurismäki discourse, for the bohemian theatrics and distinctions focus increasingly on economic and institutional critique. This shift offers another reason for Kaurismäki’s acceptance of the Artist of the Academy award. In allying himself with a politician like Halonen, who has defined herself through independent-minded commitments and moral stances that call Kaurismäki’s positions to mind, he displays a pragmatism that implicitly acknowledges the impossibility of black-and-white distinctions. Kaurismäki’s remark, ‘Tarja Halonen is a good president’ must be one of the only positive public statements he has ever uttered about a politician (Hammarberg 2002). But politics start looking good as a means of resisting arguments about markets and economic necessity.
The seminal examples of Kaurismäki’s transforming bohemian stance are also evident in the reception of The Man Without a Past from 2002. Critic and film scholar Peter von Bagh sums up critical consensus, which uses textual interpretation to erect a barrier between Kaurismäki and the economic forces the film critiques. ‘Kaurismäki has not forgotten things that are simple on their surface, but which have become stunningly unusual. Altruism. Solidarity. The notion that poverty is not evidence of stupidity. The conviction that every person is an end in herself ’ (2002b). Dissent defines The Man Without a Past, suggests von Bagh, construing Kaurismäki as carrying on the tradition of Charles Chaplin, Frank Capra, and Vittorio de Sica and rejecting the alienating relations of the market, the compromises of political institutions, and the commercialised aesthetic of mainstream cinema. A film about an outsider, told in a cinematic language no longer current, it is tempting to cast Kaurismäki in the film, interpreting it as a Manichean allegory of the bohemian outsider who rejects the superficial and the flashy to affirm a humanist morality.
This reading is credible, and was often repeated by critics, but it depends on treating the film as an autonomous object. The film’s impact was not generated by the film alone, but by the discourse around it. Kaurismäki deftly used scandal to market the film and engage in a wide-ranging social struggle. In so doing, he embraced the commodified media he professes to disdain, making the scandals and events around the film equally significant to the film itself. In this we see the art of the event, a performance art, which foments social struggle in a way that calls to mind the surrealists and dadaists often praised by Kaurismäki, who figure in the bohemian tradition inasmuch as they ambivalently attacked not only the middle classes, but the art object and institutions established by the middle classes as the armature of modern art. In this connection the career of the dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp comes to mind. Duchamp replaced ‘the production of objects with the self-dramatization of the artist, as the representative figure of a society unable to set clear limits for the identities and activities of its members’ (Seigel 1986: 389). The many important differences of figure and period notwithstanding, Kaurismäki’s use of scandal and media suggests a deep concern with the role of the artist as a negotiator of the significance of economic and moral identities and activities. We do not see this dimension when we position Kaurismäki as only a sentimental bohemian.
The Man Without a Past had its world premiere in Finland on 1 March 2002, but became a media event only in May of the same year, having been chosen for the competition series at Cannes. At the time of writing, only four films in the history of Finnish cinema have been selected for competition in Cannes: Erik Blomberg’s Valkoinen peura (White Reindeer, 1952), Kaurismäki’s Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past, and Le Havre. In addition to the intense international media attention focused on Cannes, the Finnish media and Ministry of Culture sought to present Kaurismäki as a representative of the national culture. The Man Without a Past had received a tepid reception in Finland. At the art-house Diana Theatre in Finland’s ‘second city’ Turku, for example, sixty-eight spectators attended the film during one week in early May (see Suominen 2002). The film had received reviews that emphasised its significance in Kaurismäki’s career and underscored its moral intervention (see von Bagh 2002a). Yet Kaurismäki’s visibility at Cannes made him an important figure of public diplomacy. One of the key moments was the screening on the evening of Wednesday 22 May 2002. Kaurismäki vaulted to international attention on the red carpet when he twisted his way into the theatre in time to music from his film, and to the consternation of Finland’s Minister of Culture Suvi Lindén. As we saw in the Introduction, Lindén scoldingly invoked the drunkenness discourse in responding to Kaurismäki’s twist.
I do not want to comment on Kaurismäki’s behaviour. I will just say in general that it is fine to drink alcohol, but the premise must be that one maintains control of oneself and treats others with respect … Whether he represents culture or sport, anyone who appears in the international media should know that he creates an image of Finland. (In Tainola 2002)
Lindén overlooks the rationale for Kaurismäki’s performance; the incident forces together national cultural expectations and ‘success’ stories, global cinema, and the status of the filmmaker in relation to his film. Kaurismäki’s self-dramatisation on the red carpet worked to brand him as an eccentric, and hence an interesting, star, which is an economic category rather than one relevant to national representation. Such a performance challenges arguments like Mykkänen’s, for it forces us to ask if the filmmaker when understood as an economic category continues to be relevant or valuable as a political or cultural category in a national discourse. Some argue no, as we will see when we take up Jörn Donner’s contribution to this discussion in chapter four.
The debate caused by Kaurismäki as such a figure intensified following the gala awards ceremony in which The Man Without a Past received several awards. The awards ceremony was not broadcast on Finnish television, and the film’s success was initially squeezed to the edge of the national news by reporting on events that coincided with Cannes: the disappointing performance of Finland’s hockey team in the World Championships, a Finnish pop artist’s failure at the Eurovision Song Contest, and the fortunes of Formula One driver Kimi Räikönen in the Monaco Grand Prix (see Näveri 2002c; Anon. 2002a; Lindstedt 2002). After initial confusion, however, Finnish commentators were quick to trumpet Kaurismäki’s success, yet not primarily for the aesthetic or moral reasons that critics like von Bagh had identified, but for the reasons outlined by Mykkänen. Kaurismäki’s cinema was a model of economic success, a cultural export story to be emulated by other quarters of Finnish culture. In telling Kaurismäki’s success story as one of economic triumph, many commentators wondered what impact the film’s success would have on the legislative session that would determine the Culture Ministry’s budget for 2003–5 (see Anon. 2002a; Anon. 2002b; Anon. 2002c; Näveri 2002c). The international press also wrote about the economic dimensions of Kaurismäki’s film, focusing on the many distribution contracts signed for it at Cannes, but also about its aesthetic and moral dimensions. By contrast, some commentators criticised the economic emphasis, arguing that Kaurismäki was misunderstood, that the story was one of aesthetics, originality, political opposition, and a unique achievement in the history of Finnish cinema (see von Bagh 2002b; Noukka 2002; Donner 2003; Valkola 2002; Sundström 2002). Such commentators ignored or criticised the economic arguments.
Kaurismäki continued to rise in prominence as the film circulated in festival and commercial release, culminating in a nomination for Best Foreign Film at the 2003 Academy Awards, which took place on 20 March 2003, three days before the US began its invasion of Iraq. Kaurismäki again engaged in self-dramatisation that probed economic, cultural, and political expectations about his cinema. Already in February, Kaurismäki initiated a mini-Oscar scandal by announcing that he would not attend the Academy Awards ceremony. He has routinely refused to allow his films to be chosen by the Finnish Film Foundation as its nominee for the Academy Awards, and has also said that he will never set foot in the state of California (see Luomi 2007: 94). Minister of Culture Kaarina Dromberg – who had replaced Lindén, after Lindén resigned in the conflict-of-interest scandal that followed Kaurismäki’s prize at Cannes – sought to pressure Kaurismäki to attend, and newspapers published articles citing readers’ support for Kaurismäki’s attendance (see Blåfeld 2003; Asikainen 2003). Kaurismäki eventually responded by releasing to the press a letter he sent to Frank R. Pierson, then-director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences:
I thank you for the invitation to the Academy Awards Ceremony. However I am sure that You and the Academy are well aware that we are not living the most glorious moments of the history of the mankind [sic]. Therefore I nor anybody else from Sputnik Ltd can participate the Oscar Gala event [sic.] at the same time the government of the United States is preparing a Crime against Humanity for the purpose of shameless economical interests [sic]. For these reasons we are not in a party mood. (In Roos 2003)
Kaurismäki’s refusal to attend the Academy Awards, and his framing of it as a political-economic critique of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, was widely reported, bolstering the director’s image as a bohemian dissident. While the scandal can be read in terms of stark oppositions, it can also be understood within the ironic bohemian frame.
Kaurismäki’s cinema and by extension the director have become significant economic values. The success of the film at Cannes, and the nomination for an Acvademy Award, led to more than a year in Finnish theatres, and commercial release and distribution in scores of markets. Total tickets sold for the film surpassed two million. The film’s total theatrical gross of €9.5 million is the largest in the history of Finnish cinema; its estimated total gross (including DVD, video, television exhibition rights, and other rentals) reached an estimated €40 million (see Näveri 2003). The real and cultural capital Kaurismäki accumulated has provided him with a means of heightening his engagement in economic critique, as we see in the letter to Pierson.
Kaurismäki’s career is entangled with changes in the defining features of Finnish and Western society. The political activism of the 1970s gave way to social movements, which won certain gains, for example the successes of the feminist and environmentalist movements, but which have struggled to impact the rise of neoliberalism and globalisation. These latter have redefined the paternalistic state that Kaurismäki railed against in the 1980s as an economic facilitator, a ‘night watchman’ in the neoliberal utopia. We have tracked this shift from a politically defined state and society to an economically defined state and society in relation to Kaurismäki’s bohemianism. The argument has suggested that the director is not an outsider to these discourses, a sentimental bohemian, so much as an internal resistor exploring and contesting shifting conditions, limits, and contradictions. Kaurismäki’s project has drawn its material and inspiration from social movements, struggles, and popular culture: punk and the do-it-yourself cultural movement, new theatre movements, underground cinema, Finnish alcohol discourse. These have become material for Kaurismäki’s cinema, but have also figured in his public statements and performances, which have also tested the premises and expectations that characterise late modernity in the West. Our picture of Kaurismäki is enriched by grasping the dialectical shifts that have animated the bohemianism that is a seminal part of his cinema and career. By thinking of this bohemianism as involving sentimental and ironic elements, we get a fuller view of the way Kaurismäki’s cinema draws from ‘modern life’, as Baudelaire might say, to fashion a perspective on modern life that explores and tests its conflicts, sites of exclusion, opportunities for emancipation, and utopian aspirations.
Notes
1 Marcel speaking in The Bohemians of the Latin Quarter (2004 [1852]: 392).
2 A number of sources state that Kaurismäki completed his secondary education at the Kankaanpää lukio in 1973. In fact, in 1973 the Kaurismäki family still lived in Kuusa, where Kaurismäki’s older brother Mika completed his secondary education in spring 1974 (see Pouta 2003).
3 In other interviews, he recalls ‘being removed from the army in 1976’ and ending up in Helsinki (von Bagh 2006: 18).
4 Kaurismäki gives differing chronologies of his activities between 1976 and 1980. He completed secondary school during June 1976 and served as a summer intern at Ilta-Sanomat during 1978 (see Niemelä 1978). He also studied journalism at the University of Tampere, presumably before he was summer intern at Ilta-Sanomat. This period ends in the summer of 1980, when he worked on making The Liar with his brother Mika and others. The differences do not contradict the bohemian narrative of this part of his life, however.
5 Mannerheimintie is the primary arterial road in central Helsinki. Its point of origin in the city centre is Erottaja (literally, the divider), which lies adjacent to Helsinki’s Esplanade Park.
6 The Film historian Jari Sedergren connects The Liar to Godard’s All the Boys are Called Patrick, noting that The Liar and Godard’s first short are both built around an ironic, exaggerated Don Juan figure.
7 The film was shown on television in 1982, generating an unusual amount of coverage for a short film in the first year of its release.
9 I am especially thankful to the late Professor Sihvola for sharing with me in several conversations his memories and thoughts about the arrival of punk in Finland, and possible connections to Kaurismäki. The argument that follows draws on his comments and observations.
10 Distinct from the post-war period, the inter-war period was a time of ideological division, suspicion, and instability, as the wounds of Finland’s bloody civil war (1918) continued to figure in parliamentary and social conflict.
11 To be sure, alcoholism is also depicted in the films, embodied for example in Iiris Rukka’s parents in The Match Factory Girl.
12 Fittingly ahead of the curve, the only book on Kaurismäki in English was published in 1991 by architectural critic Roger Connah, K/K: A Couple of Finns and Some Donald Ducks.